053. Creating a Multi-Channel Paid Media Strategy for B2B Lead Gen

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Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode the Managen Studio. My name is Emilio Garcia and as usual is Gabby here with me. How are you, Gavi?

Hi Emilio. Pretty fine.

I'm very good. I hope you're having a great day. I hope everybody is having a great day. Today we are going to cover a topic related to Pay Media and B2B lead gen which is creating a multi channel pay media strategy that matches your B2B lead gen strategy or tactics. Right. It's a mouthful of a title but. But I think obviously that is something that is quite important to understand how different channels on paid media can work together to improve your lead generation efforts on your B2 companies. So really excited about it. I don't know if you want to start with, you know, a little introduction gab if you feel so it's okay.

I think that this is a really important topic because. Because of what lead generation means to us. Right. And the processes that it involves like identifying, attracting and convert converting those potential business clients or customers that we will have in the, in these processes. And I would just like to emphasize that this is about always, always forging that value relationship in the business world through this process that we're going to build which is obviously creating that multichannel paid media and strategies.

I agree. And so I think we should obviously understanding the role of lead generation in our overall demand generation strategy. And as we said in other episodes, while demand generation is not necessarily focused solely on generated leads, especially in some cases where you for example, are working on account based marketing where your buying committee is already identified, you, you are not trying to get or discover those leads, you already have them on your database coming from your business intelligence tool. So lead generation is not as important in some cases. But still it is understandable that marketing in general is being measured more and more by performance metrics. And lead gen is one of the most popular ones if even it can be misused to some extent. So in that, in that content it's understood that marketing might have a metric related to creating or bringing new leads, usually coming from the multiple channels that the website has available. Forms are the most, the most common. But as I always say, I remind people to have an omnichannel approach to lead generation. Right? So phone calls are leads as well. Right. People writing into your chair inboxes are lead as well. People engaging on your chat are leads as well. And obviously everyone that download any other piece of content that is not necessarily a in, you know, commercial intent one like your premium offers newsletter subscriptions. So really really important that you take a look at all the places where someone can engage with your brand and request information and consider those as leads. Not necessarily qualified, not necessarily commercial intent ones, but definitely something that marketing needs to manage and hold. So that's, you know, in a nutshell what we mean by lead generation. And I feel that with that we, we should start talking about, you know, that multichannel pay media strategy. The first one is, is why is multichannel. I think that we, we can draw here from the traditional marketing space where you know, if you were to, if the Internet didn't exist, you have still multiple channels to engage with. Some billboards, radio ads, TV ads, you know, one on one conversations, mail. So digitally similar in that sense. As the Internet has evolved, we have more and more places where you can advertise. But the way that you classify them is unique to the Internet as well. And so in my mind we have in a very broad, broad sense two big categories of advertising channels. Channels that use intent as the way of targeting users and channels that use context as ways of targeting users. And I will provide a couple of examples on those. So intent is because of what the person is looking for. I will target that person on the advertising. Best example obviously is search search engines. And the best known platform obviously is Google. It's not the only one. There's also Microsoft, Bing. But the idea there is that the keywords are the way that we create audiences. And because of the intent of the user, we present answers in the form of advertising that answer those questions and provide more information. The biggest advantage of intent channels is that obviously you have better understanding where the user is in their buying journey. The biggest disadvantage is that usually and that improving over time you don't have a lot of information about the person that is doing the search because of privacy concerns and that and not everybody's login and have a lot of data about themselves on search engines. And in the flip side is context. And the best examples are social media platform. And the best platform for B2B buyers will be LinkedIn. Right there we are using the information that the platform has about us company that we work for, seniority, job title function groups that we belong to, to create audiences that can present our message to the buyer. But just like in 10 channels, the biggest drawback is that while also it's possible to draw some information with business intelligent data about people's intent, you rarely have a lot of it because they are not searching, they are just looking at their phones usually. And therefore you are here in greater control of context but in not so great control of intent. Those two big ones have like a middle ground and I kind of like share those already. Right. So for example in display campaigns on Google you can have campaigns that are where the audience is based on what people search in the past. So that's a mix of intent but this is still context because the ad is not triggered by someone searching something. Another great example for me are places like Quora or Reddit where the intent is based on the name of the subreddit or the question being asked on Quora but the ad is not an answer to the, to the query itself. Right. So you can say well if I'm an IT managed service company and I am on the, you know, I want to advertise on the Cisco Certified Professionals Group or whatever, I, I know that I will have a great match between the intent of that and the, and the ad but they are not searching for me. Right. So it is, there's a middle ground and I think that will happen more and more as these platforms evolve. But in general that's the way that probably we should see those old channels and obviously how we will tailor our strategy to that. So I think that's important to understand or see. I don't know if you there Gabby, you have any, any comments or insights? Yeah.

About like the search engine advertising itself. Like I think that I would like to say that this type of search is excellent for capturing like prospects that at the moment they express an interest or a need. Right. And they will provide direct answers to the user queries and drive obviously highly relevant traffic that we do. Obviously that's what we want. And on the other side like you said on display type of advertising, I think that ads are great for building brand recognition for obviously your, your company and fostering a rebrand recall. And this type of advertising can help you to reach a wider audience and serve as a reminder that your business, you have what they need or they might need. And obviously that includes products or services. And see that's a. I think that difference between those two.

Yes, I agree and you have touched on something important I think will be a great cue to move to the next next section which is what are the advantages of having a multi channel approach for your lead generation. One of the obvious one is that you want to spread your bets right. You it wouldn't be a, it wouldn't be wise to just invest on one channel because then you will become reliable on that one. Right. If something happens and Google changes the rules for your Google advertising campaigns or platform or LinkedIn does, then you will be at the mercy of the, the app platform for your volume of leads and you know, your impact. So yes, I, I think I've told in in previous episodes when you are starting and when you have limited budget, I highly recommend that you focus on one channel first and try and test the one that works the best for you and focus on that one. Um, so I'm not saying that you should start with 20 of them at the beginning, but as you progress and improve that channel, probably you will saturate it and as you have success, probably you will get more funding. So that extra funding is helpful to diversify across channels to protect yourself. You know, changes on platforms. That's for me the biggest advantage of having multi approach, multi channel approach. The second biggest advantage is that as we were saying you're, you will be capable of tailoring intent and context. And that matters because one usual mistake is that because intent channels like Google Chat, Google Ads usually provide a higher correlation to performance in the form of leads, which is what people is sometimes after, then they rely heavily on Google Ads and search channels because that's the channel that brings them the most amount of, of inquiries. Right. At least you can show some success to your salesperson. But, but the challenge is that you can just get so much of that without building the brand. Right? So yes, and I, I use B2C examples here rather than B2B because I feel it's easier to convey to everyone listening and watching this. Yes, you want to capture all the people that are searching for a smartphone if you are a smartphone builder. But it will be even better if they were searching straight away for the name of your product or for your brand rather than searching generically for your product. Right. So in the, in, in the absence of brand recognition, the next best, best thing that you can do is to bid for people searching for the category of the product. But it's not best search. The best search is that if they just search for iPhone Pro rather than a smartphone. Right. So and the only way to build up that search term to is to promote the product, to promote the message across the right people, which is that context part. Right. That's what display and social media and YouTube ads can do. To some extent that search will find very challenging to accomplish. So that for me that's the second advantage or importance of the multi channel approach. Right.

And, and the, yeah, I think that I want to highlight something here about the advantage advantages of multi channel approach because not only I think that B2B landscape is so diverse. Like you will have so many type of people going through the Internet. You will have to obviously compromise different or various industries in, in, in this process, roles and decisions make decision makers and stuff like that. And each of those they might have different preferences for communication and information also. So sources. And I would like to say that the way that multichannel approach will help you is just that like imagine that you have different segments of like you want to target and obviously different audience segments. And for example, let's just say that our CEO might be more active on LinkedIn. You will have the other part like a technical manager looking for that information, relying on industry specific forums or blogs. So that's the, that's the different about the audience segments and the way that you can take advantage of the multichannel approaching from, for, for those segments and obviously the type of people that will you encounter along the process.

Yeah. And finally I want to say before moving to the next section that the third one that I think is very powerful but is the hardest one to take advantage of is that you can take in, you can take advantage of the price, the price differences of different channels for different kind of people. For example, Google Ads for high intent commercial terms is very expensive. The cost per click is very high because there's a lot of competition and you will convert into leads just a fraction of that traffic. Right. 3%, 5% at most depending on your offer. And the other 95% probably are qualified users that just didn't pull the trigger. So if you have the right setup on the analytics and especially if you have a build up for de anonymizing that traffic and understand which companies are visiting, then you can use a channel that is context based to just retarget or continue to promote your message to visitors of your website that come from that came from a a high intent channel to continue the conversation so they can eventually reach out if they didn't did it, didn't do it the first that's very powerful. And it works also the way the other way around it's harder but it works the same way. If you are promoting the brand on a broader space, just brand awareness, not a lot of focus on clicks or conversions and you get someone that actually clicks on your message, meaning that they're engaged, that they find it useful, relevant, then you can build a list of people that have engaged with your content and then on the intent side you can use that group to go for broader terms that you wouldn't go if you didn't know that they are the right people. Let me put an example. If you are a company that is work that is focused on cybersecurity, for example, but you offer a very specific thing, cybersecurity services for government. Right. So very nimble. Yeah. So if you try to bid for that on Google, you will, you will struggle because the volume of people typing cybersecurity services for, for government agencies is very small. But something else, something that you can do is that you can target government employees on LinkedIn to put an example, or any other platform where you can source that information and the ones that click will build a pool of users. And so on Google you can feel comfortable saying, well, I will just target people for service security services, which is a way larger pool of searchers than cybersecurity services for the government. Yes, the search will be broader, but you will constrain it by saying, but only to people that have visited my website in the last six months or three months. So that way you can go broader, which is not helpful usually on Google or search or intent channels when you want to get high quality traffic. But you layer on top what you have done in the order. So it works one way or not. And obviously you can make all those combinations for that because you can source information from your CRM for example, to also make a layer that will filter out people that is not relevant to you. So there are many ways, but that's, that will be a third advantage for using a multi channel approach. Yeah. Now I think the next section is quite, quite relevant which is because you're using multiple channels. One of the biggest challenges is that you need to remind yourself to tailor the content that you are promoting on each of them. Because usually they have a preferred format. Right. I prefer format. So intent usually has, is text heavy. Right. The, the most important portion is the cup. Nowadays Google, obviously because it's trying to converge to other tools, is adding some logos there, it's adding some images, but it's still the answer. Pretty much mimic what you will see on, on the search engine. And therefore it's very tech heavy. And between texts you can have the other spectrum, which is places like YouTube and reels on TikTok and short videos on other platforms. There you want to lead with video and that video is vertical and that video is short and that video is attention grabbing in those first three seconds. So it's a completely different play and you really have to be mindful of that as you create those ads. Um, even for example, when you are thinking about images, it matters the how, how heavy the image looks like an ad, right? So if you are building display banners, definitely you want to be more salesy. The, the, the brand is present, the logo is present, there's a clear call to action. It looks like an ad, right? So it doesn't get modeled between the whole content of the website. But native ads or ads are going on the feed of social media platforms. Usually it's intentional that they don't look as much as ads because we want them to be, you know, to feel as another post. So there you got to pay more attention to your, the use of your hashtags and your descriptions and, and the image has to be attention grabbing but not or, or ad oriented. So I think that's one of the biggest problem because it doesn't mean that you have to promote different pieces of content on each platform, right? So it does make sense that if you are advertising to a group of accounts and one case study is the one that matters, then that's as the piece of content that you will promote the case study. But if the case study is going to be promoted across cross channels then the copy that you put on search will be important. The image that you for the, for the case study on on display and social media will matter and having a short video with the client providing testimonial, for example on, on places where you are video heavy will matter more. So overall the advice is tailored to the, to the channel that you have even if the offer is the same. Right.

I want to point out really something really important important as a content creator and it's that not all content, it's one size that fits all in the digital marketing world because you will, like you said, you will think that you make a short video or you make a video for, for that content channel, but it's not, it's not going to be the same if you upload it on TikTok or if you upload it on YouTube because the way that it works, the way that the platform works and the audience is different, the format and the purpose of it is different. And obviously understanding that you need to adapt that content for different platforms is essential for, for this multi channel approach and it will ensure you that your message it would, it would be presented in the way that it will resonates obviously with the expectations of the other person that is seeing it and it will match the behaviors on, on the platform's users, which is the important thing that you want to share your message but you also want to make sure that the other person that's that is seeing that content is going to understand it and it's gonna. It's gonna see it as. As an. Let's just say like when we talk about native ads is going to see it like as something that they see every day. Because if you tailor that content for someone that's always using for example Instagram or LinkedIn it will be usual for. For them to consume that type of content and it will be as natural as them for. For consume that content. Which is important not only will resonates with them, it would make sense for them to consume that content. It will not feel like you're actually advertising for them like in a direct way. Which is the. What we're going through. Right. We're going after that. Like you said, it has different approaches and. And different type of ways that you can show that information and the platform on the Internet have different purposes. We got that visual content, detailed information like places like LinkedIn or bit size updates like Twitter. When you always want to share like news or stuff that you're working on and the time is. Is imperative and stuff like that. So everything that you are going to create as a. As a. As a content creator and you're obviously going to share for those different channels. You always want to make sure that you're tailoring that or for what you want to the other person to. To consume.

Yeah. And. And you touched something really valuable there saying about, you know where people spend time. Because while this is not the topic for today, something that usually get missed when you are doing that market research for your marketing efforts is that yes, you need to know who your target market is. Right. That's your ICP buying committee kind of combination. Your firmographics and demographics. That's key. Right. You need to know who you're talking to. Yes. You need to understand what they are searching for or what do they care about or how they answer, how they ask for the problems that you solve and the potential solutions. And that's your keyword research topic research, whatever you want to call it. One that you get miss all the time. And why is this multi channel approach is relevant is that we need to know where do they spend time and how they research for what you are offer which are not the same thing. Right. So you want to know how they search for potential solution like yours because you want to be present in the places where they make those questions. That's where you have your Google search engine and your chorus and your Reddits and to some extent some social media platforms. Because you want to understand if they spend time in Facebook groups or LinkedIn groups or WhatsApp groups for their. Where they hang out with their peers and ask for advice, right? So how do they search for information for your solution is relevant, but also you just want to know where they hang out without searching anything because that's where you. As you were saying, Gabby, right? Is that while you are in Instagram or if. If your users are not in search, are not in intent mode, not even searching, not even showing the symptoms of a problem, completely unaware that they have a problem or that you offer a sol solution, then you need to be, you need to be where they are, right? Where they spend time. I recently had a conversation with a company that is in this CTB space, I think it's called, which is video ads for streaming platforms, right? So obviously this was not very relevant years ago because most of the ads were running through regular cable providers. And so that was more of a traditional kind of play. Traditional media kind of play. Your only true in stream ads were ads like YouTube ones, right? And that was pretty much restricted to mobile and to some extent desktop. But now more and more users are choosing, you know, ad versions of their streaming services. I know Hulu offers that. Amazon announced that it's going to start offering a tier for advertising with advertising. And I can see B2B users because I consider that myself, you know, choosing no ads for some channels that they use a lot. But for some other stream services, you don't care that much, right? You don't mind, you don't use them as often. So you don't mind watching A two or three ads from time to time just to watch a movie. So in that scenario where you're not in search mode, it will be helpful to start showing some ads about what you do. Because in B2C that's exactly what happens, right? Most of the time people are not searching for pharmaceuticals, they are not searching for insurance, they are not searching for laundry products. They are not in, you know, they don't have a place that they go and search for soap. Some of us do, right? Maybe your products or whatever, but most of the time you are not. So the only route for you is to actually just show yourself or present yourself where people hang out, right? And that's what TV has done traditionally for years and is for B2B is going to become relevant. Yes, you want to be on LinkedIn where you are spending time with peers. Yes, you want to be on TikTok or Facebook. But think about where your audiences Spend time even if they don't have their job titles and you already cap on them. Right. Because getting your attention, their attention in those places matters. Even if it's just for a 15 second ad that you know that tells the world this is who we are, this is what we care about and this is who we work for. Right. So I understanding the buyer behavior and their, their journey, even the, the beginnings of journey when they're not aware, will give you an edge. Right. We'll definitely help you. Now one important aspect of this, one challenge that comes with having a multi channel approach is that you want to build consistency for your brand. And this is something that we discuss with prospects all the time because sometimes they say, well, how can we make our ads more interesting, more relevant? Right. More catchy, kind of like viral. Right. I challenge them on that all the time. Because I will put the example of how would you present your brand if you were going to do a billboard on the airport or an ad on the TV or the radio. Right. Or a newspaper. You will probably want to make sure that whatever you put there matches how you present yourself across all the other aspects of your company, how salespeople present themselves, how your website look like. So really, really important to have that brand guide and make sure that especially if you're working with multiple agencies and in house employees that manage different channels that they understand what is the palette of colors that you use, what is the typography that use the fonts, the way that you say stuff, the way that you present your products, how you name them so you can be consistent across channels. Yeah, it matters because obviously is the way that you present your company, but especially because on channels that you're focused on context, you, you want to increase that brand there, right? That people remember your brand.

It's memorable.

Yes.

It creates more.

Yes. Right. So yes, you want to, you want to. It is a delicate balance. I will not say that it's easy.

It's.

Yes. You want to increase attention, for sure, grab attention, but at the same time you want to make sure that people associate that ad with your brand. I have seen many times ads that are fantastic, they are eye catching, but if you ask the person do you know what company was that? They don't have the answer. They just find it funny or they just find it interesting. So definitely invest time to make sure that the association with your brand is consistent with what you have done so far. We, for example, insist a lot on your ad has to match your content or the page that you're sending People when you're doing that, because that, the ad represents your sneak peek into your true offer, which is the content that you have on your landing page or the website. So really match that to some extent. I think that's like, that's important. So, and finally, I don't know, Gabby, if you were going to say something.

No, yeah, I, I just, I just think that like, like you said, like making this memorable, it's what creates on people's mind that this, this brand is consistent, this brand is, is. It has created some extent experiences for that person. Like you said, if something's funny, if something really caters to your mind and that's what creates that, it's like a cohesive thought in your head that this is something that I can trust because I have seen in different platforms or different channels and it's trustworthy and it's dependable. You can actually say that I can depend on this, this company or this product because it is trustworthy. You can, you can actually say that because you've seen in the different places and it's like just the same, but it, it has different ways to present it.

Yes. And, and finally I will say, you know, gaining a competitive edge when you are working with multiple channel approaches is just recognizing those differences. Right. So if your company is present not just on intent channels, but also on context channel and your competition is not, it's focused on intent because that's where they're generating the lead. You are going to have an edge because your cost per lead is going to be lower than your competitors. Because competitor, when someone see your ad, when they're searching for the category of your product, they're going to recognize your brand. They have seen it before and that will give you an edge. Even if you're competing for the same keywords on the space with your competition, that's a big one. And the second one that will give you an edge is this example that I was using about building awareness even when someone is not thinking about you or the problems that you have. Right. So being in the places where people spend the time will give you an edge because you will be in front of someone before they even start thinking about your, your, your company. Something that probably some of your competitors will not do because they will not find value in the form of additional leads at the beginning. And what will happen is that your future volume will increase and the cost of those leads will lower themselves because you have that presence before. And finally, what we were saying, the other thing that builds an edge is being able to cross reference traffic and audiences from multiple sources. Right. If you set up the right foundation on your web analytics, your CRM, your product use, you will be able to use all of that data to narrow down the target that you have on intent, narrow down the target that you have on context. And that will help you to save dollars and have a higher impact and more results, better results with the same or less money or ad spend than your competition. So definitely invite you to explore all of that. Yeah, I think that for all that's all that we have it has been a blast. And Gabby as always, thank you for set up all this and and drave the conversation. I really I really enjoyed this episode.

Oh me too. Don't miss the next one people. We are getting more and more people on around our episodes. We are going to make a little video because we have reached some views on our on our the Imagen Studio.

Yeah.

So so we are really excited about that. And here's the the link to our our website. So don't don't miss it then not get notified and tell everyone around around you about this. And we are so happy to to share this with you and I hope that your your happy with this information too.

So until the next time, thank you.

Bye bye. Julio.