The B2B Elephant in the room
You’re thinking it… so we’ll say it:
Most B2B marketing and advertising is boring, derivative, and uninspiring.
This is not a shocking or surprising statement to make. But why do B2B ads tend to be boring or dry? Simple. Because it works…or at least, it used to. Now, the B2B decision makers you’re marketing to are aged-up millennials - a generation that grew up with loud, fun, and inspiring B2C marketing injected into literally every corner of their day-to-day.
The marketing that works fantastically on us is hard to find in B2B. Chances are, you scroll past or skip through 1000’s of ads every single day. You don’t pay attention because they all look the same.
This isn’t just an opinion… nothing is grabbing your attention. The facts? The average view-rate of a LinkedIn video ad is 15%. The average CTR on any LinkedIn ad is below 1%.?
This is abysmal performance, but the good news is that there’s a clear-cut way to break out of the norm.
Below, we’ll break down the main learnings of our LinkedIn advertising experiment, in which we generated $600k in the pipeline with $20k spent on LinkedIn advertising.
If you’re running ads on LinkedIn, especially to cold audiences, you are going to want to use video. Why? A video ad unlocks retargeting audience building off of views - which require NO clicks, and as little as 3 seconds of view time depending on your ad length.
When you run an image ad, the ad will only be able to build a retargeting audience off of clicks, and interactions with your ad. Compared to what a video ad could capture, these numbers will be laughably small.
Immediate Fix: For any ads you are currently running as static images, consider transforming those static images into the shortest video possible, even if it’s 5 seconds of the image. This way, you’ll capture audiences that are pausing during their scroll to read your ad copy and look at your image. Capture them even if they don’t click.
For heavy engagement, longer view-times, and a higher chance of a click - focus your energy on your creative. Why? Surprisingly, different creative that sticks out over everyone else’s content can have view-rates 4x higher than the traditional stuff you commonly see on LinkedIn.
We ran ‘traditional’ style video ads with lots of text and imagery (like the one seen above) alongside ‘stand-out’ content - (example below).
The "Light a Fire" video got a view-rate of over 50%, where the text-based video got a view rate of just 25%. We tested this further by pairing more ‘traditional’ videos to even more ‘stand-out’ videos, and the results were consistent.
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Keep it simple, and recall the past… The last learning is a simple principle - show your creative multiple times.?
Back in the day, we’d all see the same Cheerios ad again and again and again. Cheerios, or any other brand, didn’t try to inject different messages, a ‘why’, ‘what’, ‘how’ funnel, or any of the in-betweens.
There are tons of articles out there that say it takes 5, 8, 10, maybe even 15 touches for a prospect to take an action. But, if you’re constantly putting different creative, messages, and materials in front of them and you don’t have the brand awareness of Oreo, you might be re-starting the count every time.
The incorrect way to show your creative multiple times is to leave your retargeted audience in a single campaign. This is incorrect because it will begin to degrade the effectiveness of the campaign by having your frequency be extremely high. The correct way is to filter out viewers of that campaign, and then serve them the same creative (but a different ad technically speaking) on the next campaign down.
You can do this by excluding the retargeted audience created by a specific campaign from that campaign. For example, in campaign XYZ, exclude viewers of campaign XYZ. This method ensures that viewers will see your ad once or twice before being excluded from the campaign.
The B2B Conclusion
The point here is that #b2bmarketers need to start thinking differently. Try leveraging video everywhere possible. By doing this, you’ll take advantage of cost-effective audience building. As you move your audiences along, you can segment them to find your sweet spots.
Try ‘out there’ creative to boost view-rates for better performance - the more entertaining it is the better it will perform. With high view-rates and CTR’s, you’ll be building an audience faster and cheaper. For bonus points, you’ll be more memorable.
Try serving the same creative multiple times - at some point, the audience will go ‘I’m finally going to watch this, I’ve seen the first few seconds a few times, now I have time…’ or, they’ll go ‘I loved this, let me watch it again…’ and then they’ll click.
As we find more learnings within the B2B Marketing space, we’ll be the first to share them - and as always, we want to remind everyone that we’re not speaking out of theory, we put our own money and time on the line to test and learn.
Video Brothers is a B2B video production agency. We’ve been making content for 10+ years, from explainers to 140+ episode branded entertainment series.?