Had a piece published on BtoB Magazine’s website yesterday. The inspiration came from walking the floor at Salesforce.com’s 2011 Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. We talked to countless marketing automation vendors, and very few had any clue about display advertising. It was all email, email, email (oh, and one vendor touted a tracking solution for newspaper ads…how cutting edge). The whole marketing/salesforce automation industry seemed to be stuck 10-15 years in the past. Virtually no one we spoke with was familiar with “retargeting” (or “remarketing” if that’s your bag), despite the fact that it’s one of the best B2B marketing tools to come along in years.

Apparently, further education is needed.
 

We asked Neil Young, and he didn’t know what retargeting was, either.
 
What makes display advertising so great for B2B marketing? It’s the targeting. Just a few years ago, when you ran display ads, you had no option but to buy relatively broad swaths of ad space on specific websites (or sub-sections thereof). This could get you in the ballpark in terms of audience, but if you bought 100,000 impressions on some trade journal like Plastics & Rubber Weekly, you still didn’t really know who was seeing your ads. Imagine any given viewer and think of all the buckets they could fall into:

• Existing customer
• Competitor’s customer, researching alternatives
• Ready to upgrade
• Deeply familiar with the ins and outs of your solution
• First week on the job and looking for answers
• Rubber fetishist; went to the wrong website
• And so forth…

Wouldn’t it be awesome to know which bucket each viewer belonged in? However, when you don’t know these details about your viewers, you’re forced to employ lowest-common-denominator ad content filled with cliches and platitudes that everyone ignores (“Results-driven enterprise-class solutions”…generate your own here). The result? No one pays any attention to your ad and no one clicks on it. You’ve wasted your ad dollars, and you might mistakenly blame the medium (display advertising), but it was really the targeting that fell short.

And targeting is extremely important in B2B marketing. The audience for industrial plastic extrusion and thermoforming solutions is quite small when compared to the audience for Ford trucks, but it’s probably worth several billion dollars a year, so there’s a lot at stake.

I don’t claim that display advertising will, by itself, sell complex B2B products and services. No one says that about print ads or email either. But if you can target display ad viewers on an individual level, then the whole web becomes like an inbox. You can show messages to your prospects all day long if you want (actually, this isn’t a good idea; there are lots of targeting and frequency capping techniques available to make sure you’re not overwhelming your audience with ads).

Compelling cheat-sheet:
 

 
More helpful reading on this blog:

• How does site retargeting work?
• How does search retargeting work?

 
Some vendors you might want to check out:

• Bizo—business marketing is their sole focus so they have a lot of demographic and targeting options available
• AdRoll—site retargeting par excellence
• Chango—search retargeting. Great primer from them on how retargeting techniques correspond to level of prospect intent.