Welcome to our ABM Crash Course Series where we’ll cover ABM campaign fundamentals and answer ABM’s most pressing questions. This week we are going to tackle the ins and outs of account-based display advertising. At face value, display advertising might not seem like the most direct way to reach your target accounts. However, a successful display ad campaign is cost-effective, highly advantageous to your pipeline, and keeps your brand top of mind for key accounts. Display advertisements are a medium of digital ads appearing mostly on third-party websites that combine images, text, and a URL to drive traffic to a landing page. Display ads provide a highly targeted means of raising brand awareness within an account or customized audience list.
What is display advertising?
Display ads are a powerful tool for ABM campaigns because they…
- Target custom audiences (ICP, IP, Contact,)
- Retarget buyers showing confirmed interest
- Have full-funnel scalability
- Integrate with your CRM
Why account-based display advertising?
Accuracy
Account-based display ads allow marketers to run highly targeted ad campaigns that reach specific contacts. Marketers save budget and get the most from their spend by targeting key stakeholders instead of a large list with very few decision-makers.
Retarget
With display ads, you can retarget prospects who have shown interest in your product or service. This enables marketing teams to engage with interested buyers on websites other than your own – helping keep your brand top of mind.
Scale
Display ads allow you to reach the largest audience possible within your target market. With the ability to reach 90% of internet users worldwide, you can target your ICP across the web. Where other marketing channels lack scalability, display ads excel in deliverability and reach. Display campaigns can target accounts at any point in the purchase journey.
Integrate
Another great advantage of display ads is their ability to integrate with marketing automation software and your CRM. Seamless integration makes it easy to track, manage, and build display advertising campaigns. Marketers can create display ad audiences directly from their CRM and prompt sales plays based on ad performance indicators.
How to Launch Successful Account-Based Display Ads
Step 1: Identify & target decision makers
Your display ads can have thousands and thousands of impressions, but if your messaging is not catered to the decision-makers in your audience, it’s a lost opportunity. Not only does your messaging need to be on point, but you also want to amplify your reach within that target audience by identifying the key stakeholders. Intent data and campaign analytics can help narrow down what accounts are showing the most interest. This way, marketing teams can concentrate their spend on specific decision-makers within a hot account. To create killer display ads, you’ll first want to ask yourself, how targeted do you want to get?
- IP – this is the broadest and most expensive type of account-based advertising. With IP targeting you are looking to reach whole companies. While it’s much more targeted than traditional media outlets like TV or radio, ad spend can still add up when you’re targeting large accounts.
- Persona – persona-based targeting allows you to select specific departments and titles to target.
- Contact – contact-based targeting lets you serve ads to specific people. If you have a large contact database and good email lists, this is the most efficient way to spend your ad budget.
Consider this… Some marketing automation platforms can only perform IP targeting (the broadest and most expensive form of targeting) Although IP targeting can be beneficial, consider a platform that can perform contact targeting while evaluating ABM platforms. With contact targeting, you’ll be able to pinpoint and engage directly with key stakeholders.
Step 2: Set your goals
When setting up your display ads, you can cap your maximum spend per campaign as well as a daily budget cap to ensure your ads keep a steady pace and don’t go over budget. This is especially beneficial when targeting a large audience that has the potential to bring your campaign and daily spend over the budgeted amount.
When setting your budget keep your key performance indicators (KPIs) in mind. It’s important to budget enough and set cap numbers high enough to reach your desired results. If your goal is to reach X number of impressions or conversions, your budget has to be flexible enough to accommodate for your goals.
Your budget should vary based on who you are targeting. Let’s take a look at IP vs. Contact targeting. In Q3 of 2020, Foundry found the best daily budget for contact targeting to be ½ cent a day per contact and IP at $0.45 a day per account.
Display ads by the numbers
Performance metrics can vary quite a bit depending on the audience size and industry. Let’s take a look at some B2B display advertisement benchmarks:
The average B2B…
CTR – 0.22%
CPC – $0.37
CVR – 0.96%
Using these benchmarks or benchmarks from your business’s past display ad campaigns, allows you to realistically plan how much you’ll need to spend to achieve your campaign goals.
Step 3: Create killer ad creative
Display ads don’t need to be fancy to be effective. Although the animation capabilities of an advanced file format like html5 are attractive, focus on clear branding, strong CTAs and eye-catching visuals. Let’s take a look at the best ad creative format and size recommendations:
Display ad size recommendations
- 300×250 (Medium Rectangle)
- 728×90 (Leaderboard)
- 160×600 (Wide Skyscraper)
- 300×600 (Half Page)
- 320×50 (Mobile Leaderboard)
- 970×250 (Billboard) *** Foundry CTR based on display ad size
Format guidelines:
- Supported file types are: jpg, png, html5, and gif (up to 30 seconds of animation, 15-20 fps, no looping)
- Up to 750KB in size
- Destination URL (including UTM parameters) is up to 1,024 characters, cannot contain redirects (ex. bit.ly), and can’t direct to a video (ex. YouTube) or payment processor (ex. PayPal). See landing page requirements for more.
See more: Display Ads Overview – Requirements, Creative, FAQs
Design
When asked about how to approach display ad design, designer Brett Robinson said, “The first thing I think of is how my imagery is going to translate across all ad sizes.” To achieve this he recommends keeping your ad design simple. The amount of boxes you have to fit your messaging in is limited. So making simple, yet compelling design and messaging is key to display ad performance.
Best practices to consider when designing your next display ad:
- Keep Text Short
- Use bold Calls to Action
- Create visuals that translate across all ad sizes
- Design around the copy
Step 4: A/B testing
At this point you’ve set your goals, created your target account list, and created killer display ads to engage with decision makers. Now it’s time to run an A/B test on your display ads. A/B tests allow you to run two variations of your ads that give insights on what’s resonating with the audience. With these insights, you can fine-tune your CTA or copy to get the best results.
A/B tests are a huge asset when running ABM campaigns. It’s important that your ABM platform has the ability to perform these tests. At the end of the day, the budget is limited and time is critical. Making it all that more important that the version resonating with the audience is the ad using the campaign’s budget.
Conclusion
Account-based display advertising is an excellent way to kickstart your ABM program. However, a successful display ad campaign is only the first step to launching and executing a successful account based program. To generate revenue and move the needle on pipeline, your ABM program needs to reach and engage account stakeholders throughout the buying cycle across different channels. Once on your site, it becomes even more important to tailor your content to your different accounts to engage and convert them. Tune in next time for our ABM Campaign Crash Course on account-based website personalization, where we’ll dive into how web personalization at scale can maximize your ABM program performance and impact pipeline.
Ready to get started? Learn more about account-based advertising.
