More Banners & Adverts
When it comes to getting exposure, everyone has their own ideas and opinions, however, the reality kicks in when you realise that you’re simply not getting the traffic or visibility you hoped for. That is until now!
Our visibility and exposure strategy started off as sX Social 334; this stood for posting three adverts, three times a day on social channels over four weeks, and then repeat. This totalled ninety adverts. We then increased it to 444 to prepare a minimum 120 adverts in advance, publishing 4 adverts 4 times a day over 4 weeks and repeat, and naturally we’ve called it Social 444. But there's been a bit of a problem.
We didn't stop there as we became more and more aware B2B behaviour and responses, especially regarding the issue surrounding repetition. If you haven’t seen it already, look at the explanation of The System which will help you understand why a vastly different approach is required then it comes to adverts and banners.
It became clear it didn't matter how many adverts you pushed out daily as long as you didn't repeat them too often, because LinkedIn would penalise you for spam. Our initial number of 334 later became 10-10-4, but I think you'll agree that it doesn't quite roll of-the-tongue, so we'll stick with 444.
Getting Visibility
To ‘nutshell’ this; selling requires repetition, the same as you see on television. But for B2Bs it needs to be adapted for the social platforms we all use such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram etc.
Most businesses believe posting a link to a blog post on social channel and pay-per-click banners constitutes ‘digital marketing’, and therefore nothing ese can be done. They’re wrong!
As part of your strategy, you must leave out ‘breadcrumbs’. The same as it implies, people cannot be sold to the first time they set eyes on your brand. Therefore you have no alternative but to create multiple elements that act as breadcrumbs because your prospect will first notice your brand out of the corner of their eye, then a little more, then, they’ll deliberately look, then read, then, possibly click. In other words, they will do what you have already done on your journey getting to this page and you simply have to replicate it.
Using Banners & Adverts
My recommendation to you is to get your graphic designer and copywriter to work together and create multiple adverts. For example, ten graphics per ‘decent’ piece of content. Your content can consist of an article, download, video, podcast, or infographic.
The advert enticing your prospect to click can range from a simple graphic with a picture and some text, to a 59 second short video as shown below that explains and communicates a call to action.
Depending on the significance of the content piece, you may decide to create a banner to be promoted on LinkedIn.
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For our own distribution and advert posting, we use a platform called Recurpost to publish everything to multiple social media channels and company pages. We've used a SaaS company called Recurpost for about eighteen months and would definitely recommend them and their product.
YouTube Shorts
As you may be aware, the consumer creator and Influencer community use YouTube Shorts extensively, but that does not mean that us B2Bs should not adopt the same practices too.
The reality is, we are advocating a massive change in the way B2Bs attain visibility and the only way this can be achieved is, as I mentioned earlier, dropping a significant amount of "breadcrumbs' that potential prospects will gradually notice and pick up.
No one is prepared to invest the time you would like them to invest, in learning about your product, your company or your staff. Taking a leaf out of the consumer playbook, it is essential you maintain a strategy of sustainable repetition at low cost in terms of revenue and production.
This strategy is not about selling you a specific product, rather, we're promoting a complete change in the way to do your outreach to prospects.
Video or Static Graphic
I don’t believe anyone can say which advert is best. Our social presence on LinkedIn illustrates a combination of everything we can think of because we’re not psychic! Again, some prospects will be in a place that a simply graphic is all they’re prepared to look at, until sometime later, when their ‘pain’ has become greater, and they are driven to invest more time investigating possible new solutions. It’s what we all do. Therefore my recommendation is to keep creating new and different adverts using different mediums.
The advert video template on this page is from Envato, an online resource for creators. The have thousands of assets. For anyone who knows Adobe Premiere Pro or After Effects, they’ll know all you need are the images and a music clip and hey presto! You have a video advert.
Conclusion
It’s all about presence. We recently completed some additional adverts, and we are achieving 2,500 impression a week on LinkedIn and approximately 200 engagements, and that’s with two accounts. I used the same strategy years ago when I was selling VoIP telecoms. I prepared everything in advance, distributed the ‘solid’ content, waited a few months and then the enquiries started happening.
I’m sure you can see this from my point of view. Here I am as a solo consultant with more exposure and engagement than most companies and whilst it has cost me time, the distribution is a mere $50 a month. Compare that to Google pay-per-click! But that comparison is a little unfair – because nearly 100% of B2B buyers ‘hate’ filling out demand generation forms just to get access to content they want to learn from, so the success of PPC and demand-gen is skewed. But you already knew it wasn’t working – right?
Experience tells us that everything is a long game, we know you will take your time before you change anything. My advice; get to know us, follow me or salesXchange on LinkedIn and see what we’re doing and how it differs from the rest of the B2B marketing operators. Or you could take a short cut and have a chat with us, click the link below - it might just be the best thing you've ever done.
The author and founder of salesXchange, Nigel Maine is a B2B marketing and sales expert with a proven track record in scaling up growth for Technology, SaaS, and Professional Services organisations. With 30 years hands-on experience and unique approach, Nigel has developed an effective strategy that dramatically increases exposure and profitability for B2B organizations.
