For marketers, capturing attention is everything. For B2B marketers in particular, our audience and their attention aren't limited to LinkedIn or their work email. LinkedIn and the email inbox might be the MOST challenging places to get attention because there is so much direct competition. Don’t believe me? Keep reading to understand…
- You’re thinking about audience attention all wrong
- Why you shouldn’t fear Facebook
- Are you confident in your paid social audiences?
- What else is out there
I promise you, there’s more to B2B marketing than LinkedIn and email.
Audience Attention
I’ll say it: you’re thinking about attention all wrong. Here’s what I mean.
At its most basic form, attention is “the ability to actively process specific information in the environment while tuning out other details.”
Marketers are constantly fighting the battle against those “other details.” Our social feeds are filled with content we’ve sought out and content we’ve been served up through an algorithm. So, let’s clarify what capturing the audience's attention really means.
Paid/performance marketers tend to think about attention in terms of impressions, clicks, video views, etc. Now, there’s nothing technically wrong with this approach but let me paint a common picture:
You’re a performance marketer running a new campaign targeting a new audience segment. You construct your audience using a combination of native targeting, various data providers, spreadsheets, etc, set everything up, and press Publish. Your shiny new campaign starts running and you start seeing results! Lots of impressions, a few clicks, and even fewer conversions. You optimize and go right back to measuring success (attention) on impressions, clicks, and conversions.
At any point are you thinking about what’s capturing your audience's attention? What’s stopping their endless scrolling on LinkedIn? What content is making them more curious?
Audience attention is all about being memorable and inspiring curiosity. Too often we default to serving up shiny-object ads in service of an impression or “engagement” goal.
Now that we’re aligned on philosophy, let’s chat about how to get some attention.
Don’t Fear Facebook
LinkedIn is the gold standard for reaching a B2B buyer on a social media platform. It was built for work and its core users come to LinkedIn for advice, connections, networking, and job opportunities. Knowing this, advertisers have saturated LinkedIn with ads. Everything looks the same (we can smell an ebook download from a mile away), and it’s nearly impossible to stand out. Not to mention the ridiculous CPMs performance marketers encounter just trying to reach their audience, let alone capture their attention.
I propose a solution. Move some dollars to Facebook.
Facebook, and its cooler sister Instagram, are all about one thing and one thing only: eyeballs. According to their Q4 2022 earnings report, “...Meta reported 2.96 billion people were using at least one of the company's core products (Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, or Messenger) every day.”
3 billion people…every single day.
While that number is enormous, it also provides opportunity. Opportunity to capture attention. Here’s why:
- Your ideal customer isn’t scrolling through LinkedIn at 8 pm on the couch. Yes, they might scroll their LinkedIn feed, but I guarantee they’re not scrolling with intention.
- Facebook’s very nature is to serve you relevant content. Users expect it. Additionally, a traditional B2B buyer does not expect to see a well-constructed piece of B2B creative that speaks to a current pain point he’s facing during the 9-5 hours at 8 pm. Targeting your ideal customer on Facebook and serving them a relevant piece of creative feels like a breath of fresh air for the user. See where I’m going with this…
- Your ideal buyer is overloaded with ads for DTC brands, automotive brands, retail brands, etc. Standing out in their feed and stopping their thumb (scroll) becomes infinitely more manageable when you’re not competing against other B2B brands (yes, even the ones only offering gated case studies).
Audience Confidence
I can’t talk about capturing the audience's attention without mentioning the audience itself. Often overlooked in favor of “spray-and-pray” methods, complex, targeted audiences are becoming increasingly important.
Anil Malhotra said it best, “...rather than ensuring that the advert gets seen by the right people, digital advertisers are ensuring that the advert isn’t seen by the wrong people.”
So how can we be confident our ads are being seen by the right people?
Here at Primer, we generate audience confidence by stacking data providers because, in short, your platform’s (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) native targeting is too broad, and no single data provider (ZoomInfo, Apollo, etc.) can cover every attribute across every audience you need to build.
First, Primer helps you create custom audiences by combining attributes like job titles, company sizes, and website traffic growth. Then we use identity resolution and data enrichment from over 12 GDPR and CCPA-compliant providers to add data points for ad networks.
This first step in the process gives us more granular and specific audiences. The second step boosts our audience match rates well above 75%.
Beyond LinkedIn and Email
We’ve talked about audience attention, why Facebook isn’t as scary for marketers as it seems, and what it takes to be confident in your audiences. Let’s wrap this up with some insight into why you should expand your view beyond LinkedIn and email.
As stated previously, LinkedIn is the gold standard for reaching B2B marketers on a social platform. Email is the best way to have 1:1 interactions with your audience. But what else is out there? Let’s look at the options:
Targeting your ideal customer and developing creative for these channels takes effort but your reward is a getting chance at capturing audience attention, given the lack of B2B marketers actively exploring new channels. If I were wanting to target my ideal audience on all of these platforms, I’d certainly like to ensure I was using the same audience construction.
Building audiences natively in each platform makes this impossible. If we use Primer, we can directly sync our audience build to Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, and export via CSV to take to any additional channels you’d like to activate.
If you’re looking to capture more attention AND cleanly target your ideal audience across all major platforms, feel free to give us a shout! With Primer, there’s a world beyond LinkedIn and email.
