Why B2B marketers should invest in always-on paid media

When it comes to paid media, many B2B marketers focus their investments on campaign sprints, favoring short-term paid activity that promotes a specific message or content asset for a limited time.  

While this approach might drive short-term spikes in demand, the residual impact is typically negligible. Once the activity stops the incoming leads dry up, and your brand is no longer front of mind with the target audience. 

At Metia, we recommend an always-on approach for paid media. For B2B marketers, this ensures a steady flow of inbound leads at the best possible price, a consistent and long-term presence in market, and an ability to respond to market opportunities quicker than the competition. 

To help B2B marketers pick the right strategy, we’ve outlined a few of the benefits of this approach. 

Agility to respond to market opportunities 

An always-on strategy allows you to be more agile with spend, messaging and the creative you run – allowing you to react quickly to change. Once you move beyond initial set-up and test phase, you can leave your campaigns to tick along at a low volume and ramp them up when needed. This avoids the wasted effort of creating standalone campaigns each time you want to advertise, especially when you’re targeting similar audiences for campaigns. 

If a market opportunity presents itself, you’re then ready to respond quickly – it’s simply a case of adding new creative and messaging, and dialing up spend. 

Increased cost effectiveness 

Running always-on paid media can provide an incremental cost benefit when compared to standalone campaigns. Instead of squeezing marketing budget into a limited period, running budget across the year reduces the average number of impressions required on any given day. 

This means you have fewer ad auctions to win, so can bid lower for each impression or click – which results in a lower cost-per-lead. This approach also helps to smooth over temporary increases in demand for ads, including seasonal variations. 

Marketers will also benefit from economies of scale around set-up and optimization. With set-up limited to the start of a single always-on campaign, marketers can choose a cadence of optimization, content refreshes, and reporting that works for them – ensuring more of their budget can be deployed to media spend. 

Test and learn to drive performance improvements 

As the old adage goes, ‘half of my advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half’. Running always-on advertising provides a constant test environment for your marketing. Marketers can add in new creative and content, testing response from a subset of audience before scaling to a broader group. If something works, ramp up spend. If something doesn’t work, take the learnings and move on. 

Having advertising running constantly should also improve the performance of advertising channel algorithms, compared to running short spikes in activity. It will help you build a more accurate picture of how campaigns perform over time – and a better understanding of the impact of seasonal spikes in demand. 

Where to start? 

Always-on can seem daunting without a direction. We find paid search advertising a good starting point, as marketers can advertise against numerous search terms and then ‘harvest’ demand from individuals demonstrating intent. This will help to de-risk early campaigns and provides valuable insight for other channels. 

Cross-channel retargeting is another tactic to consider early. Retargeting to your website visitors will help you to reach an audience that is already ‘warm’ – they should at least recognize your brand if they’ve already visited your site. When executed well, retargeting can be cost effective – as the warmer audience will typically generate higher conversion rates than advertising targeted at new audiences. Bear in mind that getting the frequency right with any retargeting campaign is crucial: there is a fine line between effective retargeting and annoying your prospects. 

Moving to an always-on approach 

If any of these points have caught your interest, get in touch. Our paid media experts love to share and compare notes with other marketers and can walk you through some of our always-on case studies.