How to Use Paid Advertising in the Buyer’s Journey

Strategically integrating paid advertising in the buyer’s journey can help influence purchases and repeat sales.

Highlights:

We advocate a primarily inbound strategy, you can boost the reach of your posts by investing in paid digital advertising.
Your goal is to continue to engage with prospects and educate buyers as to why your product/service is better than your competitors’.
60% of consumers believed customer reviews were either trustworthy or very trustworthy — meaning that businesses that can accumulate positive reviews had a good chance of helping a customer make a purchase decision.

Let’s face it: the internet has completely changed the way B2B buyers are researching and making purchases. It’s becoming more crucial than ever to customize content for a potential customer’s journey through your funnel to help convert leads to sales.

The internet has given buyers the ability to research products and services, as well as compare competitors, without ever leaving the house. To keep up, B2B marketers need to align digital marketing efforts with the buyer’s journey to create and distribute content at the right moment.

While we advocate a primarily inbound strategy, you can boost the reach of your posts, ads, and videos by investing in paid digital advertising. And increased reach isn’t the only benefit. New statistics show that PPC visitors are 50% more likely to purchase something than organic visitors.

The key is to create interesting and informative ads and serve it to potential buyers at the right point in their research. Let’s look at how to integrate paid advertising in the buyer’s journey.

3 stages of the buyer’s journey

To stand out from your competitors, marketers need to know what types of paid ads to create and where to distribute them throughout the buyer’s journey. According to Brandon Stauffer, the typical buyer’s journey breaks into three stages:

Awareness:A buyer figures out they have a problem and begin researching more about that problem. They are looking for resources to validate or better explain what their problem is.
Consideration:Now the buyer knows the details of their problem. They begin more research to find a solution to their problem.
Decision:The buyer has done research into solutions and is now comparing those solutions to make a final decision.

Now that you have the three key stages of the buyer’s journey, digital marketers need to pair specific paid ad campaigns with the right stages.

How to use paid advertising in the buyer’s journey by stage

Awareness stage

This is the very top of the sales funnel. All ads at this stage should focus on educating and engaging with prospects. There are two trains of thought when it comes to the awareness stage of paid ad campaigns:

Create a campaign for prospects who might not know about your brand, products, or services
Create an ad campaign that focuses on brand awareness and keeping your company at the top of the mind for those prospects that have heard of your brand

For each of these options, creating ads that appeal to your buyer personas will help get them in front of your targeted audiences.

Recommendation: Google search ads, Facebook and Instagram ads, highly visual content including video

Consideration stage

The second stage, consideration, is just that … Buyers are aware of your brand and are considering your products and services. Your goal is to continue to engage with prospects and educate buyers as to why your product/service is better than your competitors’. Remember, this isn’t the time for a hard sale. You want to bring buyers to the table by demonstrating what you can do for them.

Recommendation: Google Display ads, remarketing through Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter

Decision stage

Your prospect is almost ready to commit to a “conversion” but may need that extra push. Ads in this phase should communicate an incentive to get them to complete the conversion.

And don’t forget: people trust people. Customer testimonials can be a powerful tool in the decision stage of the buyer’s journey. HubSpot research found that 60% of consumers believed customer reviews were either trustworthy or very trustworthy — meaning that businesses that can accumulate positive reviews had a good chance of helping a customer make a purchase decision.

Recommendation: Remarketing on Google and social platforms, create visual customer testimonials

Have you tried integrating paid advertising in the buyer’s journey?