PSAC Day 2 Melissa Mackey
Session 2: Search and Social BtoB Ads in a Covid-19 World
Gyro’s Melissa Mackey shares tips for successful B2B campaigns.
Some Key Points
“I’m excited to be speaking here at our inaugural PSA conference and I’m going to talk about b2b advertising in a Covid-19 world so first a little bit about me I work at gyro which is Dentsu Aegis networks flagship B2B agency and I’ve been there for eight years we do exclusively b2b so we’re a full-service we do search, social, creative, branding, etc I specialize in paid search and paid social and you can follow me on twitter at mel66 so let’s talk about some b2b challenges that we’re having right now during Covid 19.”
“if you sell ventilators or anything else in the medical field that it relates to Covid-19 treatment you’re swamped. Janitorial everybody is selling more or doing more deep cleaning offices that we’re being cleaned are now being doubly cleaned so these folks are swamped as well the food supply chain is completely disrupted not only are they swamped with everybody panic buying at the grocery stores and trying to keep those supplies up but the restaurant and commercial business has dried up and those foods are not supplied in the same way so if you’re buying milk for a restaurant you’re buying it and giant containers nobody’s buying those for their home they want gallon jugs and so they’ve got to completely retool their food supply chain.”
“SAS and business productivity not surprising is the fact that video conferencing like we’re doing right now security remote working that’s all increased as well that’s I’m sure it surprises no one on this call but what is interesting is that a lot of our SAS clients are seeing people looking towards the future.”
“In this study from Sage Intact is showing that 21% of businesses are looking to purchase or expand the use of cloud-based systems for things like accounting and HR so SAS businesses. This is kind of the time to step back and say how can we do things better and more efficiently. Events are canceled or going virtual, the whole reason for this conference is because we saw a need due to events being canceled or gone virtual. Events are a huge way for b2b advertisers to get clients. B2B advertisers invest large amounts of money and I mean significant amounts of money in events and in-person events are great source of leads because you have the person in front of you they are very engaged, they’re very active, and very far down the funnel. A virtual conference is not exactly the same, it’s easy for users to sign up especially if there’s no cost and they may not be as hot of a lead and of course if you’re cancelling your conference like a lot of the medical ones are just flat-out cancelled you’re just losing those leads so they’ve got to do something to make up for that
“It’s a mess so what should you do about it first thing you got to do is get your basics down. Review all of your ad copy and landing pages so the typical things that we’ve done in the past may not work. For example here you try to propel your business to the next level with a bunch of people cheering and this just doesn’t play this is it doesn’t feel right during this time so you’ve got to check your tone. If you haven’t done this already you really need to go today and check all of your ad copy, all your site links, all of your social ads to make sure that you’re really trying to be helpful and sensitive to the times.”
“IP targeting is something that we use in B2B all the time if you have a company that you want to reach you just find out their IP address and you target at their business location. Well nobody’s at that location right now, everyone’s working from home so your IP targeting is out the window or as Gerard Butler might say you’re gonna have to find another way to reach those people.”
If you’re doing any kind of geo targeting based around business locations that same thing it’s it’s no longer applicable. Also your remarketing lists cookies and devices are thrown off so if people are in a remarketing list based on a particular device that they’re using maybe it’s their computer at their office and yes some people do still use desktop computers they might be at home working on a personal computer now and so all the remarketing cookies are gone. Cookie duration is something that you need to take a look at so if you’re buying cycle is normally 90 days that may be longer now it probably is because people are taking longer to make decisions just due to everything that’s going on.
“Devices have gone crazy so this is actual data that we’re seeing from from a particular client and most of our clients look similar so prior to February we were seeing computer traffic go down and mobile traffic go up. Now people are not traveling, they’re not commuting, they’re not using their mobile devices as much and the traffic is just going down while computers is going up so this is the opposite of what we were seeing in the past and if you’ve got a strong mobile strategy or if you’ve made device adjustments you’re gonna want to take a look at that and make sure that you’re adjusting appropriately for what’s happening right now.”