As online competition intensifies, it’s harder for brands to reach prospects and convert them into customers. Since the pandemic, B2B digital ad spending has seen a 32.5% year-over-year increase in the US — from $6.55 billion in 2019 to $8.68 billion in 2020 — Insider Intelligence shares. Despite the potential impending economic downturn, global ad spending is forecasted to increase by 2.6% in 2023 to a value of $880.9 billion, WARC reveals.
This means that having a strong media strategy in place is not enough to stay relevant. To reach a wider audience and avoid losing market share, brands must invest in strategic ad optimization — which entails using data to create and make changes to a campaign in order to improve its performance.
To support your marketing journey, we reached out to ResearchGate’s campaign and audience management team to find out what makes a successful B2B ad campaign optimization strategy. Having collaborated with leading organizations in academia and the sciences, our account managers have the know-how to get the most out of our customers’ budgets and achieve results. We have gathered their insights below.
B2B marketers can choose from a variety of media platforms in a multi-channel campaign. When targeting a scientific or academic audience, partnering with ResearchGate can be an effective way to reach an audience of 20+ million scientists as they do their research.
Our team continuously optimizes ad campaigns for clients’ KPIs to generate brand awareness and high-quality leads. We break down five ways they put this into action:
Having the right content plays a major role in the impact of your ad campaigns on your target audience. It must be contextually relevant and address their different pain points. So you’ll need to adapt your content to target different personas at different parts of the buyer journey.
ResearchGate’s account management team can advise you on the type of content that might be interesting and exciting to your target audience, factoring in user behavior, profession, seniority, and other data points.
Not only will they share optimization tips based on existing data, but they will also A/B test different types of content provided by customers. After initial findings, this allows your budget to be shifted to the piece of content that works best — resulting in a better-optimized campaign and maximized return on ad spend (ROAS).
Our hands-on team continuously tracks and monitors campaign success for you against set KPIs. They also A/B test multiple creatives, messages, and channels — tweaking media planning strategy according to campaign performance.
Successful optimization methods used by our campaign and audience managers include:
These highly targeted efforts enable brands to offer a more positive user experience, maximizing dollar spend and leading to higher conversion rates down the funnel.
ResearchGate Marketing Solutions proprietary data — which analyzed thousands of native advertising campaigns across disciplines in H1 of 2022— reveals that anthropology, education, and history campaigns yielded the best results on the platform. Using contextual targeting, these campaigns achieved a CTR of 0.35%, 0.34%, and 0.34%, respectively. Their success is followed by campaigns in agricultural science, computer science, and mathematics. More than half of the campaigns analyzed reached a CTR above 0.18%.
As our lab buying group dynamics report uncovered, there are different decision-makers in the buying process. To influence them, you’ll need to target each buyer segment with the right messaging.
At ResearchGate, we can help you achieve this with an effective targeting strategy. Our in-house team can leverage a rich data set based on proprietary first-party data. They will form a hypothesis about the broad audience segments your message will resonate with the most. Next, they will experiment and iterate, refining the ad’s placement and the groups of buyers that see it.
This highly granular targeting and optimization strategy ensures that your ads are seen by the most relevant audience for your campaigns, and prevents you from missing out on any potential customers.
Media planning is a customized advertising strategy that tailors ad content to individual audience segments across multiple media channels.
For campaign success, you need an effective media mix. Your media assets should be high-quality and aligned to each platform and target audience. But this process — from reporting to tweaking media across channels — can be complex and time-consuming.
To assist you, the ResearchGate Marketing Solutions team can create a strong media plan optimized to your target audience goals and different budget options. They will also manage the flow of your media to ensure all your assets are in alignment.
This approach resulted in a high increase in qualified lead numbers and improved campaign ROI for our customer QIAGEN. Following their ad campaign on ResearchGate, their average eCPL decreased by over 75%.
Your prospects are naturally attracted to visually appealing content. So, the more unique and engaging your design, the more likely your brand will stand out in a crowded marketplace — helping you strengthen brand recognition and loyalty.
The challenge with running multi-channel campaigns is to maintain brand consistency across native, emails, and video ads. But when partnering with ResearchGate, you can hand over the entire design process to our team. Once your brand content reaches our account managers, they will ensure that all the high-quality assets for the ad campaign — like ad creatives and sponsored content pages — are created and up and running.
ResearchGate assisted InvivoGen with design creation and campaign optimization. Our team A/B tested banners for the same campaign to find content that best resonated with their target audience — boosting overall campaign performance and reaching a CTR of 1.86%.
Are you ready to engage researchers with ads that are an organic part of the platform? Place native ads within home feeds and alongside scientific content to help generate and convert quality leads. Contact ResearchGate to find out more.
