The Most Underused Lever in B2B Ad Performance - Offers
There’s only a few levers to really improve performance in ad campaign. These levers are Targeting, Creative & Offer.
In eCommerce and direct-to-consumer in general, everyone knows how important offers are. Campaigns live and die by price reductions, Buy One Get One Free, Free Shipping and other promotions.
In B2B, Offer is also a very powerful campaign lever, that can align very well with brand value. It just works differently compared to D2C.
How do B2B Offers Work?
There’s three buckets of offers in B2B:
1) Traditional
The default Offer, if you don’t think about it at all, is an offer to the prospective customer to talk to your sales team or try your product. “Get a Demo” being the typical CTA.
Beyond that, traditional B2B offers are the closest to D2C offers - it means offering a cheaper or less risky way to use your product.
The most common offer in this category is a free trial - access the product for 7, 14 or 30 days without paying.
Almost as common is tiers to the product - there’s an offer for a freemium version of the product, but if people want all the features they have to pay later.
Both of these are powerful offers that have different implications for paid media strategy. To make paid media work best, you need effective conversion signals that happen within a day or so of ad click. Both of the above offers complicate that need.
If you offer a Free trial, you need to find conversions signals that correlate to revenue early on, before the free trial period expires.
If you have a “free forever” freemium offering, you need to find signals from product usage that correlate to revenue in the future.
For more detail, check our our guide to Product-Led vs Sales-Led growth.
2) Content
People don’t think of the different content they use in ads as offers, but they definitely are. And they’re powerful ones at that.
Every time you present different content in your ads you are presenting a different valuable offer to the end user. Content is necessary in most fully scaled ad accounts to prevent ad fatigue.
Below is an aggregation of real account data. You can see that ad accounts that use content ads to keep offers fresh greatly reduce ad fatigue, which allows ad accounts to scale with good ROI.
Content ads are one of the best ways to reduce ad fatigue. While this chart just measures click through rate, this usually also affects funnel results all the way down to cost per new customer.
You may be worried about how well content converts to new customers. We find that once the ad and sales team is fully optimized, leads from content ads convert to sales at about 60% the rate of “get a demo” ads, but at 20% the long term cost per MQL.
They two keys to content ad success are to make content that is:
Laser focused on your target audience
Closely related to your value prop
Here’s two examples of content offers that work really well.
3) Incentive
Incentive ads means you offer qualified prospects something beyond your product just for signing up.
A common example of this is credits. Google frequently offers free AdWords credits for new users. AWS offers free database processing credits. This can be a really powerful tool.
Another offer that works, and this one is a shocker, is straight up compensation in return for a qualified person signing up for a demo. At Right Percent, we’ve seen clients scale from from $100k - $500k in ROI efficient spend purely from incentivizing qualified users with gift cards.
In Summary - B2B Offers
1) Offer is a really powerful lever B2B ad accounts have to drive performance. Companies tend to underinvest in testing new offers.
2) The three main offer types are traditional, content, and incentive.
This is the basics of what we’ve learned about B2B offers from managing 50+ B2B ad accounts and $50M+ in B2B direct response ad spend.
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