Creating demand where none existed before is kind of like magic. Think about it: it wasn’t too long ago that no one knew what cryptocurrency, blockchain, AI, or even smartphones were. If you’d mention any of them just a year before they hit the mainstream, at best you’d get a blank stare in response; and at worse, well you might have been labeled a modern-day warlock and burned alive at the stake by the entire town. Seemingly by magic, digital advertising and marketing take previously unknown technologies and products from obscurity into the limelight.
But, one thing I can promise you is that some serious digital advertising elbow grease was invested before every Tom, Dick and Harry got themselves some crypto. Generating demand for new, tech products when no one even knows what they are is an uphill battle that can only be won with determination and digital advertising know-how. The main issue is that effective digital advertising requires that there be demand for a product, and a prerequisite to demand is awareness.
So how do we get that ball rolling? How do we generate that awareness that eventually creates demand and later on down the funnel, revenue and profit. This article is dedicated to answering just that question.
Traditional UA Channels Are Ill Suited to Generating Demand for B2B Tech Products
There’s one thing about advertising that hasn’t changed with the times: it’s that there must be some sort of demand for the products you’re peddling. Despite popular belief, even the savviest saleswoman can’t sell ice to an eskimo. Eskimos don’t need any ice, it’s that simple. For similar reasons, it’s difficult to advertise innovative, unknown B2B tech products on Google. Your audience doesn’t know they need your product yet, it’s up to you to make that happen.
Google’s advertising network works by pull-demand. Basically that means that your product advertisements only appear when someone is looking for them. That makes advertising a new, innovative tech product that no one even knew existed pretty difficult. The reason being that no one is going to actively search for a product that doesn’t exist. The answer of course is to market the problems that your product solves, and not the product itself. More on that below.
Facebook too is also pretty lacking when it comes to advertising new tech products. While no one can deny that Facebook’s targeting capabilities are second to none, a closer look reveals that most of those parameters aren’t worth too much to a B2B advertiser. Truth be told, Facebook Ad Manager looks like it was designed to sell designer handbags and not annual subscriptions to your revolutionary SaaS product.
Most people log in to Facebook to socialize and post images of their children and pets, not to talk shop. Business information is limited at best, and most likely not updated. To effectively advertise your niche B2B product you’ve got to get in front of the right individual, with the right budget, at the right time. Unfortunately, Facebook Ads wasn’t built for sniper-like, niche-business-audience targeting, but rather for massive campaigns with tens of thousands of potentially relevant buyers.
Innovative, Creative UA Tactics Can Help
Luckily for us, digital advertising doesn’t live and die on Google or Facebook’s doorstep. LinkedIn is definitely a powerhouse when it comes to B2B advertising. And wait, before you get all riled up about the advertising costs on LinkedIn, take a deep breath. Yes, LinkedIn ads are definitely more expensive than Google, Facebook or almost any other advertising channel.
And for good reason. LinkedIn Ads are primarily used by B2B advertisers looking to target business professionals, while both Google and Facebook have a mix of B2B and B2C advertisers. LinkedIn is acutely aware that their audiences are super relevant–and potentially super profitable–to B2B advertisers. Their highly refined targeting capabilities were built to pinpoint the different stakeholders in a given organization’s purchasing-decision making chain, and no one can deny that it works.
But, as every good digital advertiser knows it’s not about what you spend, it’s about what you make. While LinkedIn definitely has notoriously high ad costs, they deliver the goods. And when it comes to B2B tech products delivering just a few goods can translate into massive Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) numbers. Remember, it’s not about Cost Per Click (CPC) but rather Cost Per Lead (CPL). When you take those metrics and compare them to nearly any other advertising channel you may just see that LinkedIn is way cheaper than the alternatives.
Now, back to Google. When some creative juice is applied to Google’s advertising network, it can return surprisingly positive results.
Here’s one way: Like we mentioned above, Google works by pull-demand, meaning that your audience has to actively search for your specific product before it’ll be displayed. This won’t get you too far when you’re promoting an unknown tech product that no one searches for. However, at the end of the day your product solves a specific problem, or at least it should if you built it right. Chances are, your audience is searching for a solution for that specific problem.
For example, one of my clients sells subscriptions to its product management platform. They automate and digitize well-known product management methodologies and tools such as roadmapping, user story maps and prioritization tools. Their product exists in a relatively new space that hasn’t reached the mainstream just yet, and a cursory review of Google search volumes shows that search terms around product management platforms aren’t exactly way up there. However, search volumes around problems that the platform solves–roadmapping, product management templates and prioritization tools– yield much more impressive numbers. By targeting campaigns around those terms, the pains that my client’s innovative tech product eases, we’ve seen great traction.
3 Ways to Build a UA Strategy that Combines LinkedIn and Google
The example I just outlined above is just one of several tactics that I’ve successfully used over the years to advertise new tech products to audiences that don’t know they exist. By applying some creativity and leveraging both Google and LinkedIn together, it’s definitely possible to generate quality leads for your innovative B2B tech product. Here’s a few more tactics you can try:
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- Different flows for different platforms. Different levels of relevancy call for different flows. Targeted Google campaigns that focus on the problem your product solves are by definition more generic than LinkedIn campaigns targeting budget owners in companies of a certain size and in a specific industry, and hence Google results are frequently less relevant. One smart way to adapt your strategy to this reality is to implement different flows for each of the platforms. Try advertising free trials for Google traffic as a way to vet non relevant traffic without expending too much resources. You’ll see who uses the free trial and know in that way whether the lead is relevant or not. On LinkedIn, advertise a Live Demo as you should invest the full force of your sales operation into these highly relevant, albeit expensive, leads.
- Target products that cater to the same audience. No audience lives in a bubble. If you’ve identified a specific audience for your product, chances are that same audience is relevant for other tech products. And you can target them that way. One of my clients provides banking services for freelancers, not exactly a commodity. However, by targeting keywords such as Uber Login and DoorDash LogIn, we were able to create demand for their product. Once you have that original demand going, you’ll be able to create 1st party data on your relevant customers and implement tactics on other networks, such as lookalike audiences on Facebook. A similar tactic involves targeting search words for companies that provide complementary services. Fiverr is an online marketplace for freelancers and many of its sellers would be highly relevant to my client. By targeting keywords like “Fiverr Sellers”, “freelancer marketplaces” and such, we were able to achieve some awesome results.
- Implement quality control methodologies to filter out Google leads. With limited B2B targeting capabilities on Google, many of the leads you’ll generate there may not be relevant to your business. To help my product management platform client with this issue, we decided that only companies with at least 10 product managers onboard would be relevant. Each lead we captured was compared to this metric as a way to qualify it. Using LinkedIn, we quickly saw which companies were relevant, and only approached them.
- Different flows for different platforms. Different levels of relevancy call for different flows. Targeted Google campaigns that focus on the problem your product solves are by definition more generic than LinkedIn campaigns targeting budget owners in companies of a certain size and in a specific industry, and hence Google results are frequently less relevant. One smart way to adapt your strategy to this reality is to implement different flows for each of the platforms. Try advertising free trials for Google traffic as a way to vet non relevant traffic without expending too much resources. You’ll see who uses the free trial and know in that way whether the lead is relevant or not. On LinkedIn, advertise a Live Demo as you should invest the full force of your sales operation into these highly relevant, albeit expensive, leads.
Conclusion
Creating demand for products that no one knows can be an advertiser’s worst nightmare if they don’t know what they’re doing. While advertising innovative B2B tech products is a challenge, it’s nothing that can’t be handled with the right mix of creativity, digital advertising knowledge and gumption.
