Reach your B2B audience in unexpected places. Use Reddit, YouTube and TikTok for paid media campaigns that drive real results.

In B2B marketing, simply sticking to traditional channels may limit your potential.

As audiences diversify and new platforms emerge, expanding your media strategy can be a game-changer for engaging decision-makers where they spend time.

But how do you know which channels fit your strategy and whether they’ll resonate with your target audience?

This article discusses strategies to help you better understand your audience, develop a clear and effective media plan and explore some overlooked platforms that can give your B2B marketing a fresh edge.

First things first: Understanding your audience

It’s surprising how often people feel they lack the tools to understand their audience. Your CRM likely holds more valuable insights than you realize. It can help address three key challenges:

• Data tied to your business: If properly recorded, your CRM tracks all interactions with your business – whether won, lost or disqualified – making it easy to identify trends and patterns.
• Buying committee exploration: Are your marketing campaigns targeting the right people? Your CRM should include who is involved in sales and pipeline activities. This data helps confirm whether your targeting is reaching the right audience.
• Understanding who seems qualified but isn’t: Did a company or account look like the perfect fit but ended up disqualified by sales? Are you seeing many accounts go through the disqualification process? Identify what these accounts have in common so you can adjust accordingly.

A few other tactics to better understand your audience include:

• LinkedIn groups: There’s a LinkedIn group for whatever you’re selling. Look at the job titles and firmographics of the companies in that group. What are they discussing? What are their concerns and common pain points? The possibilities are endless.
• LinkedIn Insight tag: Set up this tag to identify attributes like job titles, company names, company sizes and seniority based on the users landing on your website. You can also audit who’s visiting your blog versus your key pages, thus gathering a wealth of information.
• Your competitors’ websites: Have you ever audited the industries and job titles your competitors highlight? Do they feature more case studies for certain verticals over others? This can offer valuable insights into their priorities for you to cross-reference.

Dig deeper: LinkedIn advertising: A comprehensive guide

Plan smart: How to build a basic media plan

A common mindset I often see is marketers wanting to be everywhere, believing they can effectively spread $2,000 across multiple channels.

Unfortunately, this approach limits your ability to scale or achieve meaningful results. A focused media plan consolidates all your efforts, offering a clear view of each channel’s potential and helping you allocate your budget for maximum impact.

A successful media plan should include:

• Target audience segmentation and identification.
• Clear goals and objectives.
• Multichannel strategy.
• Budget allocation.
• Performance measurement and analysis.

Dig deeper: How to manage a paid media budget: Allocation, risk and scaling

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