Stage-Based Display Advertising: Engage the Right Way

Sarah Wylie

6sense is hyper-focused on engaging with customers the right way. This post will give you an idea of how we come up with our stage-based display advertising as well as understanding what your future customers are doing at each stage of the buyer journey.

A quick snapshot to understand interactions at each stage:

When future customers are in Awareness, they’re researching keywords but aren’t yet researching you or your products. For us, as an example, this means they could be searching ‘how to increase pipeline’ - nothing about 6sense just yet. In Consideration, they’re researching your solutions and might even be researching your competitors. Once in Decision, they’ve been to your website and are now getting deeper involved in what you have to offer. In Purchase, they’re fully engaged.

With a clear understanding of what’s happening in each of these stages, it’s now time to figure out how you will engage and interact with these future customers at every stage of the journey. With stage-based display, you’re serving content to the future customer according to where they are in the journey. The goal is to push them down the funnel, starting with high-level, thought-leadership content, to eventually, a product demo. 

Here’s how 6sense does stage-based display: 

In Awareness, we’re all about educating - a TalkingSense episode is perfect at this stage because rather than self-serving content, we’re equipping the future customer with industry knowledge. In Consideration, we go deeper with an eBook of our own, still focused on sharing knowledge but this time a little closer to home. Decision and Purchase focus on product-specific content as these are the stages where the magic happens!

The important thing to note here is that stage-based display for 6sense is focused on four key elements: Keyword, Account, Persona, and Timing. Dynamic personalization based on the combination of these attributes dramatically improves account engagement. In a typical display campaign, we might see less than a 1% CTR, but up to 30% or more of the targeted accounts engaging with our website content after being served an ad. It’s imperative to take each of these four elements into account when building out your display campaigns to plug in the right content at each stage in order to push your future customers down the funnel.

Now that you have an understanding of all the components that go into stage-based display advertising, think about what matters to your future customers at each stage, focus on the four key elements, and go build some awesome display campaigns!