We talk a lot at Salesforce about the current revolution in digital advertising. Advertisers shifted their focus from relatively undifferentiated, and often ignored, banner ads to ads that are integrated into the sites and in the apps that people spend all of their time. At the same time, they are shifting from broad demographic targeting to targeting specific people based on first-party data.

Usually, that revolution gets told in the context of large B2C industries, since for example the Retail industry will spend $15 billion on digital ads just in the United States in 2016. However, this revolution is potentially even more powerful for B2B advertisers, because broad demographic targeting is much less effective for them -- for example, targeting all males between 18 and 35 in the United States certainly isn’t an efficient way to advertise CRM Software!

Kantar Media surveyed B2B advertisers about what is extremely important for programmatic advertising today -- their top two answers were “Audience” (78%) and “Inventory Quality” (51%). This is why traditionally “B2C” platforms like Facebook and Instagram can shine for B2B advertising -- because it can be used to target very B2B specific audiences with Custom Audiences, and because the inventory is an integral part of the Newsfeed, it’s high quality.

Salesforce ourselves found the power of ads powered by CRM data on Facebook recently when we ran a cross-sell campaign to get existing Sales Cloud customers interested in Service Cloud. We found that by targeting Sales Cloud customers who were not yet Service Cloud customers with ads, we reduced the cost per lead (CPL) for our request a demo campaign by 18% and the CPL for our ebook campaign by 48%! Because the ads were more relevant, engagement also increased by 40% across the campaigns.

Of course, Facebook certainly isn’t the only place you can reach a B2B audience with high quality ads that are integrated into the user experience. Eight in every ten - yes 80% -- of all internet users over age 16 visit YouTube each and every month, including 73% in North America, 79% in Europe, 83% in Asia Pacific, and fully 93% in Latin America. In each region, those are higher numbers than even Facebook, according to the GlobalWebIndex. With the introduction of Google Customer Match, fully supported by Advertising Studio, you can target all of those people with ads based on their CRM data and interactions with your B2B brand.

Stay ahead of the shift to mobile video in “Advertising Trends: Video Takes Over Digital, Mobile Advertising.” Download the FREE white paper.