Choosing Advertising Platforms For B2C Or B2B Or Both

Choosing the right advertising solutions can get messy when your company sells to consumers and businesses — or when your B2B company has to support a range of buying journeys like B2B enterprise, B2B2C, and B2B e-commerce. Should you choose a B2C-focused advertising platform to advertise to consumers and a separate B2B-focused advertising platform to advertise to business buyers? Or are there advertising platforms that can do both and do it well enough to cover the range of B2C and B2B use cases across your company?

The answers to those questions are starting to become clear as the rise of the advertising platform is now upon us. Demand-side platforms, channel-specific media vendors, paid media point solutions, and managed service providers have evolved, acquired, and built new features over the past few years. And now, they offer the kinds of expansive self-service capabilities you would expect from a technology that calls itself a platform.

Which Advertising Platforms Focus On B2C Or B2B Or Both?

These advertising platform vendors know their media landscape quite well. But they also understand their customers’ needs better than ever. As a result, an emerging number of advertising platforms are focusing their cross-channel advertising capabilities to address specific B2C and/or B2B use cases.

These vendors, their focus areas, and our comprehensive buying decision criteria are listed in our new report, Now Tech: Advertising Platforms, Q1 2022. To explore advertising platform functionality at a deeper level, we broke the market into three segments. Each segment has varying capabilities related to B2C and B2B use cases. The report also explains how to think about assembling multiple vendors for companies in pursuit of omnichannel media management.

B2B companies can use the report to determine which types of advertising platforms make the most sense for each type of B2B use case. B2C companies with B2B business units can use the report to think about how to improve the interlock between their consumer-based advertising and the advertising targeted toward business buyers.