Targeting a B2B audience programmatically is complex. Understanding how data has been sourced is really important.
Even though the route to purchase is different to consumer campaigns, you should still think of your audience as humans with individual lifestyles and hobbies.
These are the key questions you should be asking of your data provider to ensure that your campaign delivers on its KPIs:
1. Where do you collect your data?
Is it from a publisher’s website or an ecommerce site? Is it based on surveys or through a partnership? Any data provider should be happy to provide a transparent list of how they have compiled the data. This will help you to ascertain its relevancy, and engage audiences more effectively.
2. How fresh is your data?
Data is powerful because it helps advertisers engage people as human beings, rather than just a number. But not if it is out-dated. What is more likely to happen is that the advertiser will appear out of step with the individual’s path to purchase, thus delivering a poor user experience. B2B purchases mirror consumer trends, which remains that any data over 14 days old is highly likely to be out of date.
3. Where can I access your data?
Ease of access to data is key. Ask your data provider what buy-side platforms they are integrated with to ensure that you’ll be able to access their data directly via your DSP, trading desk, ad-serving platform, or advertising exchange. Flexibility is also key if the data you require isn’t available in the platform you are using, generally if you raise this with your data provider they should be able to activate it.
4. How can I use your data?
This is arguably the most crucial question. It is important that in the early planning stages of the campaign you think about how the data you buy will be used, and communicate that to your data provider. You may have access to standard B2B datasets that enable you to target based on job title and level of seniority but you should still consider how to target the person behind the desk. Can your data provider give you the data points you need to target exactly the right person and in the exactly the right way?
Even though the route to purchase is different to consumer campaigns, you should still think of your audience as humans with individual lifestyles and hobbies. If you have access to audience data, then you can add additional targeting fields beyond job title, gender, age, marital status and interests. This data can enable you to develop more relevant advertising and offers to appeal to the person making the purchasing decisions. Such an approach ensures you develop a personalised digital marketing campaign and build a personal link between buyer and company.
Audience data can also be used to profile data held in your CRM so you can identify look-a-like customers and extend your prospecting pool beyond your own first data. Additionally, the insights you gather can be used to identify new partnerships or advertising opportunities to promote your products and services to the correct audience. For example, you may be a legal services firm who sees a high proportion of your current clients visit marathon training sites therefore you may wish to sponsor running clubs, advertise your products on training and marathon event sites, or use marathon places as prizes to competitions.
From a practical standpoint it is important to ascertain how you can use the data. There is no point in buying great swathes of data, only to find that it isn’t compatible with your current buying and planning tools. Or that you wanted to use it to serve content but can’t.
5. Do you offer local market data?
Local cultures, language and nuances are exceptionally important. The most successful global campaigns are those that demonstrate emotional intelligence. Applied correctly, data can be a key enabler of this and picks up on my earlier point about how data can help advertisers to demonstrate their human side.
A lot of B2B online marketing can feel a little robotic. However, if data has local significance and is delivered via a channel that it is in tune with local consumer behavior, it can go a long way towards building brand advocacy. To that extent be sure that your data provider can testify to the integrity of their data and its regional relevance. Additionally, it is important to question them about local registration information.
Trent Lloyd
Co-Founder and MD
Eyeota