Making Money On-line: How B2B Marketers Can Get Better Targeting and Deeper Insights

Thursday 2 June 2016

How B2B Marketers Can Get Better Targeting and Deeper Insights

Knowledge about your customers’ preferences at specific moments is critical to unlock the marketing potential of contextual intelligence today’s digital marketplace provides. By studying and applying buyer personas and qualification to marketing processes marketers can learn more about customers’ preferences. Personas can be leveraged across several departments such as sales, marketing, advertising, and customer service. But the task of actually creating the ideal buyer personas for your business can be a daunting one.

However, B2B marketers are faced with the uphill task of making sense out of data from several systems, both online and offline, internal and external. They are grappling with the fact that the always-connected buyer’s behavior and preferences are constantly evolving, and marketers need to maximize the value of customer data in near-real time for better targeting and personalization, as well as to build lifetime value.

Identifying the right buyer persona requires the consideration of several attributes (demographic, psychographic, etc.) in order to make conversations relevant. Just like in the B2C environment where customer expectations of personalization and targeted content most relevant to them are now critical factors in accelerating their decision making, similarly B2B buyers also expect the companies or brands they interact with to know them well and identify their needs and goals.

Technology to the Rescue AKA a Data Management Platform (DMP)

A data management platform (DMP) combines online and offline data from first-party proprietary systems, and second-party and third-party audiences to provide marketers with a central platform that stores and helps provide insight regarding audience and campaign data that is used for optimizing campaigns and media spend across channels.

It is also deployed against cross-channel campaigns to better inform, for example, nurture programs within an organization.

With the help of a DMP, a marketer can manage and analyze audience profile data to better inform ad targeting through modeling, implement retargeting campaigns for better direct response, and optimize site performance using customer behavior data. It also enables marketers to add analyzed audience data into marketing automation systems, for example, to help B2B marketers receive a more informed view of their customers.

Download Audience Data Management: Driving Top-of-Funnel B2B Prospects Through Digital Advertising and learn more about how B2B marketers can get better targeting and deeper insights by utilizing a DMP.