Year in Review: What B2B Marketers Wanted Most in 2024

Reflecting back on our business in 2024, we witnessed an evolution in what our clients wanted the most from us. As a performance marketing agency serving Fortune 1000 clients as well as agencies, third-party B2B marketing data has been one of our core offerings since 2005. Our clients use it to drive their omni-channel campaigns, but in 2024, the way they leverage our data shifted. Here’s how:

1. They want their data to bridge B2B and B2C: This year more brands are turning to OMI to incorporate both B2B and B2C attributes into their customer acquisition data sets to achieve a more complete view of their prospects’ profiles. This involves matching personal contact data to B2B data to power improved relevance and more personalized campaigns.

At OMI, we’ve embraced B2B2C convergence, launching a new B2B2C data linkage service this year that enables marketers to identify and connect with prospects and customers at work and at home on their personal and professional channels, including direct mail, email, social, and programmatic. It lets you link and overlay consumer audience demographics -- such as marital status, children, income, gender, age, residential address, and LinkedIn profile – on top of B2B attributes, such as email, firmographics, and job title. In addition, we offer both company- and contact-level social URLs along with , mobile phone, and a range of LinkID overlays. Most importantly, the B2B2C data remains anonymized at the execution interface to support privacy regulations.

Officially known as our Universal Person Marketing (UPM) database, the B2B2C file contains 145 million business contact records, with linkage to residential addresses and alternate emails on 90 million of those records. This is an exceptional match rate -- check out this recent case study for more details.

 

2. They want custom audiences for media activation: There are clear benefits to programmatic advertising, but over the past few years a lot of criticism has been leveled around its lack of transparency. As advertisers rely on algorithms and data to make decisions about where their ads will appear, there’s limited visibility into the specifics and contexts around where ads are displayed. This makes transparent media activation a requirement to get the most out of your advertising budget. Getting to transparency starts with the quality and accuracy of your data, and that’s why OMI’s new results-driven, digital audience-building service for media activation has become one of our most popular offerings this year.

 

OMI’s competitive advantage in audience-building lies in our B2B Living File® data, consisting of 145MM+ manager-, director-, and professional-level and above contacts with email/HEM, social URL, and other attributes. Leveraging this massive database, we link interest paths to the prospect from both a consumer and a business perspective to gain a more complete B2B2C view of their profile. We also use real-time intent signals and leverage our proven programmatic digital media buying expertise. Ultimately our end-to-end media activation service lets you engage and activate the most accurate, targeted omni-channel audiences to dramatically improve campaign results. Go here to read more about the benefits of working with OMI on audience-building for media activation.

 

3.  They want custom audiences for email marketing: Email marketing has long been a core service of ours, with our specialization being customer acquisition email campaigns and the prospect data that fuels them. While licensing our data has always been a big part of our business, in 2024 a greater number of our clients asked us to provide higher levels of customization across our audience building services. The goal is to enable them to drive stronger precision with their targeting, resulting in higher ROI. We’re using new tools and techniques, such as intent monitoring and B2B2C data, to do just that. Intent monitoring is based on client-selected market keywords that zero in on prospects whose recent digital behavior (browsing online, reading articles, downloading white papers) indicates interest in our client’s offerings, and the B2B2C data creates a more complete prospect profile that unleashes improved personalization and relevance in email marketing.

 

4. They want to license our targeted audience data for ID graph building: Today, as more brands amass both B2B and B2C data, they’re finding they have the data elements required to build their own in-house identity graphs. This allows them to sidestep the need for using costly third-party graphs to fuel improved reach and scale for their campaigns.

As we wrote in Forbes earlier this year, “the B2B2C movement arrived in tandem with the rise of do-it-yourself (DIY) identity graphs.” Identity graphs are tables or databases that stitch together customer and prospect data with online identifiers to create a single profile for each potential customer. The B2B2C data remains anonymized at the execution interface to support privacy regulations, while also giving brands a better way to target and connect with individual prospects—and market to them more effectively.

For those companies building their own identity graphs, the aim is to gain more control of their data. To get their graphs where they need to be, many are working with specialized third-party data providers like OMI to add scale and fill in any data gaps about their prospects’ personal and professional identifiers. We're seeing that many clients have either started building their own identity graphs or have shown an interest in doing so. It has been an interesting development in our business for sure in 2024!

Please reach out to our team for guidance on scaling your reach and resonating with the right prospects now and in the New Year.