5 Steps to Building Audience-First Campaigns for More Effective Digital Marketing

Buyers today are “no longer satisfied with the B2B status quo,” as noted in the recent 2021 State of B2B Marketing report by Wpromote and Ascend2. The report dives into the digital strategy shifts B2B marketers are using to drive more success in a post-pandemic world. Not surprisingly, customer connection came out as a top priority. Another key takeaway: buyers want a more personalized and engaging customer experience that recognizes their specific needs, meets them where they are, and guides them with the right resources through the buying journey.

 

To move the needle across all of these areas, it makes sense to start with the right mindset from the get-go. That’s why B2B marketers today need audience-first campaign strategies to reach the right prospective customers with the content that best suits them. Here’s a look at how modern marketers are tackling this shift.

 

1. Reach Your Audience Across Channels and Interests

B2B buying doesn’t happen in a vacuum, or the confines of a work email inbox. Instead, buyers today expect a seamless omni-channel experience including connected TV, direct mail, social media, email and display. There are benefits to each of these channels—targeting based on programming, location, online behavior and interests—but together they’re even more powerful because individual users do research on more than one device and from more than one source.

 

2. Times Have Changed, So Have Buyers

Recent changes, such as more buyers working from home, the rise in group decision making, and increased employee turnover, mean marketers can and should change the way they reach prospective customers. It’s important for B2B marketers to keep this in mind as they build audiences--because traditional methods just aren’t cutting it. Instead, digital audiences offer the flexibility and accuracy to pinpoint campaigns to specific audiences wherever they are.

 

Third-party digital audiences also solve the problems of what to do about the decline of third-party cookies along with the challenges of increasing privacy regulations. And they offer ways to measure unique reach and attribution, without the accuracy issues that often go along with outdated first-party contact data.

 

3. Build A Digital Audience from Multiple Sources

Using a process called “look-alike” modeling, marketers can identify common characteristics across current customers and find prospects with similar characteristics. When applied on an identity graph, this approach allows you to build an audience from a larger pool of prospects-- from multiple data providers -- and narrow down your selections based on online and offline factors.

 

For example, the LiveRamp Data Marketplace is the largest deterministic identity graph on the open internet. OMI’s 78+ million business contacts are available for segmenting and audience building on LiveRamp. Data from other providers can be overlaid on top of our data – or combined with it—for a more robust data selection.

 

Our clients can use the LiveRamp identity graph to build their audience -- and then take that audience data to the demand side platform (DSP) of their choice to fuel their digital campaigns. It’s an amazing opportunity to scale both reach and accuracy at the same time.

 

4. Know Who Is In Market

Leveraging intent monitoring, B2B marketers can have the most up-to-date insights into who’s ready to buy and when. There are exciting new tools and services in this area hitting the market now: at OMI, we process more than 14 billion new intent signals for our clients each week as part of our intent monitoring services. You can read more about how our approach works and what it can mean for your digital marketing here.

 

5. Remember the Quality Factor

According to the study, large companies are struggling to prioritize quality over quantity in many areas, including content, customer experiences and leads. Turning out high input with low output really just means you’re working harder, not smarter. The same applies to the data that fuels acquisition campaigns. Focusing on the quantity of your outreach is a waste of time and money. Instead, start with quality data you can rely on and zero in on the prospects best suited for your offers.

 

Our team has a lot more to say about building audience-first campaigns. Reach out to us for more information – we would like nothing more than to support you with increasing the reach and impact of your digital marketing initiatives.

 

Outward Media’s proven data cleansing services and targeted, accurate B2B data can enable you to achieve better digital marketing ROI and, ultimately, convert more prospects into customers. Go here to find out about leveraging our SMB and medical market data on the LiveRamp Data Marketplace.