B2B Buyers Crave More Relevance: 3 Ways to Give Them What They Want

I recently came across the Dentsu 2024 Superpowers Index, “the largest ever systematic study of B2B buying behavior globally.” This year’s edition, based on interviews with over 3,500 B2B buyers spanning 6,500 brand experiences globally and four separate industries, provides a new perspective on the most significant trends now shaping B2B, including:

• The importance of trust and brand building
• The ever-narrowing competitive gap between winning and losing as a B2B brand
• The growing influence of thought leadership

The new study uncovered a finding that resonated with me: While there's a lot of talk in B2B about personalization, more than anything, relevance is what buyers crave – and right now, they don't feel brands are hitting the mark. For B2B marketers, this presents both a challenge and an opportunity. When you achieve relevance, you also gain greater customer trust, loyalty, and confidence, which, in turn, drives more wins for your brand.

According to Dentsu, B2B marketers should be able to harness the power of new technology and data to meet buyers where they are, scale personalization, and deliver the relevance that buyers demand. Being in the marketing data business since 1998, I have a few thoughts about this:

1. The Rise of B2B2C Data: The dramatic rise in the number of people working from home has accelerated the growth of a movement that had already been underway. We’ve covered it on this blog before. We call it the B2B2C or “universal person” movement, and it reflects the overlap or blending of our personal and professional lives, with more balance – and fewer boundaries -- between the two.

 

The problem is that most of the first- and third-party databases fueling today’s omni-channel campaigns don’t reflect this sea change. Instead, they offer only a one-dimensional view of customers and prospects, whether it’s a personal view or a professional view. This hinders campaigns from achieving their full potential when it comes to not only personalization and relevance but also targeting and reach. Your campaigns will fall short if you’re not reaching buyers where they are and not connecting with them in a more complete way—a way that engenders trust and provides greater convenience to the buyer.

That's why OMI launched a new B2B2C data linkage service to enable marketers to identify and connect with prospects and customers on their terms – on the B2B and B2C channels they use the most, whether at work or home.

Our new service links B2B attributes, such as email, firmographics, and job title, to B2C attributes, such as the prospect's LinkedIn profile, demographics, and residential address. Because these attributes give you more insights into each prospect, you can target and engage them more effectively, providing greater relevance across B2B and B2C omni-channel points, including direct mail, email, social, and programmatic.

B2B2C Relevance in Retail Example

Consider this: A B2B2C strategy can make retailers' ad campaigns more impactful during the competitive holiday shopping season. Overlaying consumer audience demographics -- such as marital status, children, income, gender, and age – on top of business information, such as job titles, leads to more effective targeting, personalization, and relevance. In addition, serving ads on work devices also aids conversions; for example, if recipients view ads at work, then complete the purchase later at home on another device.

Go here for more insights into how clients use our B2B2C data to improve marketing ROI.

2. Scaling Personalization and Relevance: Achieving personalization and relevance takes less effort if your target audience is extremely small, but what if it numbers into the millions? For many brands, new customer acquisition campaigns do scale to that size. A dilemma for many marketers is that first-party databases can only go so far as a vehicle for reaching new customers, let alone a substantial number of them. In fact, they are inherently designed to connect brands with the customers they already have. Enter third-party data. At OMI, our business contact database spans 140 million records with email addresses and includes B2B2C residential/consumer linkage on 90 million of those records to enhance personalization and relevance.

 

Company- and contact-level social URLs, MAIDS, mobile phones, and a range of LinkID overlays are available for reaching prospects on their preferred channels. And there’s no need to start from scratch. We can augment your existing database with B2B2C linkage – ask us how. Go here to find out more.

Using AI to Scale Personalization and Relevance

According to recent research, up to 88% of marketers plan to use AI for personalization, and 84% believe it is a “key enabler” for that purpose, MediaPost reports. Here are a few ways our team is using it to address personalization at scale:

• AI gives our agency powerful filtering capabilities, speed, and scale when using intent data signals to fuel targeted programmatic advertising campaigns for clients. With billions of digital intent signals processed weekly, AI saves us time and resources and enables us to uncover deep insights around preferences and interests to improve campaign targeting and personalization for clients.
• Our team uses AI to streamline and optimize personalization for clients. For example, we combine machine learning with business firmographics and our B2B2C contact data to automate many aspects of email personalization for clients across content, images, calls to action, subject lines, and more.

3. Collect Data Insights: When you have a better pulse on what your target audience wants, it shows in your marketing, allowing you to unlock new levels of personalization and relevance. In turn, as Dentsu’s research shows, you will be more likely to earn their trust and business. Ongoing insights derived from monitoring your social channels for high-value feedback, conducting surveys and interviews, and leveraging telemetry data and analytics tools are very useful for this purpose. We also recommend intent data to identify prospects who are ready to buy the types of solutions you offer, including data that shows what’s driving their interest. Our intent data approach uncovers 14 billion fresh B2B digital signals weekly to ensure the latest insights are given to clients.

 

Reach out to our team for a no-cost consultation on using these and other approaches to build more relevance – and results -- into your campaigns.