Following Multiple Devices on the Customer Journey

With 67.2% of B2B companies planning to ramp up their digital marketing spend this year, more B2B advertisers are using intent data to strategically segment potential customers based on their interests.By segmenting users across all campaigns, marketers will gain more insight on what strategies work best for users at different stages of the purchase funnel. Due to the longer sales cycles for B2B, you can take your marketing to the next level by creating conversion segments for everything from content downloads to demo requests.

B2B marketers operate in a world where the buying process is more intricate and collaborative, and savvy digital marketers have learned that when it comes to boosting results and efficiency, intent data is the way to go in order to reach and engage users who are “in market.” Intent data is a trail of indications showing that someone is interested in making a purchase of a particular type, such as a click on a page about service software or downloading a white paper on the subject. Intent is an even more important factor in building and nurturing relationships with customers, and knowing just when to reach out to them with exactly what they need is what keeps long term B2B relationships going.

Knowing when the customer is going to be ready to act is important, but with so many stages in the B2B buyer’s journey that can often be challenging. The data that can help marketers pinpoint those key moments can be found in customer interactions, but the problem is those interactions often occur across a variety of channels and devices, so it can be difficult to keep up with a customer journey that has been through personal and professional interactions on a variety of devices, internet connections/IP addresses, and even geographical locations.

The key to effectively tracking intent relies on bridging the gap between those channels to create a clear picture of where your customers are in their journeys, even as they jump between devices. And, winning in the B2B marketing space means engaging your purchase decision-makers at the right times in both their professional and personal interactions online.

This of course means constant monitoring of a lot of data; monitoring their content consumption and working with a platform that layers rich intent data atop other demographic and behavioral data points to create highly-qualified, accurately-targeted audience segments. Once the creation of those segments becomes automatic via the right data platform, then it is easier to engage with them in a timely manner.

Marketingland.com

Bullets

• The U.S. economy appears to have entered a period of “self-sustaining” growth as revealed in written testimony to Congress by U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew. He said U.S. growth of 2.5% last year and robust forecasts for this year indicated that the U.S. was set to grow “substantially faster than all of the other advanced economies combined” in 2015.
  ft.com

• Unqualified leads cost marketers time, money and customers. And worse still, they can clog up databases with incomplete or inaccurate data. In a 2014 State of B2B Marketing Data Report revealed that 84% of marketing databases are barely functional, 85% of records are missing basic firmographic data and 64% are without phone numbers.
  ascend2.com

• The top three most important objectives for Inbound Marketing in 2015 are to improve lead quality (50%), increase sales revenue (48%) and increase conversion rates (48%).
  ascend2.com

• The three most important objectives for B2B marketing automation are to improve marketing productivity (43%), improve lead nurturing (43%) and increase lead generation (43%).
  ascend2.com

• 48% of business-to-business marketers plan to increase spending on digital channels in 2015, compared to 45% for content marketing.
  factbrowser.com