When learning about media lately, you may wish Google Translate had a “marketer” option. Buzz words like programmatic, DSPs, audience segmentation, artificial intelligence, predictive behavior, and optimization prove the media landscape is advancing… and that marketers LOVE big words. It can be intimidating, so let’s do a bit of translating.
Programmatic advertising is the process of buying digital advertising placement automatically. In order to perform programmatic advertising, a Demand Side Platform (DSP) bids on and purchases online ad space in real-time (think stock market). DSPs are powerful tools, but they’re often utilized to target consumers. Beneath this sometimes-short-sighted approach lurks a larger and possibly more rewarding strategy for your company — using a DSP to target other businesses.
Marbury Creative Group uses a unique business-to-business (B2B) targeting process for many of our clients. Leveraging our DSP, we serve ads to potential prospects based on detailed business-centric targeting profiles. We’re able to take advantage of validated offline data, like Dun & Bradstreet, to reach B2B decision-makers as they move across the internet on any device. We can reach these B2B audiences through a prospect list we want to target (Account Based Marketing) or we can build an audience profile from scratch. Whew…we tried to work in some Google Translate in there for you!
But that’s just the tip of the data-berg. The real beauty of our process is that our clients also get data BACK from the DSP. We can gauge which companies viewed our ad and which ones clicked on it; it’s an automated process that works a lot better than calling your prospects and saying, “Hey, did you see our ad?” The data can feed into your client relationship management (CRM) tool and your sales team can then take action with more relevant intel than before.
There are a few things to consider if you’re thinking of new ways to get in front of your prospects:
- The B2B space is much less crowded than the consumer market. You’re going from the top-down baby! Fishing with spears instead of nets! Your target is no longer a big segment of the population; it’s the big decision-makers in the companies you want to work with. With this in mind another benefit comes to light:
- B2B ad performance metrics give you a little more. You can confirm whether your ad was was delivered to your target and how that specific contact engaged with it. This makes it super easy to move on to the next stages of reeling in your lead.
- Now or never …well not quite, but targeting parameters are starting to change. Recent privacy changes will ultimately affect how and what we can target. For example, targeting individuals by title is a great benefit in the B2B space, but this is likely to change as opt-in requirements become more stringent and platforms and browsers add on more privacy protection.
Your head might be feeling a little swollen right now, but this digital B2B strategy is really exciting to us. For companies targeting other companies, partnering with a strategically creative marketing agency like Marbury Creative Group and implementing a unique process can drive awareness and generate sales faster than you can say crystallization of your hyper-targeted audience attribution segmentation acquisition methodology. (And yes, marketers do use jargon to talk crap behind your back…)
Interested in learning more? Contact Shelly Hoffman at shelly@marburycreativegroup. She would love to tell you all about it…in the Google Translate marketing version, of course!
