As a practitioner in the B2B Advertising and Marketing industry, I have witnessed a shift in advertising strategy. The Account-Based Advertising industry started by leveraging its data sets to help clients target advertisements to employees working for their target accounts. The technology that empowered this relied on identifying employees through their IP addresses and/or cookies. Armed with this information, advertisers could bid higher to win the ad placement and charge a premium to their clients. This allowed clients to focus their advertising dollars towards employees within the accounts that mattered most to them.
What if, however, for argument sake an advertisement is targeted to a janitor within a target account. Most likely, he or she would not be a key decision maker for the B2B product being advertised. Although Account-Based Advertisers do claim to have the capability to target only key decision makers, in reality there isn't a strong enough data set on target audiences to fulfill that promise. Take for example, Matt Aaronson who is the Director of Product Marketing at Demandbase. According to data from an advertising Data Management Platform (screenshot below), he works in 7 different industries and at companies of 3 different sizes. If he is associated with so many different audiences, how can an advertisement focusing on just one of those groups be reliably targeted to him?
To mitigate the above risk and make sure that advertisements are targeted to in-market audiences, the industry is moving towards relying on intent data. Demandbase's next-generation Targeting Solution, for example, monitors more than 150 billion intent signals every month to identify employees at target accounts that are actively researching relevant categories. For example, they may be reading articles related to your competitors' solutions. Alternatively, their research may be focused on specific trends related to your industry and product offering. These powerful insights drive advertisement targeting to those specific employees at prospect accounts that are displaying these intent signals. This functionality allows clients to take hyper targeted advertising to the next level.
What if, however, for argument sake an advertisement is targeted to a janitor within a target account. Most likely, he or she would not be a key decision maker for the B2B product being advertised. Although Account-Based Advertisers do claim to have the capability to target only key decision makers, in reality there isn't a strong enough data set on target audiences to fulfill that promise. Take for example, Matt Aaronson who is the Director of Product Marketing at Demandbase. According to data from an advertising Data Management Platform (screenshot below), he works in 7 different industries and at companies of 3 different sizes. If he is associated with so many different audiences, how can an advertisement focusing on just one of those groups be reliably targeted to him?
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