Know your audience: this is good advice when speaking to a crowd, but absolutely critical if you’re a B2B marketer looking to make the most of your marketing budget. Marketers are always talking about audiences and how to target the right people. Unfortunately, the current tools that marketers use to build audiences within social platforms limit their ability to engage in true omni-channel marketing. Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Ads, and programmatic display platforms make it easy to spend money, but not to reuse high-performing audiences elsewhere or gain valuable insights on the audiences you’re marketing to. By building your own audiences outside of these platforms, you have the ability to supercharge your marketing campaigns with real omni-channel power.
Successful digital marketing is all about accurate segmentation; filtering the enormous pool of potential customers to find that subset most likely to purchase your products or services. In the B2B world, this is typically an extremely niche audience that is hard to define and find online. Digital marketers have benefitted from the wealth of tools to help wrangle enormous amounts of data into actionable insights. But, up until now, marketers have had to put a lot of faith in Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google when using the in-platform audience building tools. You don’t get to peel back the curtain and actually see who or why they are choosing an individual or group of individuals for inclusion in the audience you’re building. The only measure of success is how that audience performs, after your spend is complete. For a B2B marketer, you also don’t get a detailed look at any firmographic insights about this audience, that might better inform your campaigns. You’re limited to the consumer-centric data the platform has available to show you. Finally, when you have a successful marketing campaign with an audience you built, you don’t have the ability to export it and use it again on other platforms.
When you build your own audience with Versium REACH, using data from a platform-agnostic Identity Graph with more than 33 million individual contacts, you own that audience. You can learn more about them so you can create more effective marketing campaigns. Then you can take that carefully built audience and upload it to marketing platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn, where your target customers will see your campaigns again and again, across all of their social channels & online content, and will be moved to action quicker - ultimately buying your company’s products or services.
True omni-channel marketing means reaching the same target customer on multiple platforms. Often, B2B marketers are unaware that their advertising campaigns would be considered a multi-channel approach - disparate, distinct campaigns on different channels, trying to line up similar targeting in the hopes of reaching the same target more than once on more than one platform. An example: A B2B multi-channel marketer who sells email automation software might target people in a Facebook ad campaign who are located in California and interested in email marketing. At the same time, they run a campaign on LinkedIn with similar targeting (email marketing interest, located in California). This marketer also uses Google Ads to target a display ad campaign to in-market audiences for users in California who are looking to buy software and users looking for advertising and marketing services. Lastly, this B2B marketer buys an email list of decision makers from California marketing agencies to use for an email campaign. Now, there is a chance there might be a small amount of overlap between all of these separate audiences, but likely, this marketer is reaching different individuals on each of these platforms. This is why multi-channel marketing is not as effective as an omni-channel approach; reaching the same individuals across all of your marketing platforms. Since evidence shows that it takes an average of 7 “touches” to make an impact with a marketing campaign, a multi-channel approach is a poor return on investment.
In contrast, with true omni-channel marketing, a marketer uses the same audience across all of their marketing platforms. For example, a marketer could download a list of their top 1,000 best customers, then upload this audience into Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Ads, and an email campaign. Those 1,000 people would see the same marketing messages across all of these platforms, and their customer journey will advance, ultimately ending in conversion. With Versium REACH, you build your audiences with very specific demographic and firmographic criteria, and then export it to your social channels or marketing platforms. When you build your own audience, you have more control, greater insights into the needs and motivations of your target customers, and the ability to do true omni-channel marketing. The result? More efficient use of your marketing budget and more conversions. Don’t just buy an audience or build one in a black box and hope for the best - own your audiences and deliver results from your marketing efforts.