Hypertargeting in a cookieless world

Over the last two years, digital advertising in B2B has replaced more traditional tactics. Although this trend is expected to continue even after the pandemic, companies using digital advertising will face some challenges in the future:

• 95% of decision-maker prospects continue to remain entirely anonymous throughout their digital journey, and brands have no plans on how to engage with them.
• Digital media is used to target individuals via cookies, but, as yet, there are no solutions regarding how to target companies based on the different and sophisticated customer segmentation criteria requested by clients.
• LinkedIn allows segmentation, but not without limitations: the audience volume is much lower than the other key competitors; prices rose significantly in the last year or so; their main segmentation criteria rely on employee size - information that is strongly ‘inflated’ by companies when profiling themselves online
• Cookie usage is becoming increasingly restricted to the point that, by 2023, all key browsers will only allow native cookies or ‘clustered’ third-party cookies based on similar behaviour or profiles.

Data and technology will save the B2B world

With the right adtech platform and a comprehensive data set, you’ll be able to overcome these challenges, and start hypertargeting.

Data needs to come from multiple sources. On top of good quality firmographic, technographic and financial data, all at company level, you should also integrate digital addresses, including IPs, user IDs and device IDs. You should also integrate decisionmakers’ purchase-intent data obtained via their interactions with digital and social channels, along with more traditional channels.

IP tracking and mapping: The new enabler

Integrating IP tracking and mapping with your or your agency martech stack will allow you to transform anonymous traffic into known traffic. Using both direct and IP-predicted matching using device IDs, you can track the behaviours of individuals no matter where they are.

What’s more, all the individual-level intent data can be mapped together with company-level information, giving you a broader picture of the customer journey.

Collecting and integrating this data and using the right data-management platform will enable you to create hypertargeted lists of companies, along with personalising and precisely timing your messages.

Using the right marketing tactics at the right time will boost the results of your demand generation and branding campaigns. Hypertargeting ensures you reach and target only:

• Accounts that matter to you (account-based).
• Segments identified as being more relevant to you (by industry, by size, etc).
• Sets of companies emanating strong purchasing signals (intent-based).
• Individuals currently reading or talking about topics relevant to you (contextual advertising) or joining an event (geo-location-based).

Technology develops so rapidly that constantly generating the level of innovation needed to keep pace isn’t easy. From awareness campaigns to lead-generation programmes, you’ll be more effective working with the right data, the right adtech platform, and the right delivery partner.