Imagine being able to target your B2B marketing activity so precisely that you can appeal to the decision maker you want to reach on an individual, one-to-one level based not only on the characteristics of their business, but also on what you know about them as an individual; their lifestyle, personal tastes and even hobbies. That’s the prospect a blended approach to marketing, integrating business and consumer data offers.
There’s been a lot of discussion about using blended data and blended marketing approaches in recent years, but in my view no one is using blended data in the B2B world to its full potential yet. This must involve having access to and fully integrating a large consumer database with an equivalent offering a full picture of the B2B population.
Pooling your assets
The potential for blended data is huge. Pooling consumer and business data enables the marketer to better understand the business they wish to target, from both a marketing and a risk perspective, making communication easier and infinitely more effective. It can drive the adoption of more appropriate creative approaches and ensure the right tone is used in communications.
Using blended data allows the marketer to segment their target market and more accurately group businesses into different types of opportunity according to their behaviour. So for example, if you consider the use of corporate credit cards you may find that one grouping of companies use them for efficiency reasons; their employees travel on business a lot and it makes life easier. Other companies may use them as an additional line of credit, while others might offer them as a ‘perk’. They all have corporate credit cards, but their reasons for using them are different.
Each of these groups can then be modelled to establish who will do the most travel, which companies are the most likely to offer a company credit card as a perk and so on. Bringing in blended consumer data affords even more granularity and refines what you know about the business further. So if the owner of the business lives in an affluent area and has a good track record in terms of their own finances, it’s unlikely their company credit cards are being used as an additional line of credit, but they could be being used for travel especially if we know the owners travel a lot themselves.
SME benefits
It has to be remembered that blended data becomes more potent the smaller the business targeted actually is. For small businesses where there is also limited financial information consumer data is vital as any extra detail adds significantly to the overall picture. If a business has eight employees and two of those are the owners managers then it’s highly likely that they will exert considerable influence on purchasing decisions, as we know that within such businesses these individuals act as consumers and that lifestyle, demographics, personal choice and taste all impact on buying behaviour.
Many businesses fall into this category. According to the Department for Business Enterprise & Regulatory Reform (BERR) over 90 per cent of businesses in the UK employ ten people or fewer, are small office/home office (SoHo) businesses or owner run businesses; a sizeable chunk of the UK economy. So the possible sphere of influence of a blended approach is significant.
Those are some of the benefits of using blended data, but how does a consultancy like PH blend business and consumer data? It’s a complex process with significant hurdles to overcome.
Firstly, individuals must be matched to the correct business, which in itself requires access to comprehensive consumer and business databases. There are also rules and regulations to comply with around the use of this data to ensure that permission and opt-in has been given to use both the consumer and business records.
Then the real research begins to establish the correlation between the consumer and business information, testing theories such as whether the business of an owner manager who is an early adopter of technology as a consumer is a similarly good target for companies selling technology or IT products.
Adding a new dimension
So what does the future hold? Blended data is here to stay and will become part and parcel of the toolkit that marketers and risk managers use on a daily basis. We’re working to establish the case for such correlations and we’re also working with an ad agency to map consumer personality types on to businesses. With this increasing focus on marketing to business contacts as individuals and understanding personal motivations, the move towards blended data will blur the line between B2B and B2C marketing techniques and approaches.
