The rise in behavioural targeting is transforming B2B marketing at a time when greater efficiency and innovation is paramount. Alex Blyth reports
There has never been a greater need for B2B marketers to create innovative and effective marketing strategies than there has been over the past two or three years. For many, behavioural targeting is increasingly the answer. To give just one example, Gavin Sinden, digital strategy director of digital marketing agency EquiMedia, points to Panasonic’s use of behavioural targeting to buck the global downturn and increase sales in a challenging market.
“Panasonic has been an early adopter of behavioural targeting,” he says. “It has used it to reach a B2B audience with marketing messages about its rugged Toughbook products. The campaign has targeted B2B buyers across Europe, identifying them by their behaviour, and adapting marketing messages accordingly. It has achieved great success, creating a supremely efficient sales pipeline, and fuelling growth of the company in Europe during a recession.”
Sinden believes the growing practice of targeting based on prospect behaviour is transforming B2B marketing, especially advertising. He says, “In the past, B2B marketers could only reach well segmented audiences through niche websites. Behavioural targeting changes this completely. It allows us to target the people rather than the site, and this promises to reduce costs at the same time as increasing campaign effectiveness.”
Potential benefits
Many B2B marketers are now beginning to use this technique, which has until recently been the preserve of consumer marketers. Kit Ruparel, CTO of marketing software provider Global Dawn, says, “Traditionally used by big brands and advertisers as a way to garner information about a consumer’s habits and provide them with a more engaging experience, behavioural targeting is increasingly being used by B2B marketers.”
He adds, “The point of B2B marketing is to target a specific audience. In the past this has involved segmenting campaigns by media content and readership. Behavioural targeting allows us to understand what individuals are doing, what they’re interested in, and to target them accordingly. It is a simple and effective way of delivering hand-picked content to select customers, in turn driving revenue. In a world in which we are bombarded with hundreds of messages on a daily basis, what’s not to love?”
Indeed, there are many very good reasons for this mounting enthusiasm. Sylvia Jensen, director of marketing for EMEA at marketing automation company Eloqua, says, “Behavioural targeting helps improve conversion rates and optimise marketing spend. The more you know about your audience, the more you can provide relevant information about what pains you can help them address, what stage of the buying cycle they are in, and how they prefer to receive information.”
Malcolm Duckett, CEO of content personalisation specialists Magiq, points out that this approach is relevant to more than just advertising. He says, “Behavioural targeting represents the marketer’s perfect storm. It allows us to reach the right people at the right time in the right place with the right message. In fact, by applying behavioural targeting to our email campaigns to tailor the subject line of the email, we have seen response rates rise by over 300 per cent.”
There are many ways in which you can use customer and prospect behaviour to enhance your marketing campaigns. Here are six of the most effective and popular.
Tracking search terms
Duckett suggests tracking the terms people use to search. This allows you to tailor content on your site or in your subsequent emails. He says, “Our customers use our solutions to do precisely this. It transforms their SEO campaigns, making them about conversion, as well as lead acquisition.”
He also notes that Google Panda factors in visit-length to its ranking algorithm, which makes it more important than ever to display relevant content. “We are currently seeing a data revolution,” he concludes. “We can know more and more about our customers than ever before, and the best marketers are becoming highly adept at using this data to deliver recommendations that are both timely and effective.”
Monitoring on-site activity
Another approach is to track user behaviour on your site and deliver personalised content and advertising. Ian Howie, web insight manager at marketing agency Fuel, says, “Our SiteGeist product monitors site visitor activity in real-time. This allows for a continuous feedback loop so that the right content can be served. It also enables us to apply attribution modelling so that marketers can understand where traffic is being driven from and how their site is being used.”
B2B marketers at smaller companies are finding this can help them compete with larger rivals. For example, Neil Hamilton, CEO at technology provider PredictiveIntent, reports that SD Fire Alarms recently began using his company’s product, PersonalMerchant, to transform its ecommerce store into a personalised trade counter for electricians across the country.
Profile building
Even once a prospect has left your site, there is much you can do with the information on their behaviour to improve your future targeting. Mike Quinn, product marketing manager at Adobe Systems, says, “SalesForce and Dell review prospect behaviour, such as click-through, hover time, dwell time etc, to understand the content, creative and promotions a particular target responds to, and then build up profiles they can replicate and target more effectively in the future.”
Interestingly, some B2B marketers are even beginning to use consumer behavioural data to create profiles of business buyers. Ruparel explains, “Much consumer data now includes behavioural categories such as green purchasing, charitable giving, high-quality, high-value, political or ethical, which could offer insight into propensity to buy business services and products.”
Retargeting visitors
One of the most exciting aspects of behavioural targeting is in retargeting. Platforms such as the Rubicon Project track cookies across their millions of sites, and automatically direct advertisers’ content to people who exhibit certain behaviour. For example, if someone has expressed an interest in renting office space by clicking on an office space ad or searching using those keywords – regardless of whether or not it was on your website – you can serve them your office space ad. Although more advanced in B2C advertising, this is an area that an increasing number of B2B marketers are looking into.
Much behavioural targeting is focused on websites, primarily search, content management and advertising. However, it is also highly relevant to email. Jensen comments, “Whenever a prospect downloads a whitepaper, responds to a banner ad, or takes some similar action, they give B2B marketers information that can be used to segment their lists.”
Social media
Whenever someone joins a group, follows a person or likes an activity, they provide valuable behavioural data, which more and more B2B marketers are using.
Rupert Staines, MD of RadiumOne, says, “The new social web is a destination for interacting and sharing content through copy and paste, the use of share buttons or URL shorteners, which means someone’s social connections are more important than ever before. We’re expecting to see a significant shift away from behavioural targeting to social targeting – and it will be exciting to see which marketers will be leading this revolution.”
Cookie challenges
There is more behavioural data available now than we would ever have dreamed possible and this presents as many challenges as opportunities. For example, there is the legal issue of the recent ePrivacy legislation. In the next 12 months, all websites in the UK will have to ensure that they are compliant with the EU Information Commissioner Office’s legislation on data collection, which demands that all websites make sure they have informed consent from visitors to collect any form of data. The UK has adopted a one-year phase-in period for this legislation in which it does not expect to impose penalties for non-compliance.
There is also the technological issue of device proliferation. Sinden says, “Behavioural targeting depends on effective cookie tracking, but as more people surf the web from multiple computers, smartphones or tablets, cookie targeting becomes much more difficult. We are carrying out research to understand how these broken journeys affect digital tracking and reporting. One solution could be allowing location data to be combined with web usage to further enhance behavioural targeting.”
However, perhaps the greatest issue in the long run is that all this behavioural data significantly raises the game for B2B marketers. Stuart Colman, MD Europe at AudienceScience, says, “Behavioural targeting in the consumer world started as a niche solution but has now become an established practice, and we expect the same to happen in the B2B sphere.”
As your competitors become increasingly adept at using behavioural data to personalise content, so your prospects will become decreasingly tolerant of poorly targeted, generic campaigns. Or, to put it more positively, if you can deal with the legal and technological issues, and make good use of the rapidly growing array of behavioural data that is now available, you have a superb opportunity to make your campaigns stand out from those of your competitors. It is up to you to seize that opportunity.
