Behavioral Targeting – The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Marketing is a very wide field and every day there is something new to explore. In the recent times, the behavioral targetinghas become one of the most talked about topics with the marketers finding ways to know more about it. If you too belong to the marketing field, it is necessary to be aware of the advancements so that you are able to bring out the best. Let us take a deep insight to what actually is the behavioral targetingand how it is beneficial for promoting your products and services…or hurt your business! What is Behavioral Targeting? As the term suggests behavioral targeting is all about understanding the interest of the visitors and targeting them accordingly. The behavior can be studied for a week, a day or even for a fixed amount of time. This study can be based on the interest of the individuals, the browsers used by them to reach the website and many other factors. Based on the different results, the marketers reach to a conclusion and then frame the marketing strategies to target their customers. The overall idea of this concept is to understand your customers in a better way and offer them the desired services.

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Right Source Marketing

Right Source Marketing is a marketing consulting firm that provides clients with a unique blend of strategic consulting and interactive marketing services. With offices in the Washington DC and Baltimore areas, the firm works with clients to create unique, effective and measurable solutions to each organization’s particular marketing challenges…

OTHER ARTICLES
Programmatic ABM

Get In Front of the Competition: Use Intent Data to Find the Accounts that Drive Your Busines

Article | June 9, 2022

B2B markets are more competitive than ever. They’re crowded, commoditized, noisy, and everybody is trying to knock on the same doors. So how do you break through the cacophony? The key is to not wait and reach out to your accounts with everyone else but to reach them when they are still early in the buyer’s journey. And that’s where leveraging intent data comes in. With intent data, you can see who is showing interest in your company or your competitors before they respond to your marketing efforts through form fills for content downloads or event RSVPs. You can create orchestrated plays as soon as they are in-market when they are searching. So you can deliver fresh ideas based on knowledge and understanding of an account’s industry and unique business issues before everyone else.

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Core ABM

Buying-Group Marketing: Why is it Gaining Traction?

Article | June 20, 2023

Selling more and selling faster is the goal that drives B2B marketers. Strategically implementing account-based marketing (ABM) to target individuals with hyper-personalized messaging across different channels is what helps them achieve it. But what is Buying Group Marketing (BGM), and why do B2B marketers need to keep up with it? Buying-Group Marketing (BGM): Taking ABM up a notch by focusing on an entire buyer group instead of the account as a whole, it’s called buying-group marketing (BGM). According to a recent Forrester survey, 94% of B2B organizations sell to groups of three or more. They do this instead of spending time identifying a set of ICPs and making a purchase decision. Let us take a look at what BGM is all about. Buying Group Marketing: The Next Evolution of ABM To implement BGM, you first need to understand what buying groups are. A purchasing group is a group of people within a target account who have a say in the purchasing decision. This makes them crucial in B2B targeting. Once B2B marketers learn about their target personas, they can come up with an effective marketing plan and approach them strategically. In large enterprises, purchase decisions are never restricted to one individual. The larger the purchase decision, the larger the size of the buying groups. When a decision involves new technologies, services, or products, an individual struggle to make a purchase decision swiftly. According to Gartner, more than 75% of customers describe these purchases as very complex or difficult. With the help of BGM, the decision-making process can be streamlined and shared among multiple people within an organization. Driving Success with BGM To better execute BGM, organizations need to change their mindsets, processes and technologies and work to understand how buying groups work together. Until demand management matches the ways buyers are making purchasing decisions, marketing and sales alignment will not be possible. Organizations need to first understand how buying groups work together, then align their mindsets, technologies, and processes to efficiently execute BGM. When the marketing and sales teams align their demand management goals with the decision-making groups, only then can they drive success in their campaigns. Interest from more than one person from a single company can lead to more success and influence in the buying phase. B2B marketers need to move beyond the idea that only the first person to respond from a company should be entertained as a lead if a second person from the same company shows interest in their product or services. They need to understand that no matter how tempting account-based advertising may seem, it doesn’t guarantee success. They should focus on engaging the actual decision-makers of their target accounts. When customer personas are mapped according to their buying roles within a group, organizations will have the much-needed intelligence required to make personalized sales. The success of BGM demands the delivery of content that resonates with an individual as per their role in a buying group. B2B marketers must meet them where they are with the content that they need. Organizations can have crucial intelligence on their customers after mapping their personas and considering their roles in the buyer groups. Delivering content that the target individual can relate to is a prerequisite of BGM. BGM may not be new as a concept, but B2B marketers see improvements in their performance by harnessing it as their principal strategy. Adapting to BGM will give them the edge that they seek, while the rest try to keep up with the changing trends of the ABM industry. ________________________________________

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Account Based Analytics

How to Adapt B2B Digital Marketing to the Buyer Journey in 2020

Article | August 3, 2022

Understanding how a B2B buyer’s journey naturally progresses is key to designing a digital marketing program that works in any economic climate. When we do this with our clients, it allows us to see their marketing as a whole, rather than looking at isolated marketing tactics and getting overly focused on minor issues. Once we understand what’s already working for a client, we can then apply an informed strategy to amplify their successes. Occasionally, we may also recommend that a client step back from a few marketing tactics that might not be working well enough.

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Account Management

Why Should Tech and Demand Gen Only Support ABM, Not Drive It?

Article | July 7, 2022

Targeted advertising has become the norm on popular ABM platforms. As a result, many marketers have forgotten ABM's principles. Leadership, marketing, revenue, sales enablement, customer success, and product teams should work together to hit ABM numbers instead of completely relying on platforms and demand generation strategies. Here are three reasons why ABM platforms and demand generation campaigns shouldn’t drive your ABM strategy: GTM Teams Cannot Advance Companies focusing on targeted demand gen through technology make their ABM strategy campaign-based instead of focusing on the interactions the sales and marketing teams need to have with target accounts to deliver revenue growth. They struggle with winning multi-year contracts. Ideally, the teams should focus on filling the gaps left by competitors with different content and messaging in order to turn accounts into sales. Buying Journey Support is Limited ABM is about getting key accounts to generate revenue. When teams rely on technology to put out content and messaging for target accounts but don’t change their sales motions, processes, and conversations, their win rates drop. They should change their prospects’ experiences at every stage of the buying journey to deliver an optimal customer experience. Sales Cycles Continue to be Lengthy An ABM strategy should be used to influence both selling conversations and internal conversations that the sales teams are not privy to. Creating demand and building a pipeline through ABM platforms won’t bring revenue growth if there is no follow-through to convert accounts. Teams should engage in account-based enablement and come up with a plan to engage accounts that go dark or get stuck in the buyer journey. Use Technology and Demand Generation in Moderation Remember that ABM platforms and demand gen strategies can enhance your ABM efforts, but they shouldn’t be the driving force behind your ABM strategy. Marketers need to start using ABM to fix the revenue issues in their organizations instead of treating it like a targeted demand-generation function.

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Spotlight

Right Source Marketing

Right Source Marketing is a marketing consulting firm that provides clients with a unique blend of strategic consulting and interactive marketing services. With offices in the Washington DC and Baltimore areas, the firm works with clients to create unique, effective and measurable solutions to each organization’s particular marketing challenges…

Related News

Core ABM

Intellimize Enables B2B Marketers to Drive More Efficient Pipeline from Key Accounts

PR Newswire | June 07, 2023

Intellimize, the leading experience optimization platform, has released a turnkey Salesforce integration that makes it easy for B2B marketers to target website visitors from any account and deliver personalized experiences on every page. The release also includes the ability to deanonymize visitors from key accounts and arm sales teams with personalized outbound experiences for target prospects. ABM success requires a deep understanding of each target persona to deliver the right personalized experience at the right time. However, the bane of every ABM marketer has been to identify which anonymous website visitors are from key accounts so they can show personalized content right from their first page view. Intellimize's Salesforce integration with Enhanced Match solves this, making it easier to show personalized content for each prospect at every opportunity stage, to satisfy the individual needs of the entire buying committee. "This is a real game changer for ABM Marketers – to be able to personalize for the entire buying committee, even the anonymous ones, is huge," said Tracy Sestili, Intellimize Chief Marketing Officer. "Plus it really creates synergy among the sales and marketing teams to deliver account based experiences (ABX) at scale." Marketers no longer need to rely on manually setting up campaign UTMs or manually building hundreds of personalized landing pages in order to deliver the content their buyers need to move through the funnel. Using Intellimize, they can create targeted outbound landing pages enabling sales teams to confidently send emails, texts, or direct mail and be certain that each key account will arrive on a landing page personalized just for them. "I'm thrilled that we can provide B2B marketers with everything they need to deliver 1:1 ABM experiences throughout the buyer journey," said Guy Yalif, Intellimize CEO. "With a few simple clicks, marketers can connect their valuable Salesforce data to automatically generate personalized experiences for each unique visitor, within each unique account." This Salesforce integration compliments Intellimize's existing behavioral targeting capabilities which allow marketers to create personalized experiences using on-site visitor behavior so companies can meet prospects where they are in their purchase journey. Marketers have, for example, tailored homepage content for target prospects who visited a product page twice in the past week to highlight that product of interest. Intellimize is the only codeless platform that uses AI to optimize for 1:1 personalized website experiences across the entire buyer's journey. Marketing teams at Gong, Okta, Drift, Coupa and Sumo Logic gain a competitive edge when using Intellimize to drive efficient pipeline and revenue growth in a cookieless world. About Intellimize Intellimize is the only codeless SaaS platform that uses AI to optimize for 1:1 personalized website experiences across the entire buyer's journey. Marketing teams gain a competitive edge when using Intellimize to drive efficient pipeline and revenue growth in a cookieless world. Leading marketing teams at Gong, Okta, Drift, Sumo Logic, Coupa and more trust Intellimize to inspire, test and learn faster, drive revenue, and be more efficient. Intellimize is backed by Cobalt Capital, Addition, Amplify Partners, Homebrew, and Precursor Ventures. Learn more on the Intellimize website or follow them on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook.

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Behavioral Ad Targeting Not Paying Off for Publishers, Study Suggests

The Wall Street Journa | May 29, 2019

Are creepy advertisements really necessary to support the free web? A new academic study suggests they aren’t. Behavioral advertising, which involves collecting data about readers online behavior and using it to serve them specially tailored ads, often through bits of code called cookies, has become the dominant force in digital advertising in recent years. But in one of the first empirical studies of the impacts of behaviorally targeted advertising on online publishers revenue, researchers at the University of Minnesota, University of California, Irvine, and Carnegie Mellon University suggest publishers only get about 4% more revenue for an ad impression that has a cookie enabled than for one that doesn’t. The study tracked millions of ad transactions at a large U.S. media company over the course of one week.

Read More

FTC Staff Issues Long-Awaited Cross-Device Tracking Report

FTC | January 24, 2017

On January 23, 2017, the FTC Staff released its long-awaited Report ("Report") on cross-device tracking following its November 2015 workshop on the topic. The Report explains what cross-device tracking is, discusses the benefits of and challenges posed by tracking consumers across their many devices, and outlines industry efforts at regulating this technology. The Report concludes by offering recommendations to industry regarding transparency, choice, the use of sensitive data, and data security.

Read More

Core ABM

Intellimize Enables B2B Marketers to Drive More Efficient Pipeline from Key Accounts

PR Newswire | June 07, 2023

Intellimize, the leading experience optimization platform, has released a turnkey Salesforce integration that makes it easy for B2B marketers to target website visitors from any account and deliver personalized experiences on every page. The release also includes the ability to deanonymize visitors from key accounts and arm sales teams with personalized outbound experiences for target prospects. ABM success requires a deep understanding of each target persona to deliver the right personalized experience at the right time. However, the bane of every ABM marketer has been to identify which anonymous website visitors are from key accounts so they can show personalized content right from their first page view. Intellimize's Salesforce integration with Enhanced Match solves this, making it easier to show personalized content for each prospect at every opportunity stage, to satisfy the individual needs of the entire buying committee. "This is a real game changer for ABM Marketers – to be able to personalize for the entire buying committee, even the anonymous ones, is huge," said Tracy Sestili, Intellimize Chief Marketing Officer. "Plus it really creates synergy among the sales and marketing teams to deliver account based experiences (ABX) at scale." Marketers no longer need to rely on manually setting up campaign UTMs or manually building hundreds of personalized landing pages in order to deliver the content their buyers need to move through the funnel. Using Intellimize, they can create targeted outbound landing pages enabling sales teams to confidently send emails, texts, or direct mail and be certain that each key account will arrive on a landing page personalized just for them. "I'm thrilled that we can provide B2B marketers with everything they need to deliver 1:1 ABM experiences throughout the buyer journey," said Guy Yalif, Intellimize CEO. "With a few simple clicks, marketers can connect their valuable Salesforce data to automatically generate personalized experiences for each unique visitor, within each unique account." This Salesforce integration compliments Intellimize's existing behavioral targeting capabilities which allow marketers to create personalized experiences using on-site visitor behavior so companies can meet prospects where they are in their purchase journey. Marketers have, for example, tailored homepage content for target prospects who visited a product page twice in the past week to highlight that product of interest. Intellimize is the only codeless platform that uses AI to optimize for 1:1 personalized website experiences across the entire buyer's journey. Marketing teams at Gong, Okta, Drift, Coupa and Sumo Logic gain a competitive edge when using Intellimize to drive efficient pipeline and revenue growth in a cookieless world. About Intellimize Intellimize is the only codeless SaaS platform that uses AI to optimize for 1:1 personalized website experiences across the entire buyer's journey. Marketing teams gain a competitive edge when using Intellimize to drive efficient pipeline and revenue growth in a cookieless world. Leading marketing teams at Gong, Okta, Drift, Sumo Logic, Coupa and more trust Intellimize to inspire, test and learn faster, drive revenue, and be more efficient. Intellimize is backed by Cobalt Capital, Addition, Amplify Partners, Homebrew, and Precursor Ventures. Learn more on the Intellimize website or follow them on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook.

Read More

Behavioral Ad Targeting Not Paying Off for Publishers, Study Suggests

The Wall Street Journa | May 29, 2019

Are creepy advertisements really necessary to support the free web? A new academic study suggests they aren’t. Behavioral advertising, which involves collecting data about readers online behavior and using it to serve them specially tailored ads, often through bits of code called cookies, has become the dominant force in digital advertising in recent years. But in one of the first empirical studies of the impacts of behaviorally targeted advertising on online publishers revenue, researchers at the University of Minnesota, University of California, Irvine, and Carnegie Mellon University suggest publishers only get about 4% more revenue for an ad impression that has a cookie enabled than for one that doesn’t. The study tracked millions of ad transactions at a large U.S. media company over the course of one week.

Read More

FTC Staff Issues Long-Awaited Cross-Device Tracking Report

FTC | January 24, 2017

On January 23, 2017, the FTC Staff released its long-awaited Report ("Report") on cross-device tracking following its November 2015 workshop on the topic. The Report explains what cross-device tracking is, discusses the benefits of and challenges posed by tracking consumers across their many devices, and outlines industry efforts at regulating this technology. The Report concludes by offering recommendations to industry regarding transparency, choice, the use of sensitive data, and data security.

Read More

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