In general, digital marketing is inherently based on data. You don’t have any face-to-face consumer interactions that could provide unique insights into your customer base. So, you must base your audience targeting on cold, hard data from your website and other online touchpoints. However, that’s even more true when it comes to B2B targeting tactics.
With a B2B brand, you have an extremely narrow space regarding real-time opportunities for business leads. Your perfect customer is a key decision-maker in another company, which makes them more difficult to reach. Also, the audience is naturally smaller because you’re not selling a common B2C product.
The result? You need an extremely well-targeted message that arrives at the digital doorstep of a perfectly targeted audience at exactly the most opportune time. Read on to learn how to achieve this.
B2B Audience Targeting — Where Do I Start?
Luckily, B2B marketers have more resources and targeting tools at their disposal than ever before. If you know where to look, you’ll have all the info you need to create a hyper-targeted approach that gets you the most bang for your buck in terms of your marketing budget.
This is the reason why so many companies are implementing data-backed marketing techniques to meet the actual needs of their customers. This approach helps businesses to keep old customers while simultaneously attracting new ones by delivering only relevant offers. Therefore, we can describe the key metrics you need to look for across main channels right here. After that, you can zero in on the most crucial channels for your brand and explore them further.
We’ll start with your brand website.
Brand Websites
If you don’t have a website as a B2B brand, you might as well not exist. Even if you could perfectly conduct transactions and contact your target audience across other channels — you definitely need a site. It’s like a physical office for brick-and-mortar brands — a sign that your business is stable and trustworthy.
When you start tracking B2B marketing metrics and sales data, this is also the place where you should look first.
So, which data should you look at? With a website, this is the most challenging question because there’s simply too much information. Any website developer or manager can give you heaps of data you might not know how to utilize.
As a marketer, you should start by looking at website traffic metrics.
Your website traffic will answer some key questions, like how users reach your website and which devices they’re using. Moreover, site traffic can give you the first demographic glimpses into your target audience if you haven’t performed any in-depth targeting before.
For instance, you’ll learn where your site visitors are geographically located. This is crucial data because it can inform a host of other marketing efforts.
With this in mind, use your website traffic data to learn the following information:
- Demographic data — education, gender, age, etc.
- Geolocation — country of origin, IP region or direct address,
- Channels of origin — email, social media, organic Google results, referrals, etc.
Customer Behavior
Okay, so you’ve learned more about how your B2B lead generation works. However, if you truly want to use the most precise B2B targeting tactics, you need to learn more about how users interact with your website.
To achieve this, look at how many pages users visit per session. This will show you the depth of their engagement with your brand. Also, take a look at the average bounce rate for your landing page — so you can see how many (and which) people are quickly leaving your website. After that, you can tweak your messaging to ensure a minimal bounce rate for your target audience.
Finally, see how much time visitors spend on individual pages — especially the bottom-funnel pages that impact your conversions.
So, you might be wondering — how do you actually see these stats? In most cases, Google Analytics will be more than enough. And that’s especially true for basic, crucial stats like the ones we’ve outlined above. It’s a free platform, and it’s made by one of the most dependable authorities in the world when it comes to websites and what makes them good (or bad).
Email Marketing
If you’re a B2B brand that’s not using email as one of its main marketing channels — you’re not doing things right.
Sure, email open rates are at an all-time low, especially among the average user. All of us receive tons of spam each day, and we don’t (rightly) bother opening most of it. In fact, Statista research points out that almost half of all emails sent around the world can be considered spam.
However, professionals still use email as one of the main formal modes of communication. It doesn’t matter what your company does and sells — your target audience of decision-makers has a professional email address.
So, you need to be on point regarding email marketing, but we’re talking about an incredibly competitive channel. Let’s see which metrics you need to follow to ensure you’re running a well-optimized email campaign.
For starters, you need to look at the CTR (click-through rate) for your emails so you can see how many people actually click on links on your emails — as opposed to how many open them. Speaking of which, you should also look at:
- Time spent viewing email — the longer someone reads your email, the more interested they are in your messaging,
- Open rates — a simple stat that shows the percentage of opened emails among all those you send.
If your open rates are below the industry average of your competitors, start by changing your subject lines. On the other hand, a low CTR can be improved with better, more personalized CTAs at the end of your emails.
Conclusion
So far, we’ve only scratched the surface of data-driven B2B targeting tactics. There are plenty of other channels you can focus on to reach your target audience and plenty of other data sources to mine for valuable information.
However, focusing on email and website traffic as a B2B business is always a good idea. Most key decision-makers will check out your website before making a call on your offer, and practically every professional across all industries uses email.
