B2B Marketers Need a New Cookie Recipe
In the third-party cookie heyday, it was easy and profitable for B2B marketers to take the easy road. They could broadly define the necessary audience segments they wanted, similar to how one might sift through a bag of "M&M's. Once a B2B marketer settled on what they wanted, they assumed that they could just buy green or red M&Ms from any partner and they'd all be the same.
It's easy enough to contact a B2B audience vendor or find the audiences in a data mart and access the abundance of green M&Ms (CTOs at mid-sized companies) or red M&Ms (owners of construction firms) to fill goals and budgets. When there is an attempt to finetune audience selection, large marketing budgets often dictated that a larger and "loose "audience could fill a budget better than a smaller but more accurate audience. Afterall, if the brand or agency has a huge budget, the natural reaction is to loosen up audience logic to increase scale and to capture as much of that budget as possible. The more M&Ms, the better.
Unfortunately, few B2B marketers take the time to crack open the candy shell and discover what really goes into the construction and definition of these audience segments. There isn't much analysis behind this generalist approach. A marketer gets their M&Ms without ever gaining deeper understanding of what exactly goes into these audience segments. Today, it appears that the cookie is finally being phased out and successful audience strategists will need a refined data-driven approach to maximizing audience effectiveness while preserving some level of scale. With current and ongoing changes, the M&M mentality will need to be replaced.
Time to Read the Ingredients
Marketers need to start scrutinizing some audience details so that they can start understanding the elements that drive results and have a recipe that they can use to find audiences using post-cookie tactics. For example, these strategies include how the audiences are built, what platform the audiences are being integrated into, and what combination of data is being utilized across the entire solution to solve for accuracy, fidelity, scale, and compliance.
Crucial for audience decisioning and a resultant higher ROI is knowledge and appreciation of:
- Audience logic: Look at how an audience was defined and which of those factors have the highest value compared to a marketers own ideal customer profile.
- Data understanding: Learn what data is going into a segment, from demographic to firmographics, technographic, contextual, intent, etc.
- Data accuracy: Understand how fresh and complete the data is.
- Campaign scale: Determine how big different data sets are and how those map to reality (many data sets are duplicative or loosely defined to artificially inflate their appearance.)
- Legal compliance: Ensure that data being used is of high quality and complies with all regulatory requirements.
Building a Better Recipe
The good news for B2B marketers is that martech and their data providers have been preparing for the cookie-less future for a long time. A sufficient and compliant scale will survive, but marketers will have to embrace new data and new approaches. The companies that matter have already begun phasing out the reliance upon cookies and continue to add alternative, reliable and compliant online identifiers.
To build a better approach, marketers need to consider some new ingredients. First, marketers should get familiar with new types of data and data processes such as identity-based marketing and the combination and availability of all types of audience data (B2B, B2B2C, consumer, intent, buyer/behavior/CRM, and global.)
It's important to understand the composition of a given platform's data graph/spine such as street addresses, GPS data, cookies, IP addresses, MAIDs, device IDs, platform IDs, email addresses, phone numbers, etc. How audiences are matched into a platform will determine if audiences are compliant, enterprise, household/building or individual.
Marketers need to also question the methodologies that are used to develop segments such as modeled, self-reported, actual, or deterministic. We need to finetune our acumen of how audiences are sourced, published, verified, and refreshed and how this information affects possible outcomes. Marketers need to appreciate the available data provider's and the platform's compliance standards and the rapid changes that are happening in this realm. All these changes can and will affect the accuracy of any given activation, campaign, or analytic effort.
Now is the right time to get comfortable with the concept that an accurate and effective data recipe usually translates to lower volume. Likewise, marketers need to determine what scale vs. quality balance makes sense for their needs. Going forward, marketers should think about the trade-off between accuracy and reach during every single plan.
A critical approach to audience buying is the smart way forward, but it does require more work and an acceptance of more complexity and analysis. Hopefully, marketers don't shy away from this challenge, hoping for an easy solution to be packaged by an opportunistic vendor or buried within a bountiful budget. Without cookies, platform, compliance and data methodologies are rapidly evolving which will require a deeper level of testing and investigating.
It's time for B2B digital marketers to roll up their sleeves and become experts at what types of data can contribute to their data strategy to underscore a winning campaign, ecommerce, or brand strategy. Once a winning recipe is created, only the right ingredients will pass muster. So, the next time a vendor comes by peddling M&Ms, marketers will be able to crack open the candy coating and understand more about what lies beneath the surface.
The views and opinions expressed are solely those of the contributor and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the ANA or imply endorsement from the ANA.
Todd Love is CCO at Anteriad. You can find him here on LinkedIn.