In B2B marketing, standing out from the crowd and getting your audience’s attention is absolutely critical. The investments you have made in building your marketing database, creating content, and developing a nurture program carefully mapped to the buyer’s journey does nothing if your communication doesn’t get through.

What if your message could get through to more of these individuals and companies?

Today, there are a number of new and emerging opportunities to do exactly that. Here are three of the opportunities I am watching.

Targeting Advertising To Your Key Accounts

You probably have between 100 and 2,500 target accounts. If you knew your advertising was only reaching people at these companies, would it be worth more?

Today you can target online advertising in addition to email list rentals and lead generation programs to just your list of target companies.

If you profile companies instead of only contacts (and you should), segment your list of companies the same way you do in your nurturing and outbound email programs, delivering the most appropriate message or content to every company, even if they are not .

Nurturing Site Visitors Through Advertising

Many B2B advertisers have discovered retargeting in the last 24 months, yet most retargeting is still relatively simplisitic. It often delivers the same message to every individual, regardless of what they looked at on your site.

With a little bit more effort, B2B marketers can be much smarter about retargeting, creating segments based on what visitors have viewed.

Today, as buyers spend more time educating themselves, many are hesitant to register and numerous marketing emails land in spam folders. This approach allows you to start nurturing prospects before you capture their email address. Just ensure your retargeting efforts are appropriate

Nurturing Your Email Contacts With Advertising

Today, a number of companies are using email opens and clicks to identify people and add them to a retargeting campaign. This tactic gets you in front of the people that are already showing an interest in your messages.

Now you can extend this approach to people that are not opening your emails regularly as well by building a pool of individuals for targeting using email addresses.

Of course, both approaches work with your email segmentation, so customers, active prospects and cold contacts can all receive the most appropriate messages.

With this capability, will privacy be an issue. When DoubleClick purchased Abacus in 1999 and planned to link online and offline identities, there was an uproar. Will this capability, and some of the others listed here, face similar backlashes? What if this capability is reversed, allow marketers to identify email addresses for people that visit their site, even if they never register or subscribe, and then contact them by email through a third party they have already shared their ?

Your Turn

Can new ways to target your audience and deliver the right message through online advertising make your marketing more effective? Share your opinion in the comments below or with me on Twitter (@wittlake).