Demandbase — B2B Digital Marketing

How Account Based Advertising Really Works

April 20, 2016 By Eric Wittlake 25 Comments

2015 seemed like a breakout year for account-based advertising, with a flurry of account-based advertising offerings hitting the market. Interest in account-based advertising is, no surprise, following the adoption of account-based marketing.

According to a 2015 survey from Demand Metric and Demandbase, 45% of B2B marketers are testing or have adopted account-based marketing and more than 75% of those plan to increase their use of ABM in the next year. LUMA Partners even singled out Account Based Marketing as an area they expect to take off within MarTech this year.

On the surface, if your marketing is already structured around specific accounts, using account-based targeting in your advertising programs seems like a natural next step. But how do these solutions actually target ads to specific companies? Or to put it a little bit differently, how do all of these companies most of us have never heard of know where we all work? [Read more…]

6 Ways B2B Marketers Are Falling Short Today

May 28, 2015 By Eric Wittlake 76 Comments

As I came back from the B2B Marketing Innovation Summit, put on by Demandbase, I couldn’t shake the feeling that we aren’t doing enough. That I’m not doing enough.

Sure, marketing is changing faster today than it did yesterday. Blah blah blah. It doesn’t matter how fast marketing is changing! The real question is “how are you changing?”

Here are six areas that struck me. No, they aren’t new. But they are places many B2B marketers, including myself, should be doing so much more. [Read more…]

Three Data Opportunities B2B Marketers Are Missing Today

January 20, 2014 By Eric Wittlake 15 Comments

For all of the discussion of data in marketing, and Big Data in 2014, most B2B marketers are showing they are inept when it comes to actually using data to improve the majority of their marketing.

Yes, B2B marketers are doing a few things well when it comes to using data:

B2B marketers are increasingly adopting marketing automation and using past behavior to deliver more relevant content.
Ads are (occasionally) targeted and relevant to discrete audiences, using retargeting or through data providers like Bizo.
B2B marketing performance is being carefully tracked and optimized based on reported results.

Sound ok? Before you give yourself a pat on the back, this isn’t even the tip of the iceberg! [Read more…]

The Real Reasons Programmatic Ad Buys Fail in B2B Marketing

December 19, 2013 By Eric Wittlake 6 Comments

Programmatic buying, driven by real-time bidding (RTB), is the fastest growing segment of digital marketing today. But it isn’t ready yet for today’s enterprise B2B marketer.

Time and time again, B2B marketers fall prey to a wonderful sounding sales pitch for their demand generation plan that goes something like this:

“We use 100’s of data points and sophisticated technology that optimizes every single impression in your campaign. Through our connections to every major exchange, we evaluate billions of impressions across millions of sites every day to find the exact audience and inventory you need at a fraction of the cost you would otherwise pay.”

Wow, sign me up, right? Cost-effective, constantly optimized, highly targeted. Get this program live, I’m taking a vacation!

And then you see the results. [Read more…]

7 B2B Advertising Opportunities You Are Missing

March 25, 2013 By Eric Wittlake 10 Comments

B2B advertisers generally target smaller, harder to define audiences than consumer advertisers, which puts a major premium on effective targeting in B2B advertising.

However, many B2B marketing groups are continuing to use the same targeting options they mastered in print and direct mail, simply applied to newer digital marketing tactics.

Today, B2B marketers have many new options available. Below are 7 options and potential providers for each one. [Read more…]

3 Steps to Using Data in an Imperfect Data World

January 22, 2013 By Eric Wittlake 6 Comments

Data is reinventing the online advertising market. Today, algorithmic media buying is one of the fastest growing areas in online advertising and without data, it wouldn’t even exist.

This isn’t just a consumer advertising trend, increasingly B2B advertising is being driven by data as well.

However, the problem with online data is it is inherently dirty. Collected from registration forms, browsing behavior or appended offline data sources, collecting online data is an imperfect process at best.

So what is the smart way to use dirty data to improve your advertising? Glad you asked.

Here are three steps that will guide both media and creative. [Read more…]

Marketing Automation’s Next Frontier: Madison Avenue

November 15, 2012 By Eric Wittlake 2 Comments

Marketers have invested in marketing automation, content and, in many cases, creating complex business rules to determine what content and message to deliver when.

This represents a significant investment but, for many companies, the application has been limited to emails and landing pages.

The real value is in the rules and logic used to deliver the right message at the right time. The next evolution in marketing automation will be extending the application of these rules across the full spectrum of digital and addressable marketing channels. [Read more…]

B2B Online Advertising: Improve Targeting by 10x (or more!)

October 18, 2012 By Eric Wittlake 2 Comments

B2B advertising begins with the target audience. Until you know who you are targeting, you cannot identify the publications, sites or ad networks you should be working with.

However, one of the first things advertisers do is generalize their target audience. Here are a couple examples of how B2B target audiences are generalized for advertising:

Juniper targets companies with large data centers. However, before that can be turned into a broad advertising plan, it is generalized as large companies or specific industries likely to have large data centers.
UPS targets companies with national and international logistics and high volume shipping needs. Again, that is generalized into industries, large companies or even geographic regions before it can be used as a target for advertising campaigns.

What if you didn’t need to generalize your audience? Instead of targeting large companies or industries, what if Juniper could directly target companies with large data centers or UPS could directly target companies with complex logistics needs?

Today they can. [Read more…]

Bad Advertising Advice: Go Where Your Audience Is

October 2, 2012 By Eric Wittlake 6 Comments

It sounds obvious, on point, and innocent, but the oft-told advice to “go where your audience is” is one of the worst pieces of advice B2B marketers receive.

This advice leaves B2B marketers looking at what their audience does. Do they watch the Super Bowl? Are they on Facebook? Do they read Sports Illustrated?

Media sales representatives perpetuate the problem, comparing reach to their competitors. The “more read our stuff” chart is in nearly every major media kit in one form or another and every day it leads marketers astray. [Read more…]