Does your sales team wish that they could create some sort of relationship with prospects before reaching out to them for the first time? Thankfully, with the emergence of marketing tools, insight data, and flexible platforms, it is possible: you can warm-up your leads before your sales team makes the cold-call.
Does your sales team wish that they could create some sort of relationship with prospects before reaching out to them for the first time? Thankfully, with the emergence of marketing tools, insight data, and flexible platforms, it is possible: you can warm-up your leads before your sales team makes the cold-call.
Website traffic identification platforms, such as Leadforensics.com or Visistat, provide the backbone for this strategy by providing detailed information on the potential clients who visit your site. Leadforensics, for example, will identify anonymous website traffic in real-time, allowing marketers to take action on people who visit from specific industries, or those who hold certain job titles. There are also CRM functionalities built-in. In theory, the more your sales team knows about a lead, the more fruitful the first connection will be.
However, simply knowing someone’s name and job title doesn’t necessarily make the cold-call any easier for sales. So the question becomes: once you have data on your visitors, what can you do with it to ‘warm up’ the cold-call? Is there an intermediate step?
If you have a demand-side platform (DSP), the answer is Yes. Connecting your identification tool with a DSP means that you can create an intermediate step in the form of B2B micro-retargeting campaigns. By doing so, you achieve two things: brand-awareness with your target prospect, and an opportunity to gauge how they respond to a ‘soft-sell’ in the way of a display campaign. You can even retarget your site visitors with their own company name in the banner. “Hello [insert company name]” at the top of a banner will certainly draw their attention.
Of course, there’s another element to address: the API. If you’re using a tool like Leadforensics, you’re probably tracking activity from hundreds or even thousands of site visits every day. That’s a lot of data to filter through. Manually building campaign subsets, or what is commonly referred to as flights, for each visitor is unrealistic and monitoring those flights is even more so. An ad platform API allows for automation, where visitor data is used to flight micro-retargeted campaigns. If you’re dealing with epic traffic volume on your site, a user intelligence solution like iPerceptions can help qualify the traffic; iPerceptions can be used to identify which visitors’ behaviour indicates the most interest and intent. This qualification can be used (again, via API) to selectively build and target flights to the visitors who show the strongest signs of conversion or intent, so you’re spending your retargeting budget on the most likely-to-convert prospects.
The addition of an API means that flights are summoned and shut down automatically, keeping up with the flow of leads that come in. The flights become an initial touch-base with highly qualified prospective clients, providing context to the prospect, and making it easier for sales to reach out with an offer, or to start a conversation.
Let’s look at a use-case, where the marketing director for a company that makes specialized household products wants to connect with large retailers. She has a tool like Visistat that reveals user information, such as the visitor’s company and IP address. She also has a qualification tool like iPerceptions to show which visitors display strong intent. Finally, she has a DSP account for programmatic advertising campaigns. Until now, she has not combined the platforms. However, with an API, our marketing director can set up a log which ingests user details from her website identification platform and filters them with her customer insights tool. Perhaps she’s chosen to only retarget those visitors who display certain behaviours, and she’s using the visitor’s IP address as the targeting criteria for the flights. The log data automatically creates a flight in the DSP that targets the IP address of the visitor. The API also selects an appropriate creative for that particular flight. All the automated flights are built off a template which defines the flight budget, pacing, bid price, and duration. Only the IP address, flight dates, and creatives will differ from flight to flight.
To make sure that the creative messaging is relevant to the visitor, our marketing director uses dynamic creative optimization. Perhaps she gets a visit from a department store chain, and the insight logs show that the visitor zero’d in on a single product, coming very close to converting. The automated, IP-targeted flight would serve a creative with the retailer’s company name, showing the product they viewed, or the product category.
Flight reports will show our marketer how each visitor responded to the IP-targeted display campaign, whether by interaction, click, or conversion. These reports can help to determine which prospects should be contacted first. From there, sales can take the lead and reach out to continue the conversation.
As always, a good marketing strategy should be scalable. When we speak of connecting marketing tools and advertising technology via API, we have to consider the possibility of companies whose purpose is to gather data across an entire industry or vertical. A scaled-up use-case may involve a data aggregation company who uses the platform API functionality, and then white labels the data-to-ad-campaign service. For reporting, the same API can be used to aggregate campaign data and performance, which is offered to clients in a custom reporting UI.
Micro B2B campaigns help you make the most of your audience data and, more importantly, take the stress off your sales team by providing context and an ice-breaker. Merging your ad platform API with website traffic and user insights data can foster your quality leads and change the tone of the cold call.