Partnering with Adobe to Drive Successful B2B Marketing

Uber is the largest car service company but owns no vehicles. Airbnb has the most overnight bookings but doesn’t own a hotel. At an increasingly fast rate, innovators are disrupting and transforming industries by facilitating market relationships – without the operational hassles of owning the channels that run them. In doing this, both the consumer and innovator win as operational hassles are removed and standards are increased.

In the consumer space, we can find several of these examples. But what about in B2B? How do service providers and technology companies offer the highest caliber of service to businesses without owning proprietary assets? In the world of enterprise marketing, these proprietary assets are often data assets.

Adobe, through our Solutions Partner Program, is providing this value. Just as Airbnb doesn’t own a hotel, Adobe doesn’t own a customer’s data assets. Rather, we’re providing the Audience Marketplace within Adobe Audience Manager for the buying and selling of first, second and third party data assets. We’ve invested and focused on data partnerships with quite simply the best in the industry. We have compiled over a half a billion B2B profiles allowing businesses to message to other companies as granularly or generically as they would like. And B2B companies can take advantage of this today through Adobe Marketing Cloud’s data management platform (DMP) – Audience Manager.

Thousands of brands worldwide including two-thirds of Fortune 50 companies rely on Adobe Marketing Cloud, including 10 of the top 10 world’s largest media companies, 10 of America’s top 10 financial services companies, and 10 of the top 10 world’s largest agencies.

At the core of this solution adoption is a desire to provide the best solution to Adobe and our partners’ end clients. In many instances, this could mean servicing, retaining and winning over the decision makers of some of the top companies in the world.

Today, Adobe partners with the top B2B companies in the industry to provide solutions for our mutual clients. Within Adobe Audience Manager’s Audience Marketplace, the top high-tech and ­­­­financial services companies can power their B2B marketing initiatives via Dun & Bradstreet, ALC, Bombora, Cross Pixel, Eyeota, Demandbase and TransUnion.

Having the best data partners is not enough. Adobe has created an e-commerce way for Audience Manager clients to test these data sets to evaluate who performs best for their digital initiatives. We give our DMP clients direct access to our data partners to see what the overlap is with their first party data and identify the best audiences for retention or competitive campaigns. Want to see it in action? Please click here to see our Premier Partner, Dun & Bradstreet, show you how this works.

Having me tell you about our data partners’ B2B strategy isn’t enough. In keeping with Adobe’s partner-led strategy, we wanted to give our partners the opportunity to speak for themselves. Please see below to learn more from our data partners directly about what B2B marketing in partnership with Adobe looks like for them.

Featured Partners:

Q&A

Anudit Vikram (SVP, Advanced Marketing Solutions, Dun & Bradstreet) The “marketing” in “account based marketing” is a bit of a misnomer. ABM is not just marketing. It’s a business initiative that unites sales, IT, product, customer success and other groups around one shared goal: to deepen engagement with target, strategic or major accounts. These accounts don’t have to be new business, either. ABM can also focus on retention, upsell and cross-sell efforts. Regardless of your specific ABM goals, the key is to align and orchestrate people, processes and technologies to deepen customer and prospect relationships.

Greg Herbst (VP, Programmatic Data Solutions, Bombora): B2B sales are usually more complex than B2C. While the B2C purchase funnel is generally a one-to-one journey, there are multiple stakeholders involved in the B2B buying process. This means B2B marketers need to reach a range of individuals in varying disciplines across a prospect organization. In order to identify and target these groups – B2B data needs to not only have scale across a range of areas and audiences, but also be quite specific to target the right people – hence the higher cost. This complexity also drives higher cost in that there is less B2B data available – especially on a global basis.

John Whitmore (VP, Digital Audience Solutions, ALC) ALC has observed a spike in requests for SMB decision-makers, specifically those who have a known influence on purchasing power at their respective organizations. The B2B buyer audience is also experiencing increased demand – which allows marketers to target known purchasers by type of product and frequency of purchase. In addition, we have seen a lift within the C-Suite segment – targeting these key decision makers by industry.

We are seeing an increased demand in retargeting anonymous website traffic with both email and direct mail. ALC has met this need with Remarketable – which combines the unparalleled response rates and deliverability of direct mail with the intent-to-buy relevance and timing of display retargeting.

Jeffrey Minich (VP, Product Partnerships, Digital, TransUnion): Honing in on the right decision-maker and industry is usually key to identifying the right audience for a B2B campaign. Transunion B2B data provides the ability to target by Title, Industry, Revenue, and Number of Employees. SMB’s also often serve local markets so it’s important to localize your spend to geographies being served. Most buying platforms support localization of audience buys down to the zip code.

For larger businesses, we often see the need for what we call ‘Small Business Identification’ within their existing consumer CRM file. So for example, a large bank may wish to cross-sell small business products to its consumer banking customers who may also small business owners. By layering Transunion Small Business data on top of the bank’s CRM file within Adobe Audience Manager, the bank can create a new small business prospect audience for cross-sell campaigns.

Anudit Vikram We’ll see more discussions around measurement. In many cases, the cross-functional nature of ABM requires cultural change and, if the effort is strategic, significant time and resource investments. How do we measure the return on relationships? We can look at closed deals and revenue amounts, but ABM is qualitative by nature and requires different metrics than what we’ve used with the traditional funnel (e.g., conversion rates). For example, we’ll need to quantify how ABM is moving the needle on engagement and influence.

Greg Herbst Using intent data in ABM is a trend that every B2B marketer needs to be aware of. While typical approaches to ABM have used purely IP address targeting and demographic data (e.g. job function, etc.) – this has limited scale. It adds a rich layer of insight to ABM campaigns, enabling marketers to identify what exactly their addressable market is interested in and when.

Through the creation of a custom segment, or private cookie pool, Bombora can build a list based on insights from our Surge data – which measures when a company starts consuming content on a topic much more than they normally do. Bombora also mines surging intent data and enrich existing lists by matching the companies that are ‘surging’ – or in market right now – to help marketers target only those companies.

According to Forrester Research’s ‘2015 Business Technographics Global Priorities and Journey Survey’ report, the influence level of technology professionals in the US, is strongest with mid-management and SMEs – rather than with the C-level. Expanding ABM targeting beyond the c-suite gives marketers more complete reach – and likely influence – across the entire B2B buying process.

Ultimately, personalization and accuracy is the opportunity for B2B marketers. Strong data partners are the key to any B2B marketing strategy given the scarcity of quality B2B data and the complexity of understanding how various organizations function. Through the partnerships with the organizations listed above, Adobe Audience Manager’s Audience Marketplace is helping our clients navigate this challenge and offer the strongest solution to our mutual clients.