Blog | 180byTwo

3 Ways B2B Marketers Can Streamline their Methods

Feb 1, 2021

When given constraints, the best marketers find ways to persevere and even grow.

2020 brought the advent of podcasts to Merit—they’re called MERITtalks. We initiated some meaningful conversations with thought leaders across leading B2B companies. They focused on talking about their ongoing and successful growth initiatives. Merit definitely saw a trend across orgs where agility and flexibility took a front seat in the strategy.

You can read more in Frank’s article featured on BuiltIn.com: 3 Ways B2B Marketers Can Streamline their Methods

180byTwo Included in Analyst Report as Recognized Data Provider

Jan 22, 2021

We’re excited to announce that 180byTwo has been included in Forrester’s Now Tech: B2B Marketing Data Providers, Q1 2021 Report. This report focuses on 36 providers of B2B data that vary by size, market focus, and geography. View the full press release here.

According to the Forrester report, “you can use B2B marketing data providers to create personalized and timely account-centric engagement, improve customer marketing, and achieve true customer obsession. But to realize these benefits, you’ll first have to select from a diverse set of vendors that vary by size, functionality, geography, and vertical market focus.”

Explore providers in B2B data by getting access to Forrester’s Now Tech: B2B Marketing Data Providers, Q1 2021 Report here. [Note access is only available to Forrester subscribers or for purchase].

The 180bytwo Perspective: What Is Data as a Service (DaaS) and What Does It Do for You?
The top companies understand that data and analytics are their competitive advantage. Data is the foundation for all successful marketing and sales.

DaaS, just like software as a service or any other “as a service” technology, is built on a concept that the data can be provided to the user at any time regardless of where the user is located or organizational differences. Data as a service allows critical data to be easily and securely accessed through a cloud-based platform.

Data and analytics are revolutionizing the B2B marketing landscape. Account-based B2B marketers rely on data to help them to get a 360-degree view of their prospects—revealing company profile, technology stack, and recent behavior. Data as a service results in marketing campaigns that hit closer to home because businesses now have a more holistic approach and understanding of every step of the buyer’s journey.

With a deep understanding of the prospect’s behaviors and needs, you’re able to give the personalized experience that modern consumers now expect. People show their appreciation for this tailored experience through increased engagement—they’re more likely to interact with your ad, share your content, or give your post a like. With increased engagement comes more credibility and trust. With more trust comes more purchases and brand loyalty.

Being data-driven isn’t enough. The quality and how fresh the data is playing a huge role in the efficiency of the data. Since DaaS means access to data from any device in real-time, new information derived from metrics and user behavior is always available. This allows you to continuously improve marketing and sales efforts as well as product offerings in order to stay in tune with the consumer’s ever-changing needs.

5 Tips for Personalization to Maximize ROI

Dec 10, 2020

Why does personalization matter? With the digital landscape getting noisier and more competitive since the pandemic, it’s gotten harder to stand out. To put it simply, you need to cut through the noise. Ultimately, the more relevant your message and content are to someone, the more likely they are to pay attention and take the desired action. Here are a few of our best practices for ultimate personalization and maximum ROI:

1. Use Data to Enhance Customer Experience

As you probably know, data is the foundation for every great marketer’s actions and strategy. At this point, it’s more about which data you should use since the information available is constantly growing.

Here are a few of the most important kinds of data if you want to hyper personalize your sales and marketing. Keep in mind that with us, you have access to all of these different kinds of data points (plus many more)…

Demographic – Information about a person including city, zip code, name, age, email, and more.

Behavioral – This is a really important kind of data because it reveals your prospects’ actions — what they’re searching for, which keywords they’re using, and pages they’ve landed on.

Firmographic – These are data points that include company name, number of employees, company size, etc. Think of it like this… In the same way, demographic data helps segment individuals to target audiences, firmographics can reveal target accounts for B2B marketers.

2. Personalize Your Emails

The last thing you want to do is mass email your lists and send out “this isn’t what I signed up for” kind of content. On that same note, hopefully, you do have multiple lists from segmenting your audience based on interests, needs, or even where they are in the sales cycle.

For example, if someone gets on your email list from downloading a free guide that you were promoting, they may have never heard of your company before and are most likely not ready for a product demo. It would help to send them blogs and valuable tips to nurture them and establish credibility until they are ready to move forward with the next steps.

Because each list consists of a different audience with different needs, the content you send to each should also be different. Your message changes depending on who you’re speaking to.

3. Turn Anonymous Visitors into Real People

You’re getting visits to your website (especially if you’re running any paid ads). These visitors can all be uncovered and retargeted in future campaigns. The more granular you can get, the less you’ll spend on marketing efforts and the more ROI you’ll gain. Why waste time marketing to a cold audience when you could bypass this and just directly target people who are already looking at you or your competitors? Let’s reach for the low-hanging fruit.

4. Personalize Customer Support

Humans love doing business with other humans. For that reason, it’s important to know your customers and treat and talk to them in a real way. Every interaction you have with your customer should be personalized. Is there industry jargon that you can get rid of in your canned chat responses? Are you talking to them in a conversational way or do you sound like a B2B marketing robot?

Do your best to match the customer with the customer service rep or sales team member with the appropriate skills that will best suit their needs. Learn your customers’ personalities and keep that in mind when tweaking your own brand’s personality and tone.

5. Customize Your Content

Personalization is much more than just using your prospect’s first name in your messaging. This is more of a common courtesy now. People want custom tips and offers. Customize your ad copy and landing pages to whoever will be reading it. If it’s being promoted to a cold audience who may have never heard of you, explain what you do and the benefits in the most simple way possible. You should really be pushing benefits over product features here.

Since you’re a partner of ours and have access to all the data you need, you know exactly what your prospects are searching for. You should build all of your content (whether it be a blog, email, or social posts) to answer what they’re searching for and questions they’re asking.

Savvy B2B brands and progressive marketers worldwide such as IBM, T-Mobile, SAP, Informa, and others use 180byTwo to drive their strategy and maximize marketing ROI.

Get started with hyper-personalization and granular targeting here.

Here’s How to Take the Guesswork Out of Marketing

Dec 2, 2020

Reaching the right people, at the right time, and with the right message is getting harder and harder. B2B marketers are constantly shifting their strategies to get the most out of their marketing. Meet your key to successful B2B marketing and boosted ROI: buyer intent. Here’s why…

When your team has access to quality buyer intent data, you’ll save time, money, and effort. With intent data, you’ll improve your ad targeting which results in spending less on reaching an audience who isn’t likely to convert, prioritizing your reach since you know who’s already interested, and boosting confidence in your sales team.

How do you actually make this happen? eCHo is a complimentary intent solution that combines our exclusive network of intent signals and AccountLink Graph that brings the intent of a company down to an office or site level. This goes deeper than just domain level insights – more on that later. If you’re tired of shooting in the dark and ready to get your message to the right people at the right time, keep reading…

Understand Buyer Intent Based on Engagement

With eCHO, you gain key insights into which accounts are more likely to convert or even churn based on their velocity score (or engagement level) for related topics. Go broad and gain insights into intent categories or explore specific intent topics.

There are a few questions to ask when analyzing users’ behaviors:
What are they searching for?
Are they looking for things that give you the opportunity to upsell?
Are they searching for your competitors?

Depending on the answers to these questions, this will uncover existing customers who are likely to churn. Without this information, you’d most likely never notice that a customer is about to leave to switch to a competitor. This shows you who needs extra support so you can be proactive and save the customer from leaving.

Get Granular

Our intent signals cover over 6,000 software & industry topics at 20+ million company locations. With AccountLink, we are able to go beyond IP-based signals. We are able to leverage our user data derived from mobile and SDK data to ingest and measure signals from the employees at a specific location whether it’s the tech-campus in Silicon Valley or the executive office in Brooklyn.

The best part? You can make use of this tool using your existing CRM data. eCHO has more than 400 marketing and advertising integrations with platforms like Marketo, Salesforce, and Oracle. Whether you want to access eCHO Intent data digitally, offline, or via API integration… we have you covered.

Take advantage of AI

As you probably know, AI isn’t the future – it’s the here and now. One of the most difficult hoops that B2B marketers have to jump through in order to be effective in accurately gathering and analyzing information. You can rely on your existing CRM tools to uncover demographic data such as location, age, gender, and so on. But pairing this with artificial intelligence adds another layer of hyper-personalization. This kind of personalization can only be accomplished through machine learning because as data is collected, AI can make predictions, learn, and improve itself automatically in real-time.

Ready to identify who’s ready to buy and prioritize the right accounts? Learn more here.

The Next Big Thing in B2B Marketing

Dec 1, 2020

We are thrilled to announce that 180byTwo has been acquired by MeritDirect — a leading provider of business data, database products, consultative marketing services, and campaign execution solutions with a singular focus in B2B. The acquisition will enable our customers to operate across marketing and activation channels with a full suite of go-to-market solutions.

What does this mean for our customers?

With this acquisition, our partners and clients will have access to more products and services than before. In addition to all of the powerful account-based marketing, data-as-a-service, and audience solutions 180bytwo has to offer, our clients now have access to a broad range of services from data hygiene, lead and demand generation, strategic marketing services, analytics, and other go-to-market products and services.

This combination results in a more diversified dataset and solution that gives a full 360-degree approach for B2B marketers all the while allowing our clients the capability to onboard data from existing platforms through Unifi. Unifi is a data activation platform that enables granular targeting, data enrichment, and allows you to easily use this data across different platforms.

Here’s What to Expect

The quality of our data and products, the 180byTwo name, and our exceptional service will all remain the same. In the future, we will be adding additional resources, more platform integrations, and the addition of more comprehensive data for marketing campaign executions.

We’re so excited to become a part of the MeritDirect family and know their experience and growth-driven mission will play a key role in helping us deliver comprehensive data solutions to our customers. If you have any questions or would like to learn more about the 180byTwo by MeritDirect solutions, contact us today.

For more information on upcoming product releases and feature updates, subscribe to our newsletter here.

Top Trends to Expect In B2B Marketing In 2021

Nov 19, 2020

Digital Transformations

A digital transformation was already underway for most companies, but COVID caused many to quickly take the leap and go digital. E-commerce used to be thought of as a place for only purchasing low ticket items like t-shirts and coffee mugs. Now, businesses have no issue making big purchases online.

With this change, buyers are now in more of a self-serve environment and actually prefer it. They can make decisions and purchases and do all necessary research on their own time and at their convenience.

So what’s the takeaway? Major changes in business operations, remote work, and digital workflows have taken place. There is no “going back to normal”. Most of these changes will be permanent and continue to influence purchases this year. Businesses might’ve dragged their feet a bit with adopting digital, but now the majority of them realize that digital is the way to go.

B2B Budgets Shift

Revenue and spending outlook is positive. 80% of businesses in North America and Europe report that they expect their spending on tech will remain the same. Although we may face slightly less demand, there’s still outstanding potential for those who fully understand and address their buyers’ needs.

Automation Continues

To no surprise, we will continue to see the rise of automation and AI. Now, we will see it start playing a bigger role in marketing and sales with 57% of sales leaders plan to spend more on automation and AI. As things have switched to be more digital, it’s gotten noisier. The need for a personalized experience, improved customer segmentation, and predictive journeys keeps skyrocketing.

Search Intent Redefines the Marketing Funnel

80% of brands have brand metric lifts for intent-based targeting rather than demographic-based targeting. What does this mean for your marketing and messaging? It means you have to constantly think about how you’re bringing value and personalization to every step of the user’s journey. Search intent is growing more and more with the popularity of voice assistants like Siri and Alexa. So what does that mean for your company? Here are just a couple of ideas:

Think about what questions and queries people are searching for before purchasing such as product demos, reviews, and product FAQs. Be the one who provides those for them.

Speak your audience’s language by being real and strategic. Use clear and concise sentences and write the way that people talk. It’s amazing what will happen for your marketing when you take the time to make things more personalized and human.

Increased Data Privacy and Limited Availability

When it comes to paid ads, language, and search query insights are everything to marketers. It’s how we can determine the ad itself, targeting, and get the most bang for our buck. But things are changing… With privacy becoming more and more of a concern, Google has begun limiting search data for ads. They will stop showing search queries that triggered an ad but lack “significant” data. This limitation can result in a user clicking an ad and the advertising spending money for the click without knowing the target keyword that triggered it.

Maybe it’s a good time to first point out that all of our data is ethically sourced and in compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation and California Consumer Privacy Act. Now, when it comes to the search engine giant’s latest update, our data is unlikely to be affected. That’s because how we collect data is a bit different…

Rather than relying on a search query, we are tracking and analyzing the content of a webpage. Take “email marketing” as an example topic. There are plenty of ways to measure intent for email marketing whether it’s review-based sites, white papers, e-books, or software sites… and we observe all of it.

So, rather than recording the few search queries for “best email marketing software”, we capture the signals from each page a user lands on and browses during their research. By tracking the content on the page, we can leverage much more than just search query data making us resilient to Google’s upcoming updates.

Ready to give your marketing campaigns the ultimate customization that they need to convert customers? Learn more here.

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