Using social media platforms to share marketing messages with B2B buyers is a proven tactic. And since the emergence of Covid-19 has forced more employees to work virtually, the opportunities to engage with decision-makers on social platforms has climbed significantly. LinkedIn alone saw a bump of 55% more conversational activity between existing connections in March.
While the number of people accessing content on social platforms represents an elevated opportunity to reach more prospects, optimizing the relative performance and ROI of digital campaigns may be even more challenging. The cost per qualified lead in a pay-per-click campaign may be unnecessarily high if audiences are not targeted with sufficient precision.
One of the key issues that limit the ROI of B2B campaigns, especially multi-touch initiatives that aim to engage prospects via email and social channels, is associating a prospect’s social identity with his or her business information. Because user identities on social platforms — even business-oriented sites such as LinkedIn — are more likely to include personal contact information, matching customer or prospects to their social profiles can be difficult.
According to Versium, a data cleaning and enrichment solution provider, match rates for first-party business lists to those generated from social platforms can be relatively low. Based on several controlled tests, Versium reports average match rates were 11% for Facebook, 13% for Google and 28% for programmatic displays. While the average match for LinkedIn was significantly better at 54%.
Marketers can improve the odds of finding their known customers on social channels with solutions designed to match their customers’ identities with social platform data. For example, Versium’s Reach solution enables marketers to upload names and business email addresses and match them with more identifiers, finding targets’ consumer email addresses and social profiles and uncovering more demographic data about them.
Match rates can be dramatically improved, Versium maintains, climbing in its tests to an average of 82% on Facebook, 85% on Google, 72% on programmatic displays and 78% on LinkedIn. This enables B2B marketers to more effectively target prospects at multiple touchpoints with reinforcing messages.
Companies can use also databases to generate more detailed lists of potential customers. For example, B2B marketers can create a target audience based on firmographic data of ideal customers, such as company location, size, revenue and industry, using SIC codes or industry names. Again, the resulting contact information will enable multi-touch campaigns, reaching prospects via email as well as on social channels.
Targeted Messaging Brings In Higher-Quality Leads For Talentify
The ability to better engage more precisely targeted prospects with multiple messages can not only result in desired responses, it can do so more affordably. For example, at Talentify, a recruitment marketing automation solution provider, the ability to more precisely target prospects on multiple platforms not only generated requests for business-winning demos, it did so at significantly lower cost.
Talentify targeted companies via a first-party prospect list that was layered with additional contact points by the Versium product. In addition, the company used Versium Reach to amend a purchased list of business emails with additional online contact information.
To build sufficient prospect interest in participating in a demo is not a trivial matter, explained Christopher Hopkins, Search Marketing Specialist at Talentify. “We find that more touchpoints will generally bring in not only more demos but more interested demos,” he said. “Ideally, we want to have 18 touch points on a person before they come in.”
By significantly increasing the match rates of first-party custom audiences and purchased prospect lists, Talentify was able to build more efficient and cost-effective paid social media campaigns. Unproductive clicks on paid digital ads can hike the costs of campaigns. The ability to reduce the number of unproductive clicks by identifying preferred targets and presenting them with multiple messages on social and digital platforms, resulted in a decrease in cost-per-demo from $550 to $312.
“What really worked with us is that we were finding more of the exact person at the right job, so that when they did see a message, there is a higher chance that message would resonate and they would end up signing up for a demo,” said Hopkins.
