When you think about addressable marketing, you probably do not immediately think about business banking campaigns. However, with the increased competition for share of wallet, it is critical that you approach business banking with the most efficient and effective tactics in order to maximize the performance of your programs.
“Addressable” refers to people-based marketing. In the online world, addresses are anonymous, tied to devices, and changing all the time. This makes it hard to reach the same customer across channels and devices with a consistent message. Marketers can draw on various data sources to build a profile of each individual prospect you want to target.
One such tactic is social media. Facebook and LinkedIn are good for more than just reaching known consumer prospects. These platforms are hugely popular for small businesses, too.
Today, approximately 90 million U.S. small businesses have a Facebook page and 30 million companies have LinkedIn profiles, according to Hootsuite, proving that the platforms can and should be prioritized by B2B marketers. However, financial marketers need to be aware that the B2B prospect targeting and identification process is often more complicated than targeting consumers on these platforms.
Below we outline three of the steps that banks and credit unions should take to locate top B2B prospects in addressable media with their online campaigns.
1. Identify the Data That You Can Leverage
Your institution likely has a significant amount of business data available, due to your current prospecting campaigns and your existing customer data. But you may not have a lot of consumer-based personally identifiable information (PII) associated with the individuals within those businesses. Fortunately, consumer data is not necessarily required to match into online marketing platforms. Yes, it helps significantly, but most small and medium businesses have a presence on Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social platforms.
When these small businesses open a Facebook account, they provide an email address, a location, etc., and this information can be used to identify and target small businesses through these platforms. Generally match rates and reach are lower (expect 20-30% match rates for B2B data, according to Adweek). Many businesses are also not logged on all the time, and the owner of the social media account may not be the stakeholder you need to reach. There are additional opportunities, however, to locate your target audience.
As identity resolution solutions evolve, many of them now provide the ability for financial marketers to match a business ID to a consumer ID. This type of solution empowers you to then target not only the business through the business record but also specific individuals at that business using consumer PII. Depending upon the robustness of the data, you can then take it a step further and target and segment on a variety of both business and consumer data points.
For example, resolving to the consumer ID can enable your campaigns to target the decision-makers at the organizations you are trying to acquire. This can be done through a professional title if there is one available on your business/professional records.
Once you identify consumer records associated with that business, then then you have the opportunity to target them in a consumer online environment. This will increase your match rates and your find rates over-targeting with the business information alone (expect 60-70% match rates, per Statista data).
Read More:
- Financial Marketing Strategies That Grow Business Banking Relationships
- Bank’s LinkedIn Project Builds Sales Leads and Influencer Status
- What Gen X Business Owners Want From Their Banking Providers
2. Develop Segmentation and Targeting
Once the data availability and the size of your matched audiences (i.e., B2B to consumer data) are determined, it is time to develop your segmentation. This is not approached much differently than your typical addressable marketing campaign. However, you likely will find that the top deciles in your direct mail models will not be your top deciles in digital. Also, scale is a significant factor in the online space — and in the B2B environment.
There are a variety of aspects that come into play, but simply put, the larger the audience the more confidence financial marketers can have in the results. Reach reports and frequency targeting will also help you understand not only how many within your audience you identified, but also how many of them were targeted.
Consider utilizing data points like location (radius around branch), annual sales revenue of your target audience, position/title, etc. It is best to start with a wider audience and then tighten down based on results. If the file is properly developed, additional targeting criteria can be used for backend analysis, and future campaigns and audiences can be quickly refined.
3. Campaign Execution Tactics
How the execution occurs really depends on the campaign goals, but it is generally recommended that both offline and online addressable campaigns are integrated and are in the market at the same time. Similar to consumer banking campaigns, this will increase the effectiveness of both channels. However, cost efficiencies typically enable you to reach a larger audience with online tactics.
In most cases, the platforms that enable the most reach are Facebook, with its 2.45 billion global users, and LinkedIn with its B2B focus and 600 million global users, although other partners certainly can be integrated within your institution’s marketing plan.
When leveraging this approach, it is important that targeting and segmentation are done offline through the data selection process. That means that if all criteria are properly selected, there is no additional targeting needed in the online world. When additional online targeting is overlaid, it can hamper reach, so it is not recommended.
Banks and credit unions should take a test-and-learn approach with addressable marketing for b2b. Keep in mind that your direct mail models and campaigns have been developed over time, so you likely won’t see your target result in the first campaign.
Start with the best practices and techniques of addressable targeting, to begin to supercharge your cross-channel business banking campaigns.