#76: Targeting B2B buyers like B2C consumers with Mark Connon, Bombora

Mark Kannon: The agile brand.

Greg Kilstrom: Welcome to the B2B Agility podcast, where we look at the factors that drive success in B2B marketing, with a focus on the people, processes, data and platforms that make B2B brands stand out and thrive in a competitive marketplace. I'm your host, Greg Kilstrom, advising Fortune 1000 brands on martech marketing operations and CX, best selling author and speaker. Now let's get on to the show.

Host: Why is it that B2C marketers can target someone who left a pair of shoes in their cart and following them around the Internet for a week? But that same level of precision just hasn't been the same? For B2B, agility requires closing the gap between insight and action. It's not enough to know who your audience is. You need the capability to reach them precisely wherever they are at the moment it matters most. Today we're going to talk about why B2B advertising has historically lagged behind its B2C counterpart in audience targeting and activation. We're going to explore the challenges of working with fragmented data and the new opportunities that are emerging to create highly precise, actionable audiences by combining different data sources in a new way. To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome Mark Kannon, CEO of Bombora. Mark, welcome to the show.

Mark Kannon: Thank you for having me. It's great to be here.

Host: Yeah. Looking forward to diving in here. Before we do, though, why don't you give a little background on yourself and your role at Bombora?

Mark Kannon: Sure. I'm, um, the CEO of Bombora. Uh, I've been here for coming up on three years now. It's a company that's been around for a little over a decade and really sort of built on the notion of sort, uh, of bringing together the best in B2B data, B2B intent data, to be specific, to help our brands and advertising customers and our publishers, where we source our content from our data from, uh, perform better.

Greg Kilstrom: Great. Great.

Host: So, yeah, let's get started here. We're going to talk about a few things, but I want to start with just kind of setting the stage and those many M listeners out there will probably empathize or understand what we're saying here. But, you know, beyond the classic answer of complex buying committees, certainly an issue in the B2B sales process, what are some of the fundamental data and technology reasons why B2B audience activation has been so difficult? While B2C seems to have it all figured out?

Mark Kannon: Yeah, it's, uh, in large part it comes down to visibility in the B2C world and we have an ecosystem which is really built on the B2C world. It's kind of a one to one relationship between brand or agency and the consumer. You know, in your sort of buying a pair of sneakers example, right, it's you know, we know the buyer, you know the buyer, you know, someone who's demonstrated interest or intent. With B2B, the focus is on not so much the, the, the, the, the person, but the company. Right. Uh, and not just the company, but the buying group within the company. And then you also take into consideration sort of the buying journey in addition to the committee. So it's, there's a level of complexity there required that there, that requires, you know, an effective way of identifying companies that are in market and not just companies, but the people within those companies by role C level, you know, you know, it, that type of sort, uh, of demographic, firmographic data. Um, and then once you know who that, what company is in market and you have the ability to identify those within the company that are in your buying group, you need an identity solution so you can address them in the programmatic ecosystem or the advertising ecosystem, uh, and that enables you to reach them. Um, but then you need to be able to measure it. Right. And so this, the complexity of that in the B2B space, uh, is much more significant than it hasn't been in B2C which is why I think you've seen it lag. Most importantly, as we have continued to crack the code at Bombora around each of those sort of previous limitations. It creates a ton of opportunity for brands, uh, to reach their target companies, uh, in a sort of efficient and effective way and to be able to measure it. So it's certainly different but worth the investment to ensure that you have access to sort of addressing those, those.

Host: Yeah, and I mean to justify that investment. I mean certainly there, there's, there's a real business impact here. I mean again, to go back to the shoes example, for better or worse, when I abandon a cart with a pair of sneakers in it, I'm followed around the Internet and I am the buyer for those shoes. You know, unless somebody's giving me a present, which I guess I'll gladly accept, like, you know, that we know who the buyer is, we know what they want, so on and so forth. But you know, B2B, the, the not being able to activate the right audiences. So you know, activating with, with the level of precision that's needed. You know, are we just talking about wasted ad spend or are there bigger and more Strategic consequences like missing out on entire market segments.

Mark Kannon: Yeah, I would say it's, it's more the latter than the former. Right. Yes. You are always concerned about wasted ad spend. You want to be able to measure the effectiveness of what you're, what you're targeting because of the length of sales cycles and the size of, of the, the transactions in B2B. Uh, missing out on or being late to the party on a company that's in market for your solution can have long term impact. So it's, yeah, you could worry about wasting ad spend but you're really thinking about like missing opportunity. So not doing it right means you're missing opportunity. It means you're getting involved late in a sales cycle means you're missing that RFP process that you might have otherwise had if you were out in front of that, that company earlier in the sales cycle. Upper in the funnel, higher up in the funnel, which is really what a lot of our brands and uh, agencies are really focusing on. Create awareness, branding. Try to get in as early in the funnel as possible. Given that sales cycles can be nine months, they could be a year and a half. Uh, so that you know, you're buying a pair of sneakers usually pretty quickly when you've got nine people voting on something that's going to take a year front of you, not being in front of that, that opportunity is, is the real risk.

Host: Yeah, yeah. And the sneakers so to speak, that those nine people are buying are you know, orders of magnitude more expensive and ideally margins are better than, than on a pair of sneakers as well. So lots to lose, you know, in other words. So your, your new offering at Bombora is called Curated Ecosystem Audiences with the word ecosystem being, being key there. Why is a uh, uh, partnership or data co op model the right approach to solving this rather than one company trying to build a single monolithic kind of everything database?

Mark Kannon: Yeah, it's interesting. This is something we are very passionate about and it really stems from our history. Our source of data to establish our B2B intent solution is our publisher co op. Thousands of publishers, billions of events that we use, uh, to sort of see what different companies are consuming in order to develop that intent signal. So we're kind of founded on this notion of a data co op, right. Taking that same concept, really valuable data. We have sort of invested in the infrastructure for us to distribute, identify and distribute and create audience off our own data. But, and so it's a natural kind of extension of that to say to other players in the ecosystem who may not necessarily either have had historically wanted to or had the ability to activate their data in an advertising environment and saying, look, we've got the infrastructure, we've got the plumbing, we have the relationships. You know, it's just a natural sort of a low cost opportunity to enter uh, and a big site and a significant upside given that for those partners and just having the brand and the know how to, to execute uh, in this space is, is uh, is a benefit to all involved as well. Yeah, yeah.

Host: And uh, you know, some of those partners you've launched with are, you know, crunch based G2HG insights. So you know, I'm sure most people, if not all listening, are familiar with most, if not all of those. Can you walk us through? You know, how might a marketer combine say, you know, G2's software buyer intent with Crunchbase's funding data to create an audience that might have, you know, previously been impossible to build?

Mark Kannon: Yeah, it's interesting, you know, we're, we're in the market or have been in the business of creating kind of unique recipes of data to address particular audiences. And by the way, I should shout out, don't forget Definitive Healthcare. They were the fourth anchor partner for us in that, in that list. One of the great purveyors of B2B healthcare data. Um, but the, the notion is we have the ability to curate that audience within uh, our platform. Um, uh, and you can also curate it where, where it resides. So if we have uh, a particular category or segment from G2 in the trade desk, and there's one from Crunchbase as well, you can add them if that's what you wanted to do, you can target them separately, you can add them. Or what we also do is take those and augment it with Bombora data specifically. So it's that kind of flexibility to create these very rich and importantly scalable. Because as soon as you start to say, you know, I want to have these five different targeting criteria, like the audience just gets smaller and smaller and smaller. So being a scaled solution so that when you do that and uh, you're sort of combining these different unique, valuable data assets, you can actually sort of meet the needs of the brand or the agency who has a certain amount of audience they want to reach, it's really cool and it's working really well for the advertisers so far. So we're excited about it.

Host: Yeah, well, and to the, to the point of activating, certainly, you know, it's key to build the right audience but, but being able to activate it, you Know, makes, is, is, is truly key to, to success. How does this approach, you know, a lot of, a lot of platform marketers are already using things like the Trade Desk or Yahoo or other, you know, social platforms, things like that. How does, how does this approach simplify getting these highly specific audiences into some of those platforms they're already using?

Mark Kannon: Yeah, um, the. One of the things that Bombora has, has been doing for some time now is investing to wherever our customers want it. That could be a dsp, it could be a cdp. It's into the enterprise, into their data science team and having the ability and expertise to move data and uh, efficiently, effectively and building connections or connectivity. We're basically connected to the entire programmatic ecosystem through our partnerships. Currently you can get your audience in most everywhere. More recently, as an example, we've been investing in getting our data and audiences, including uh, curated into Reddit as an example. So building the connectivity, the awareness, the ability, the segment, segmentation rules, the things that you need to integrate into these other platforms. I mean, you're spot on. It's great to have awesome data, but if it's siloed and hard to access or hard to distribute, doesn't really do anyone any good. So it's actually something that, you know, is kind of a, uh, a bit of a superpower of ours as we've been doing it for a long time now is, is to ensure that, yeah, you might be already working in those platforms indirectly or directly, but we can very simply take a very specific audience, a custom audience built for you, built for your campaign within your ICP and get that to wherever you want it and do it really fast and then be able to measure the output.

Host: Yeah, well, and speaking of measurement, then what impact does this have on the, maybe the traditional ways of measuring things or just, you know, uh, even, you know, measuring ROI in general when you. Again, I think a lot of B2B marketers are used to uh, uh, a different way of doing things. So you know, what, what does this change as far as measurement goes?

Mark Kannon: Yeah, measurement is such a key part of it and it's often times like the ability to target and find your audience. As we talked about earlier, you know, measurement can be very challenging, uh, because you need access to data and you need to build the infrastructure to take that data. So you need log files from, from these platforms and the ability to ingest those log files and tie it back to the, to your campaign activity. And once you, and you have that sort of humming, we've launched it with our, our Bamboras B2 beacon, sort of B2B measurement, uh, solution currently in the trade desk and be available on other platforms in the coming weeks. Once you have that, you have this rich body of data that's beyond like, you know, a targeted IBM. And my, my ads were in fact seen by someone at IBM. Really important by the way, not to be underestimated. And that's what kind of what marketers are asking for when they're looking for measurement. But what you show them and what you show the brand is the type of engagement, the number of times it's engaged with that company, the reactions and sort of click through from that company, all these sort of signals of intent and sort of interaction and engagement. Now fuel your strategies and fuel your tactics. Like now you've got more data which demonstrates intent. It's like, okay, that company, not only did I reach them, but they really engaged. Okay, so now I'm putting that company in a different category. I reached these other companies and yeah, I got them, but there was a low level of engagement. They're probably not in market right now. So it's, it's the ability to take that data, not just say I we did what we were supposed to. Uh, and it also gives you the ability to measure it over time. Right. Because these sales cycles are nine months to a year and a half. You know, uh, it's sort of point in time and you can measure engagement over time and the impact of that engagement happens at different, that it has at different parts of the funnel. So it's, it's a much more sort of rich and robust set of data than, than you would typically think of in, in a pure measurement solution.

Host: Yeah, And I mean, bu. Building on that, I mean you touched a little on the, the strategy here. But I wonder how having this level of audience granularity, just this able to, this ability to focus on audiences, how, how does this change a B2B CMOS strategic approach and um, you know, whether that's thinking more about omnichannel marketing, you know, some of, some of those things that maybe a B2CMO has been thinking about. Or does it, you know, can it change ABM at scale as, as well?

Mark Kannon: We think it does and ultimately it's, you know, it feeds directly into your kind of the ROI analysis from a cmo, as I mentioned, you know, it's not just sort of confirming the sort of interaction based on the campaign, but it's what's the other rich set of data that I can then use to fuel our business and the presence of that data and the ability to use that data, uh, it makes it a lot easier for the, for a CMO to justify the budget, to increase budget and to, because it becomes a bit of a flywheel. Right. I'm engaging with companies at a relatively low cost given that, you know, given the, usually the cost of what I'm selling as a way of developing signals. So it's, it kind of fundamentally changes the kind of targeting strategies uh, within abm. So it's, it's a. And we're really seeing it. Like you mentioned earlier, BSC has really sort of taken off and cracked the code and B2B is really growing because of the availability of some of these tools now.

Host: Yeah, yeah, well and also you know, I know some of the third party cookie deprecation stuff. You know, Google's been back and forth on that and you know, uh, was following the ups and downs of that. But it's still, we're still moving closer and closer to you know, first party data is you know, is key and things like that. So you know, in a uh, in a, in a world where data privacy and whether it's deprecation or just steering away from some of the third party data, you know, it seems like a partner powered approach has a lot of long term and sustainable potential in it. You know, how do you look at this and what you're doing in terms of this, you know, very data privacy conscious world that we, you know, continue to live in.

Mark Kannon: Yeah, I've uh, I've been in this programmatic advertising, data licensing, data monetization space for a long time and one of the things that, that most appealed to me about Bombora and it appeals to our customers is our co, op, our philosophy around how we collect data, consent driven based on our partnerships with our publishers and it's something that it would be hard to replicate today. We've been doing it for 10 years and we continue to add B2B publishers and large publishers on a regular basis. That gives us a consent relationship with the consumer. Um, the, and what we do, if you think about it, we don't, we like to target companies. Eventually it comes down to an idea that needs to be addressable and we have built the infrastructure for addressability. But it's that notion of is even kind of. It's like the, it's not a, it's not a people driven as it oftentimes is in B2C. It's company driven. It's like we care about activities of companies. Um, and I think what we do. And our relationship with our publishers, it gives us this really unique position from uh, a privacy and sort of position to really sort of navigate, you know, the privacy and regulatory environment. And yeah, it's a compelling story when you really look into it. And it's one of our biggest differentiators.

Host: Yeah, yeah. I mean I love to see this kind of innovation in B2B again, you know, there's B2C gets a lot of the attention, so to speak, in some of these areas. But no, it's great to see this. Well, Mark, thanks so much for joining today. One last question for you before we uh, wrap up here. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?

Mark Kannon: Oh, great question. This is a uh, complex world we live in in the B2B space. There's a lot of constituents that we work very closely with and partner with. And whenever you have this kind of ecosystem type environment, it's a lot of complexity. You need to be agile, you need to be well informed. You need to understand the challenges and opportunities for each participant in our ecosystem, whether they be our enterprise customers, our platform partners, our channel partners, our publishers, brands, agencies, really being sort of well informed to try to put you in the best position to see around corners a little bit, um, and being able to move and react to the needs of those customers. So it's, it's a really interesting set of challenges but also opportunities and just being you need to be able to be agile in this space. There's things changing all the time. But yeah, and again I. Thanks very much for, for having me. Really enjoyed the discussion.

Host: Yeah, yeah. Well, again I'd like to thank Mark Kannon, CEO at Bombora for joining the show. You can learn more about Mark and Bombora by following the links in the show notes.

Greg Kilstrom: Thanks again for listening to the B2B Agility podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please take a minute to subscribe and leave us a rating so that others can find the show more easily. You can access more episodes of the show at www.that's b2b agility.com. while you're there, check out my series of best selling agile brand guides covering a wide variety of marketing technology topics. Or you can search for Greg Kilstrom on Amazon. Until next time, stay focused and stay agile.

Mark Kannon: The agile brand.