As anyone in marketing knows nailing down a cross-channel B2B audience strategy has never been more critical. This blog will provide insight into what key features accelerate learnings and help create consistent performance improvements through a cross-channel audience strategy. By following our recommendations, you will be able to understand what audiences are most effective across different channels, allowing you to focus your investment on what drives the biggest return.

Users who have already engaged with a brand have a higher propensity to purchase. Leveraging audiences within a paid media strategy improves engagement rates, reduces cost per acquisition and influences a higher return on investment in almost every case.

How do you define your target audience?

Customer Matched audiences can also be useful to engage with existing customers. It allows you to leverage upsell opportunities or segment prospects based on information they have already provided.  

Analytics based audiences should be built on user behavior, page visits and life-cycle duration. Analytics based audiences are critical for B2B clients to not only understand patterns in their purchase path, but to re-engage with potential clients too.

Similar or Lookalike audiences can often make marketers apprehensive because they haven’t defined the segments used to create the list. The best way to begin is by testing similar to converter audiences in SEM, layer them over a campaign and don’t apply a bid modifier. Once you understand how they perform, optimize the bid adjustment after digesting the data.

Demandbase/Google Analytics Custom Dimension based audiences provide an opportunity for Marketers to further refine their analytics-based audiences. Combining Demandbase with an advanced knowledge of Google Analytics allows you to build audiences using custom dimensions(including specific company lists, company size, industries and more). As these audiences are built in Google Analytics, they can be pushed seamlessly into AdWords for some seriously refined remarketing.

How do you build an audience structure?

Analytics based audiences are key for any B2B client to truly understand their target audience. By following our recommended audience structure, you’ll be able to capture insight immediately, which will help shape cross-channel strategies and unlock opportunities to test audiences across different platforms.

  • Create audiences across each possible stage of the funnel:
  • Create audiences across multiple life-cycles to understand how long it takes for a non-converting user to purchase. To achieve this, you will need to build the different life cycle durations across the same audience. You can then build a targeted/ negative audience strategy to create a time parting effect. Apply this using custom combinations or within campaign settings.

The example below shows Step 3 Basket Droppers audience:

Launching audiences across different stages in the funnel and across different life cycles will give you accelerated learnings. Get answers to those critical questions:

  • How long does it take for a re-engaged user to convert?
  • How valuable is a user who gets to the 1st step vs the final purchase step?
  • How do the different life cycles and funnel stages perform across channels?

Invest in the right areas & identify cross channel opportunities

Look at how these audiences perform across different platforms and refine your strategies accordingly – Facebook is a very different channel to search – but what specifically does it’s performance tell you?

Expand on high performing audiences in an RLSA only model, tailor messaging and target broader keywords. Take it to the next level by launching high performing segments with