Bombora VP: Digital Marketers Still Struggle with B2B2C

You’ve heard of B2B. You’ve heard of B2C. But if you’re like many digital marketers, you might still be unsure about what B2B2C is or how it factors into the way brands today are reaching professional targets with relevant content.

A recent partnership between Gravy Analytics, a provider of enterprise location intelligence, and Bombora, a company that provides B2B intent data solutions, has put B2B2C marketing in the spotlight. Together, Gravy and Bombora will use location-based consumer insights to generate new audience segments for advertisers looking to reach professional targets. 

The concept is innovative, but also new — and somewhat complicated — which is why Street Fight was interested in talking with Bombora Vice President of Business Development Tony Mowad to learn more. 

Here’s what Mowad had to say about what B2B2C means for the martech industry, the tools he sees sales teams using to gain a competitive advantage, and how intent-powered audience data solutions are helping brands stay on the right side of ever-changing privacy laws.

Q. How does Bombora’s new partnership with Gravy Analytics expand what you can offer to businesses? 

More than half of the disposable income in the U.S. is held by white-collar job professionals, but B2C digital marketers can struggle to reach them effectively through traditional methods. B2C digital marketers have grown quite comfortable with targeting their prospective customers based on an extensive history of using data, such as gender, age, geo-location, and household income. However, this data has become table stakes. 

By partnering with Gravy Analytics, our goal was to enable digital marketers to create separation from competitors who rely on traditional segment-based targeting. For example, C-Suite professionals who are interested in new homes are more likely to purchase expensive houses, while luxury interest likely serves as a proxy for serving an ad for a luxury car brand. These insights help to inform advertiser strategy. We worked with Gravy Analytics to create unique B2B2C audiences that enable marketers to think about their customers in this distinctive way.

Q. Your position at Bombora, coupled with your long history in digital media sales, gives you a unique perspective on the martech industry. Based on your experience, why do you believe that right now is such an important time for companies in your space? 

Marketing budgets are tight. If brands want to get the most out of their programmatic campaigns, they should focus on intent-powered audience data solutions. This way, they can better understand their target audiences, create more relevant content, and fine-tune their ad targeting to focus on accounts with the highest propensity to buy. By doing this, they’ll not only make their marketing budget go further, but will also stay on the right side of ever-changing privacy laws. And, of course, they’ll be in a better position to stand out from the competition and gain more measurable ROI from their programmatic campaign spend.

Q. You’ve spent an extensive amount of time working directly with sales teams, so based on that, what do you think sales teams are looking for today, and how is that different from five years ago? 

Sales teams are eager to gain any advantage they can in an increasingly competitive landscape, especially nowadays, when they’re often being asked to do more with less. It has become imperative to prove ROI and provide data-driven, actionable insights. Digital marketers and sales professionals are looking for guidance on how to effectively reach their prospects and customers at the right time, when they’re in the right mindset to buy. 

We have more data available to us than ever before, but many salespeople don’t know what to do with it all. They need a way to filter through the noise and find, and use, the highest-quality data.

Q. Bombora’s roster of big-name clients is pretty impressive. What’s the secret to selling to major firms like IBM and Salesforce?

Big-name clients want to work with established partners who are trustworthy and have a proven track record of success. Bombora’s ethically sourced, privacy compliant data does not rely on the bidstream, but rather our proprietary co-op of high-quality B2B sites. We also have deep channel and platform integrations, ensuring data portability and ubiquity. 

Q. Based on your experiences, how are B2B marketers and sales teams thinking about privacy compliance right now? 

Privacy and compliance are top of mind for B2B digital marketers and sales teams. Bombora has been at the forefront of privacy compliance. Our data comes not from the bidstream but from a privacy-compliant publisher co-op: all members have opted in to share their data. We not only adhere to all IAB standards, as well as CCPA and GDPR, but have also received third-party certification via Neutronian, the industry leader in compliance verification. Per a Neutronian analysis, Bombora ranked 2nd out of 150 firms that are “data providers who commonly sell audience segments, data feeds or data analytics solutions to marketers.” 

As we move into the cookieless future, we continue to innovate in order to ensure that we offer future-proof solutions for our advertisers.

Q. What should martech vendors be doing to better meet the needs of sales teams, particularly as it involves data privacy? 

Martech and adtech vendors should establish a data ethics policy that goes beyond mitigating risk and avoiding fines from regulatory agencies, and also puts consumers’ interests first and builds trust within the company as well as with consumers and partners. 

It’s important to hold companies accountable, and highlight their moral obligation to consumers when collecting, storing, and activating personally identifiable information – specifically in regard to how mishandling or misuse can have a negative impact on users. 

As Google sunsets third-party cookies, data providers will need ways to maintain their revenue, and advertisers will be on the hunt for tools that help them continue to deliver targeted ads. Moving forward, all companies buying marketing data must ask questions about data ownership, transparency, privacy, intention, and outcomes before paying for a data resource. To ensure ethical standards and compliance throughout the ecosystem, all data and its origins and activations must be considered. These considerations apply to all parties involved: the companies collecting, selling, and using the data. It is in the best interest of all stakeholders to understand where data originates, how it is activated, and to ensure consent and compliance.

Q. Going forward, what should we be watching for at Bombora and throughout your industry more broadly? 

The Gravy Analytics partnership is a great example of innovative solutions that bring new data. The industry can expect to see us come out with new data-based products and services, as well. Media buyers have been searching for more transparency and control in their omni-channel programmatic media buying, and Bombora has the ability to provide both. It’s a great time to optimize, measure, and prove the impact of your programmatic B2B campaigns with transparent reporting.