People-Based Marketing: Meet Your Customers Where They Are

As marketers, it’s easy to reduce the recipients of our campaigns to ICPs, buyer personas, and target audiences. Yet the simple truth is that we’re marketing our products and services to people, just like you and me.

Therefore, It’s no surprise that personalized marketing outperforms a more generic approach, and there are now entire marketing strategies focused on personalization, such as account-based marketing (ABM).

People-based marketing, for instance, takes a similar approach to ABM, but with fundamental differences that set it apart.

Let’s dive deeper into what people-based marketing really is and how it can boost B2B engagement.

What Is People-Based Marketing?

People-based marketing is hyper-personalized. Rather than targeting a broad audience or entire company, PBM targets individuals, resulting in a bespoke experience. This is made possible by collecting data from both online and offline sources to target your ideal customers—wherever they happen to be—with specific, relevant messaging.

A Brief History of Cookies

Since the mid-‘90s, small text or image files (“cookies”) have been in place to track online users across the web for advertising purposes. Initially, cookies were created by and limited to websites you visited to remember your and improve your experience of the that website. They didn’t track activity beyond that specific website.

Third-party cookies, on the other hand, can track your actions across various websites and are used to target you with personalized ads regardless of what website you happen to be on. In short, they revolutionized online advertising,

Global privacy regulation, however, has begun targeting and cracking down on the tracking of people’s online activity and behavior. Because of this, major companies like Google (er, Alphabet) and Apple have been working with publishers, marketers, and regulators on plans to replace cookies altogether. Those plans keep getting delayed, though, and online users these days have plenty of options when it comes to blocking cookies and other software tracking tricks of the trade.

Even if third-party cookies go away, internet tracking won’t. It simply means that advertisers must look for more reliable options for collecting consumer data. Fortunately, other ways to monitor prospects to understand who’s taking an interest in your brand already exist.

How People-Based Marketing Works

People-based marketing relies on first-party data collected from your site visitors, prospects, and customers. Unlike cookies and tracking pixels, first-party data enables you to better understand buying behavior across any channel or device to identify trends and gauge interest level, making it a valuable strategy in a world without third-party cookies, which will likely become a reality within the next couple of years.

First-party data can be gathered from tools such as Google Analytics, which provides intel on the website content your customers interact with (and how they got there), the basic demographics of your audience, what type of devices they use to visit your site, and so on. You can also collect first-party data through forms on your website, such as “contact us” forms or forms to request free quotes, trials, or demos. These simple lead generation forms can help you establish simple yet essential user info such as name, email, and even the reason a user is visiting your website.

This online first-party data can be augmented by offline activities such as visits to your booth at a trade show or offline interactions with your sales team.

All the data you collect can then be used to craft detailed profiles of your prospects, enabling you to target them with content tailored to their individual behavior. This creates a more personalized experience for your prospects, which is an essential element of effective B2B marketing campaigns.

Delivering personalized messaging to prospects at the right time via their preferred channel or device provides an individualized experience. And if your potential customers seamlessly pick up where they left off when switching from their cellphones to their laptops to their tablets and back again, that’s a great customer experience. And better CX leads to deeper engagement, which leads to improved conversion rates, and, in turn, more revenue.

What’s the Difference Between PBM and ABM?

Think of PBM as an evolution of account-based marketing. The two are closely related—they both focus on personalization to optimize results—but they differ in one key way: ABM focuses on targeting key accounts, while people-based marketing goes one step further to target the specific people comprising the buying committee within those key accounts.

According to Gartner, the average B2B purchase decision is made by a team of up to 10 people. It’s not rocket science: It’s easy to see how you’d have a better chance of making a sale if you target all 10 of those decision-makers.

Now, imagine how much better your chances would be if you were to target the six who have already interacted with your brand. That’s where people-based marketing comes in. PBM uses behavioral data to target the people who have already shown an interest in your brand—whether that’s downloading a whitepaper, or engaging with a social post, or just spending significant time on your website browsing specific product pages.

Think of it like this: Instead of targeting an HR title at GE, you’re crafting and delivering a digital ad geared specifically to the payroll manager within the HR team at GE’s North American operations who recently visited your website and downloaded a report.

That’s the kind of hyper-personalization PBM offers.

Why Try People-Based Marketing?

 The difference between ABM and PBM may be subtle, but the results are more impactful:

• Create a more precise customer profile. With PBM, you can get a better understanding of your ideal customer by analyzing their past behavior. For example, if a COO of a major automobile company clicks on your LinkedIn ad, they are showing an initial interest in your product or service. This kind of behavior will factor into the lead score, and a marketer can use this info to develop a stronger ideal customer profile (ICP). Accurate ICPs optimize marketing spend since they take the guess-work out of pursuing contacts at key accounts who may not be relevant or interested.
• Offer more tailored messaging and see engagement rates go up. With PBM, you tap into first-party data to create content your customers want based on how they have interacted with your brand in the past. By better understanding your audience, you can deliver more personalized messages and offers. You can also continuously learn about your customers’ behaviors, see exactly what kind of ads and content they’re interacting with, and use this to refine your future marketing efforts. The more personalized the marketing, the higher the engagement rate. In fact, using B2B personalization as part of a brand’s marketing strategy results in 63% better customer engagement and higher conversions.
• Do more with your marketing budget and achieve a higher ROI. Times are not easy, and marketing budgets will face more scrutiny as economic uncertainty and layoffs continue. PBM literally allows you to “do more with less.” It helps you continuously learn what’s resonating with your audience and see how they’re interacting with your brand. You can use this knowledge to refine future marketing campaigns and optimize your brand’s communication channels, including websites and social media.
• Retarget and lock in those prospects. Data is a powerful tool. If a prospect doesn’t convert the first time, knowing how and where to reconnect with them again can help your chances. For example, if a prospect clicked on an ad on a mobile device but dropped off, PBM can help you remarket to that user on another device to reinforce the messaging and increase the odds of winning them back.

PBM’s Hyper-Personalization Will Boost Engagement and Conversion

Customer-centric marketing is not a new concept. And we know that ABM is a proven sales tactic. B2B people-based marketing takes these concepts one step further. PBM enables hyper-personalization by tapping into the data you already have available on your customers’ buying behaviors to offer highly relevant experiences that truly resonate and, ultimately, convert.

Learn more about PBM with our on-demand webinar, Generate Qualified Leads with Data-Driven, Customer-Centric Messaging.