How to use lookalike data to fuel your B2B pipeline

Don’t you wish B2B marketing had something as effective as Facebook lookalike audiences to help you target your ideal customers?

You may have an extensive background in running Facebook ads. Most people who’ve run these ads have experience with B2C demand generation. Facebook offers some competitive advantages that most other platforms couldn’t dream of because of the amount of data they have about their users.

For instance, every page you like, every post you click ‘like’ on, every brand you follow and all of the information you input about your job, title, education, day-to-day browning activity all contribute to your “graph,” which is Facebook’s way of describing the totality of your online persona. Facebook can then take that information and help their advertisers target more efficiently. One way that this is done is by using lookalike audiences.

 

What is a lookalike audience?

A lookalike audience is a list of consumers most likely to buy your product or service based on key data points pulled from your existing customer list. These data points could be a job title, location, relationship status, favorite sports team or other factors that make up a customer’s unique profile. These factors are compared to a much larger audience by using predictive analytics. The result is a highly-accurate customer persona that is algorithmically similar to your best customers or lookalikes.

Here’s a look at the process of creating a lookalike audience on Facebook: You upload a list of 500 high-value customers you’ve already worked with. Facebook takes that customer list, finds those Facebook users and uses artificial intelligence marketing solutions to deconstruct the ‘graph’ of each successful customer. Then, the AI looks at all of the commonalities between those successful customers and creates a persona.

The real magic happens next.

Facebook then uses predictive analytics to look at the entire Facebook user group and produce a list of the top 1% who are the most similar to your most successful customers, your lookalikes. This has incredible benefits for digital marketers, and it’s not uncommon for lookalike audiences to shave 50% or more off the cost of acquisition in a B2C environment.

 

So why aren’t B2B lookalike audiences a thing?

Lookalike audiences are the future of audience targeting. The problem for B2B marketers, as of this writing, is that there is no platform upon which a similar targeting structure can be built for B2B demand generation specialists. LinkedIn aside, nobody is volunteering information about themselves related to their business units, purchase behaviors, etc. This makes identifying a target audience understandably difficult. More alarming, perhaps, is the difficulty of penetrating account-based clients with this sort of targeting.

So what happens next? Are B2B Marketers just out of luck?

 

B2B data + artificial intelligence: Welcome to the nerdery

It’s time to toot our own horn because Rev has cracked this egg. We’ve established an elite team of data scientists from places like Stanford and given them access to unlimited Redbull and Doritos until they figured it out. What they came up with are called vectors.

Vectors are similar to Facebook’s graph, but their tentacles reach out far and wide into the B2B business space and seemingly touch everything.

  • Number of employees
  • Revenue
  • Job titles

Sure, but that’s the easy stuff. These are simple commodity firmographics that have been at play forever in B2B marketing.

Think deeper, more meaningful ways to slice up a company, and you’re beginning to get the point. We can look at more than how many people a company has and what its industry is, but also the skills the employees possess, their educational backgrounds, their tenure at the company, their years of experience and the profiles of the company’s leadership. We can surface data on how companies operate. We call it exegraphic data, and the results can be stunning.

We can deliver B2B lookalike audiences.

We can deliver target account lists that have a high propensity to buy.

 

Is this the future of B2B demand generation?

It’s hard to imagine an industry walking past a technology capable of disrupting the status quo. The data nerdery is a beehive of activity as the team continues to refine the vector approach, adding new dimensions and ways to slice and analyze B2B data. The results can be expected to cascade with the rising level of sophistication in artificial intelligence.

 

TL;DR

Before reading this article, you may have wondered, “What is lookalike audience targeting?” Hopefully, you now have a better understanding on the topic and how you can use it for B2B marketing.

Don’t just settle for knowing. See it in action. Contact us to schedule a demo. It will bring you one step closer to becoming the envy of the water cooler community for being the first one to find it and winning the love of the sales team.