B2B brands are spending millions of digital marketing dollars a year trying get their target audience to visit their websites and consume content – but how to do you ensure you’re getting the right content to the right people at the right companies at the right time?
Getting your prospects to your site is only half the battle – but most of them will stay invisible and never fill out a form.
Re-targeting is Not Enough
For the last decade or so, both B2C and B2B brands have employed cookie-based retargeting as an effective way to generate leads and sales (and if your B2B brand is not taking advantage of cookie-based retargeting/remarketing, you should be).
You’ve all experienced cookie-based retargeting – you visit a brand’s website, and the site drops a cookie in your browser. If you leave that site without making an inquiry or download, the cookie signals programmatic display ad networks like Google Ads or AdRoll to ‘retarget’ you with ads for that business, everywhere you go. As the theory goes, you’ve already visited that brand’s site and therefore shown some interest in their products or services – “buyer intent,” or “propensity to buy” in advertising parlance. So, they retarget you with ads containing offers designed to entice you to return to their site and convert or close the deal.
More and more people are regularly clearing cookies from their browsers or blocking brands from dropping cookies in their browsers in the first place. This has become even more prevalent since the EU GDPR regulations went into effect in 2018.
The person who visits your site is anonymous – even after you drop the cookie, you don’t know who they are until they “convert” – i.e. make a purchase, fill out a form, or otherwise give you their contact information.
Cookie-based retargeting can also fall prey to non-human traffic like web crawlers, click farms and server farms, which wastes your precious marketing dollars.
With increasing privacy regulations and the impending phase-out of third-party cookies by browsers, relying solely on cookie-based retargeting is becoming less viable. Brands need new strategies to reach their target audiences effectively.
In parallel, several years ago B2B brands started identifying the companies of their anonymous website visitors based on their IP address. This was helpful to B2B marketing and sales teams who were employing an account-based marketing approach. They could monitor the companies that visited their website and match those companies against target accounts. What usually followed was some combination of email or phone outreach to existing or newly-acquired contacts from those visiting companies.
The problem is: the actual visitors themselves are still anonymous. You could see what company they are from, but especially if you are targeting big enterprise accounts, finding the actual visitors themselves can be like searching for a needle in a haystack.
In addition, doing cold email and phone outreach to prospects is never a very effective way to get in touch with them, especially if you’re an emerging B2B brand that is still fighting for mind share among your target prospects. So how do you get your brand in front of target prospects without breaking the bank on spray-and-pray ads?
Consumer brand marketers can now identify and target individual households by IP address, but in the B2B realm, targeting companies by IP address means serving ads to every person in the company. This is not very efficient, and only slightly better than an old-school ‘spray-and-pray’ approach. You can serve ads to your target accounts, but the ad creative itself must be relatively generic. You can’t personalize your ads to specific job titles or departments who may be on the buying committee at your target accounts.
This is where reverse-IP pretargeting comes into play, transforming the way B2B marketers improve brand building on social platforms.
Reverse-IP pretargeting is an innovative strategy that empowers B2B marketers to connect with potential customers before they even visit their website. By identifying the IP addresses of interested companies, brands can serve tailored advertisements to these potential leads on social media, increasing the chances of conversion.
One key benefit of reverse-IP pretargeting is the ability to deliver highly personalized content. By analyzing IP data, marketers gain insights into their audience’s interests and needs, allowing them to craft customized ad campaigns that resonate more effectively with potential customers.
This personalization not only improves engagement rates but also strengthens relationships with your audience.
Additionally, reverse-IP pretargeting improves the efficiency of marketing campaigns. Instead of using generic ads, brands can focus on a targeted audience, leading to a better ROI. This approach saves time and money and directs efforts toward individuals who are more likely to be interested in the brand’s offerings.
So, how can you set up an effective reverse-IP pretargeting strategy? It requires careful planning and the right tools. Here’s how to build and implement your strategy across social platforms while integrating it with your existing ABM efforts.
Start by implementing reverse-IP lookup capabilities on your website using tools that can identify companies visiting your site through their IP addresses.
Configure your tracking to focus on:
Transform the collected IP data into actionable targeting lists by:
Different social platforms offer unique capabilities for reverse-IP pretargeting:
Use LinkedIn’s Matched Audiences to:
Implement through Business Manager by:
Connect your reverse-IP pretargeting with your broader ABM efforts by:
Track key metrics to optimize campaigns:
Use platforms like Metadata.io to automate campaign management and analyze performance data, allowing you to optimize your strategy in real-time.
Remember, reverse-IP pretargeting isn’t standalone. According to research, 60% of B2B marketers consider social media their most effective revenue-driving channel. Combining reverse-IP pretargeting with your existing social media strategy creates a targeted approach to reaching decision-makers.
Consider a combined pretargeting and retargeting approach: use reverse-IP data to identify and target companies initially, then retarget engaged users with more specific, role-based content. This strategy is more nuanced and effective than traditional cookie-based approaches, especially given increasing privacy regulations.
What if you could take that company IP address data you collect on your website and use it to ‘pretarget’ members of the buying committee at your target accounts?
It would work like this:
An anonymous person visits your site. Your IP address data provider tells you they are from Company ABC.Company ABC is on your target account list, but you have not yet generated any qualified leads or opportunities with them.You work with your firmographic data providers and generate a list of the contacts on the buying committee (by department or job role/title) at Company ABC.You use those contact lists to create custom audiences for social ad platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook. Even better, since you know their job roles and titles, you can serve them personalized display ads that speak to their interests/needs with Company ABC.
Some targeted contacts will respond to your ads and convert, thereby triggering additional retargeting ads that build engagement and reinforce your message.When you go after the remaining targeted contacts with email and phone outreach, chances are they have seen your ads and online content, making them more likely to engage.
Integrating pretargeting and retargeting strategies creates a powerful marketing synergy, guiding potential customers through their buying journey more effectively.
Orchestrate campaigns in the right sequence. Start with pretargeting to create initial awareness among potential customers. Once users engage with your brand, activate retargeting campaigns to reinforce your message and drive conversions.
For example, a travel agency first used pretargeting for vacation ideas. After visits to their website, they deployed retargeting ads featuring specific vacation packages, increasing bookings.
Implement precise audience segmentation based on demographics, firmographics, online behavior, engagement levels, purchase history, and website interaction data.
Your content should adapt to each segment’s buying journey stage. Pretargeting focuses on educational material and brand awareness, while retargeting showcases specific products, testimonials, or offers relevant to previous interactions.
Maintain campaign effectiveness by:
Track performance using metrics like cross-campaign engagement rates, sequential conversion paths, time to conversion, customer acquisition costs, and ROAS.
Don’t forget to investigate non-ad related issues affecting performance, such as website UX, navigation, and checkout processes. A holistic optimization approach reveals improvement opportunities beyond ads.
To effectively measure and optimize your reverse-IP pretargeting campaigns, focus on brand awareness and conversion metrics while maintaining a data-driven optimization approach.
Your measurement strategy should cover brand awareness metrics:
And conversion metrics:
Advanced A/B testing goes beyond examining basic elements like headlines. It delves into user experience factors, ensuring that every part of the user journey is optimized. This approach allows for a deeper understanding of what truly drives conversions and user engagement. By testing various aspects, you can identify how different elements, such as button placements, images, and copy, influence behavior.
Another crucial aspect of A/B testing is analyzing performance across various placements and devices. This helps you understand how your content performs on different platforms, whether it’s desktop, mobile, or tablet, and across diverse ad placements. By tailoring content to suit these variations, you can enhance user experience and improve campaign results.
In addition to user experience factors, it’s important to monitor the technical performance of your website. Keeping track of website load times is essential, with a goal to keep them under 3 seconds. A slow-loading website can cause users to abandon their journey before they even engage with your content. Ensuring fast, smooth performance not only improves user satisfaction but also supports better conversion rates.
Similarly, assessing the relevance and consistency of your landing pages plays a crucial role in campaign success. Landing pages should align closely with the user’s expectations and the ad or content that led them there. If there is a disconnect between what the user expected and what they find, it can lead to increased bounce rates and lower conversion rates.
Segmentation analysis also plays a significant role in refining your campaigns. By breaking down results based on placement performance, device usage, demographic response, and time of day effectiveness, you can identify patterns that lead to better-targeted marketing efforts. This allows for more tailored messaging that resonates with specific audience segments at the right time and place.
Finally, real-time adjustments are crucial for campaign optimization. Actively monitoring campaigns ensures that you are ready to make necessary changes on the fly. Whether it’s modifying targeting parameters, adjusting creative elements, reallocating budget, or pausing underperforming campaigns, real-time flexibility is key to maintaining momentum and improving results.
By following these measurement and optimization strategies, you’ll achieve sustainable results from reverse-IP pretargeting campaigns while focusing on revenue-generating metrics.
With privacy regulations tightening, B2B marketers must rethink their approach to reaching decision-makers. Reverse-IP pretargeting offers a powerful alternative by identifying target companies before they visit your site, allowing for precise, account-based social advertising.
This strategy improves brand visibility, engagement, and marketing efficiency by delivering personalized content to key stakeholders. When combined with retargeting, it creates a full-funnel approach that nurtures prospects throughout their buying journey.
Ready to optimize your marketing with smarter targeting? Book a demo with Metadata.io to see how our platform can help you drive more leads and scale your results effortlessly.