124 | Unearthing the gold mine of B2B data

Jon Busby: So welcome again to another episode of the Tech Marketing Podcast. This is a bit of a strange one that we're doing today. This is, I'm going to call it a news bulletin. This was a great chance to speak to many of you as our listeners about what's changing in some of the B2B marketing world. Of course, if it wouldn't be, we wouldn't be talking about cookies.

and first party data without my partner in crime. When it comes to this, um, Alex Lakin, biddable director from Encore, one of our strategic partners back by

Alex Lakin: unpopular demand. I think

Jon Busby: you were hoping we wouldn't need to do this for another little while, but again, the rug has changed beneath our feet. And of course, I'm also joined by my partner in media, McKaylee Real.

Yeah. Thanks,

Michele Reale: John, for having me back.

Jon Busby: So I'm calling this 21st century gold digging because most of the gold mines out in the far west of the US have all since closed and we don't hear panning for gold as a, as a, as a career very often, but in the 21st century, we are seeing a whole new need to, to mine gold.

Data instead of mining gold. So today we're going to be talking about what that looks like in many of your organizations and what you can do to really uncover those new sources of gold. We're going to see how far this analogy can go, actually, as we go through this. But the first thing I want to mention to many of you, if you're listening to this podcast, this goes out on the 11th of September, we actually have an event on the 1st of October in London.

You're really welcome to join us where we're going to be going into some of these topics in a lot more detail. So this is a little bit of a plug for us, but we also thought it was a great Chance to, to speak to many of our listeners about these challenges that, that we're facing. When we talk about gold with our data, like what are we referring to?

Alex Lakin: Yeah. Data takes a lot of different forms and means different things, different people. But really for us, the gold is your customer data. So first party data that you collect as a business that can inform. A lot of different strategies. And that's why it's the gold, because if you pan for gold, you could understand exactly where to find that gold.

You said, how far can we take this gold mining analogy? I'm going to keep driving it. It makes panning for gold in the future much easier. So if you get a proper understanding of your customers, where they're coming from, what they're doing across your. Properties, whether that's your website or they're interacting with, I don't know, like an event or a ebook or webinar, if you understand where they're coming from and how they're interacting with you, you can go and continue to find similar goals, similar users or audience in the future.

Jon Busby: I think, and I don't want to, I'm going to keep diving into this analogy cause I really quite like it, but let's grease out on why data is so important as well. When we, Alex, me and you have been talking about first party data on this podcast two or three times in the past, it's not something, it's something that we, we were really expecting to be a bit of a cliff edge at the end of this year.

And we're going to come onto why that cliff edge is maybe a little bit softer, but still a very much a downhill slope, but why, why is that data so important when it comes to B2B marketing?

Alex Lakin: I come from an activation background where especially in B2B, you know, targeting and finding the right audience is the most important element of activating digital ad campaigns, digital marketing campaigns.

So by, again, use the panning for gold analogy, there's a lot of data out there. There's a lot of other Rocks that we're not that interested in. And it's all about finding the little nuggets of gold, finding the audience you actually want to reach. And that's the bit that's really powerful because if you can get that, if you can appear in front of the correct audience, it's a no brainer.

It makes your marketing work so much harder than if you were just taking more of a scattergun approach and not, not being super tailored.

Jon Busby: Absolutely. Let's talk about why we're talking, why we're calling it gold, right? We've Alex, me and you have talked around first party data for an awful long time.

We've been, we've probably had it on the podcast maybe twice, maybe even three times over the last few years, because we were expecting to reach a real cliff edge at the end of this year. That's now a little bit more of a downhill slope, but it's still very much trending in that direction. Like I often think.

When we're talking about gold, there were so many, and we're going to continue to use that analogy. There's, this is a big mountain that we're, we're at the top of right now. There are so many different seams that many of our clients don't go and start digging in. We, when we talk about customer data, we often think about customers that have just bought from us, but there are so many other seams that the.

They're not using when they're thinking about their first party data and about how they can do a more effective marketing, like just between us, what are some of those different extra minds that people could dig Alex? Well, you were just talking about the importance of some of that data. What's where are some of the other places people could look?

Alex Lakin: Essentially everywhere where you can, you have a touch point with your audience. There's data to collect, there's data to mine, there's gold to mine. Sorry, John, I moved off of the gold mining analogy for a second. So let's get back to that. Um, there's gold to mine. So, you know, Every time a user or your audience comes into your website, you can begin to understand what they're doing across your site, what they're interacting with, what, like, where did they come from?

Was it from a paid ad? Did they come organically? Did they register across the site for a piece of content? Or sign up to an event, what they do. Yeah. So every interaction we have is a piece of gold to mine. And the logic here is that, and I'll come onto this a bit later on, but as digital marketers, we want to find more of that gold and in the future, it is going to be potentially more difficult to find that gold if you're not already.

Looking for it.

Jon Busby: Yeah. And let's just be clear with this analogy because now I think we've probably could be confusing a little bit. We've gone way off. With it. But this is really, we're talking about your customer data and, and although, and we're going to talk about the latest Google news in a moment, cause that really does impact this.

It doesn't just because the, it, the foundations and everything is changing beneath our feet doesn't mean that first party data has become any less valuable. And so when I often think about some of those different scenes, people could mine, it's things like your customer support data, like this is a whole set of consented data that you could be using in order to build audiences to do a more effective marketing.

And many of us are just looking at. It's something like an intent data, like a six cents as an example, as our data source, while there is so much more you could be using to create more, more informed and I'm going to say interesting data sets, McKaylee, I'm going to bring you back in here. Like what's your view on the opportunity?

Many B2B marketers are missing here.

Michele Reale: I think the opportunity is significant and in many ways. The delays and the challenges that Google has had to face in obviously some of the industry changes that they want to apply, in my personal opinion, demonstrate the value of what we are discussing here. Digital ecosystem is built on deep understanding of audiences, how they behave, how they engage and how brands can use that data historically.

I know we're using a, an analogy, John around gold mining, but one of the longest standing challenges for B2B organization has always been that data has been sitting in silos. And right now there is, there should be a strong push to actually bring this data together. So it's not necessarily finding. new mind, new minds of data.

My opinion is that companies sit already right now on a huge amount of data. And one of the challenges is to bring it in, in, in an ecosystem that is built for, for this current age or an improved the way you engage and uncover audiences that are relevant to your business.

Jon Busby: What are some of the tactics or things a B2B marketer could do today in order to find and de silo some of that data?

Michele Reale: My advice would be to audit the entire marketing technology ecosystem and really understand how the ecosystem comes together. Um, often we have clients that have invested in many different, um, technologies to support marketing, um, but more often than not, they operate in isolation. So, um, this goes back actually to one of our strategic framework, John, which, um, you're very familiar, um, as, uh, as an agency together, we believe to have an innovation framework around the percent should be running.

the basics brilliantly. And often there's a huge amount of value into that before you move into adding even more complexity to your system. So an audit is very simple. It's not rocket science, but it can be incredibly valuable to really uncover the value that you have already.

Jon Busby: I don't disagree there. And that's 70 20.

10 model can be really important to make sure that you're looking at the kind of basic systems that you expect their data to be, but you're also looking slightly outside of that. The only correction I would say is almost this, the concept of marketing technology. Like we need to move up first party data can sit outside of your marketing technology stack as well.

This is your sales stack, your sales force, your sales loft, your pipe drive, all of your other systems where that data could reside. You need to be looking at. And it very holistically,

Michele Reale: I would completely agree with that. And that brings me to, to the second tactic, my advice would be to come to review entirely the user journey, the by journey for every company, understanding every touch point from, from start to finish, how that prospect or user is engaging with your brand and mapping that out in, in, in quite very granular level of detail to really understand.

You're currently capturing every single touch point. Where is the data going? How is it flowing through the marketing technology stack? And can that data point be utilized or in many ways analyzed again, consumer brands, I would say are a good example, especially e commerce websites. One of the. Challenges for business to business companies is that the role of the website, the role of digital platforms, including sales teams, they left to rethink the user journey and make sure that they're capturing everything.

Jon Busby: You've actually hit on a really interesting topic. We've not, we've actually not discussed that much internally, which is this concept of the user journey and some of the. Really the challenges associated with auditing it and understanding it in a B2C context, I think that's quite simple, right? We're not, we're often looking at a purchase.

Someone hits Google ads. They see a nice bag that they like. They add it to their basket. You can see where it gets, where it goes. The, the abandon rates happen. You can see where most of the channels that drive most of the sales in B2B that by committee can be what 13 to 17 people, I think was one of the last stats that I saw.

How can you map that in B2B? This is one of those areas I'm going to talk about. This is like a mind collapse, right? This is one of those elements where if we don't get this right, then the gold stops. How, what are some of the tactics that we would recommend for many of our customers to help map that journey in a B2B context?

Michele Reale: Clearly a lot more complicated than, um, a consumer website. Um, however, it is very exciting for business to business organization these days to be able to fill some of the gaps that historically they were facing. The challenge is not technology. There's a plethora of technology solutions, uh, available to capture data, uh, whether it's anonymous data that can still be analyzed, as well And this is less of a technology challenge, but it's more of a content strategy challenge, rethinking the engagement with digital platforms to incentivize users.

As you say, on an e commerce consumer website, you browse categories of product. You might put something in, in the basket. Therefore the analysis is a little bit. They say easier to understand. However, in a business to business context, we know from research that not only, as you mentioned, the by group is very large, but they also consume a significant amount of content.

Now, all of that data is a gold mine and going back to the topic of this discussion and capturing the data is not a technological challenge in my view. is more of a value exchange quality of the content and be able to then identify patterns and interest and categorize users based on that. That's obviously one of the dimensions here.

Alex Lakin: Value exchange, I think, is the biggest. I couldn't agree more with that statement. And I think it's almost like We spend a lot of time in B2B going on about how it's not, we're not trying to reach consumers and it's really challenging, et cetera, et cetera. But really we've got to learn from the B2C world.

What do they, what do e commerce websites do really well? You hit the homepage of a site and you get a pop up that says, sign up for 10 percent off. That's the kind of mindset while we can't as B2B marketers, we can't deploy that as easily. But what we've got to do is think about what the value exchange is.

Why is somebody coming through to my website? What do they actually want to do here? And then serve them something that incentivizes them. To sign up with you and collect that data. It could be a webinar. It could be a white paper, whatever we've got, that's the mindset shift that we've got to make.

Jon Busby: Yeah, I completely agree actually.

And glad you brought it on to the value exchange side, Alex, because in a B2B context is about making sure we create some of those content pieces that are truly valuable, we're not just creating a. You're forcing people to enter the details to download a data sheet. I think it's also important though, why we look outside the marketing technology stack to things like, uh, as one of the main sources of that data, because that's where some of the offline interactions would also, should also be recorded, which can help build that holistic picture of the buying committee.

So I think it's, you have to, McKaylee to your point, we have to. silos, some of these minds in order to put together a holistic picture of what people are doing. I think also one of the other bigger challenges, this is great. I can actually have an opinion on podcasts. This is one of the other big challenges we've got is around analytics.

Most analytics packages are built for a B2C. Very linear type journey. They're not built for understanding how B2B people interact with a website and how you, how we should be deriving value from it.

Michele Reale: And I would say on that point, again, from my perspective, that the technical side of things is less of a barrier these days is more.

A strategic thinking in terms of how do we want users to engage and how we can capture the engagement. And I think there's a huge amount of learning from again, obviously from the consumer world, but also with technologies around conversational tools on chatbots. I appreciate that in the last three or four years, the experience and technology with chatbots.

Perhaps was not as slick as some people were expecting, but we're seeing massive improvements there. Now, if you think about the role of a chatbot or a conversational type technology applied to sales conversation engagement in, in, in a different way. So rethinking how people come to the website, start engaging.

Asking questions, downloading content rather than obviously a click based journey to your point is not that linear for B2B. So we need to go deeper. We need to understand what, what are the questions that prospects need to answer and why they're coming to your website, the type of answers that you can provide and that data.

Today, even in the offline world, let's say your sales team, all of these conversations can be captured or as, as many as possible can be captured. And then the analytics piece behind the scenes can do the rest. So for me, it's not technical barriers to really apply a logic to capture as many of this, of this user journey as possible.

Jon Busby: Alex, what are some of the other. Mind collapses we could be looking at here.

Alex Lakin: Yeah, so for me there's two major ones. The first one is really obvious, but not acting, like we have gone from a world and again we're going to come on to this later, but we've gone from a world where there's a plethora of data available and a first party data strategy has historically been a nice to have to now It's a vital part of any marketing strategy moving forward.

So not acting is the biggest risk to cave in that we face. And the second one, and I'm repeatedly told that it's not sexy, but I'm going to talk about it anyway, is user consent. We live in a, we live in a GDPR world now and have done for however long it's been five, six years. There's no point in doing all of this hard work in terms of investing in a strategy and collecting all this data if you haven't got consent for it, because guess what?

You can't use it. That it's almost, it's not even a hygiene factor. It's like the first thing you need to look at is am I capturing consent from anybody hitting any of my digital properties or even offline data as well? Can I, Use that data for marketing. And if the answer to those things is yes, then we can build some really exciting strategies.

And a big part of my role is connecting the dots between all these different data silos. And if you've got consent, guess what? Sky's the limit. You can run some really cool and really innovative strategies. Which I think

Michele Reale: leads into a quality versus quantity. Aspect, especially in B2B, I think it's important for our audience in the B2B world.

Obviously numbers can be pretty large, but comparing to consumer, we're talking about smaller numbers, but consent is key, but it's also linked to quality. So what's important is to put your effort to really build a good quality. There's no point having to Alex's argument. There's no point to have unconsensual data, but there's also no point having low quality data, which brings us back to the value exchange.

It's better to have smaller data set of a high quality where we really understand what the user journey has been.

Jon Busby: I also think that's the. Advantage some of the AI elements could bring in soon as well, right? Which is a whole other conversation around if you're almost better to have 10 really engaged contacts than have a hundred disengaged contacts that you've got to sift through before you can pan through if we're going to continue the analogy, of course, we can't be talking about all of this first party data stuff without talking about the elephant in the room, which is the update from Google.

This is the reason why we've had this as a staple in our podcast for so long is that it's kept changing. Alex, I'm going to put this phone back to you because you're the one closest to this with some of the changes in the industry. Like what has Google announced and what does that mean for many of us in B2B marketing?

Alex Lakin: Yeah, good old Google. I promise I'm not going to keep this to like a 20 minute monologue. I'll do my best to keep it concise because it's been the last four years, three years of my life that we've been working on this. But essentially, so Google, yeah, three, four years ago, were planning to deprecate third party cookies.

And what I mean by that is they were technically not going to support the use of third party cookies in the Chrome browser. The reason for that is was is because they deemed that cookies were not privacy centric and not secure enough to um, to essentially like facilitate ad targeting because that's what they were using.

Cookies weren't ever designed to to be used to target an audience. But that's what the ad tech community comes on. Cookies were invented however, whenever it was 20 plus years ago. And ad tech like, Ooh, there's an identifier that, that follows somebody around the web and is consistent in loads of different web environments.

Brilliant. We'll use that to target people. So Google were very much against that. They had planned to remove their support for third party cookies at the, supposed to be at the start of, at the end of last year. Then it was at the end of this year, then it got pushed to next year. And now as of about a month ago, they've decided that they will not, not technically remove support for third party cookies.

Now it's not been confirmed why that was my, my view on it is that they, they couldn't remove support without. being seen to be monopolistic. And as we all know, they've got a lot of anti what to I think antitrust cases going on at the moment in the US with the DOJ. And I think this is just like another another ember or another iron in the fire, if you like, that they needed to avoid.

And it's worth saying that the UK's Competition Markets Authority were the regulator and were involved in every step of Google's removal of cookies. And again, my hunch is that they couldn't agree on a way for Google to remove third party cookies and not have a monopoly over digital ad buying.

Jon Busby: So we're back.

in the world of third party cookies. But that's not really the end of the story though, is it here?

Alex Lakin: Yeah, no, it's not. The saga continues, just adding on a few more Star Wars films. The saga always goes on. So, the latest is that Google will not technically remove support for third party cookies, but what they will do, and what all the industry got was about a hundred word blog post as to their plans, as it stands, they will move towards a user friendly focused approach to removal of third party cookies.

So just to be clear on that, their view of third party cookies has absolutely not changed, but the remove, the technical removal will change. And again, my view here is that they're hoping that by giving a user choice, As to whether they opt into third party cookies or not, they will hope that the users will remove third party cookies for them by opting out.

And there's a lot of speculation what that's going to look like, but there is a wide view at the moment that it's probably going to look something similar to Apple's app transparency tracking. So I'm sure everybody's seen the pop ups that you get when you download a new app on iOS these days where it says, ask app not to track.

Yes, no. The speculation is there will be Google offer something similar to their Chrome users. I think

Jon Busby: this is something, there's both good and bad sides of this. I think depending on which way you look at it, was a very good blog post by one of the other ad commentators on this as well, that used even more analogies than we've tried to use today.

But the, On a good side, like it can only be a positive thing to be giving users more choice, like the ask app not to track app transparency feature in iOS has allowed us to provide a consistent experience across all apps and you understand exactly how they're using your data, which is, can only be a better thing.

But I think there's also a bit of a Trojan horse here, which is essentially Google, we're driving us to. Be using their, to use their products a lot more things like the, um, privacy sandbox and so on, and it was proven that wouldn't, that would be anti competitive. And yet, so giving users the choice, essentially, yes, this might feel like a better user experience, but it could end up kind of playing into Google's hands and really us ending up in exactly the place that we were.

expecting to end up in January, but with, with a less developed ecosystem and ad tech support system around it.

Alex Lakin: Yeah, ultimately we don't know what the final solution is going to look like from Google, but what we do know is that when Apple made those app transparency changes, it made in app identifiers drop off by over

Jon Busby: 90%.

Apple basically

Alex Lakin: removed in app identifiers, by the way. That

Jon Busby: was, it was removed

Alex Lakin: in the API. Exactly. So if we're assuming the same thing's going to happen with third party cookies, we cannot rely on third party based cookie data. To continue finding our audiences across the web.

Jon Busby: Which means we've got to look at making sure we provide value to our audiences through the value exchange.

And then we've got to make sure that we collect and get consent for that data. That's really what we're saying at the end here, isn't it? Nothing's changed, everything's changed, but nothing's changed. Exactly. And we need to keep looking at the importance of that data.

Alex Lakin: Exactly. And there's still, there's alternative identifiers, alternative to cookies that we can continue to use in the future.

That market is just exploding. There's so many players in that now. To be clear to everybody listening, we're still going to be able to reach our audiences across the web, but we need to collect first party data in order to understand them much clearer. And then it's a lot easier to then go and find them across the web.

Jon Busby: But Katie, I'm going to bring you in here for your commentary as well.

Michele Reale: There is a huge amount of opportunity to, to obviously discover audiences and engage using multiple sources of data. From my perspective, it's more of a kind of holistic approach. And John, I hope you're not going to be upset if I use yet another analogy.

I think when it comes to the world of data, there should be no company Really relying only on a single source or over a few sources of data. It's like investment. When you're looking at your investment portfolio, you do need to spread the risk and make sure that you're collecting data in many different ways, but regardless.

There should be no company relying on any single technology provider or company out there to find prospects or audiences that you're trying to sell to companies now, given the importance of digital platforms and the user experience, should really invest in their own data, which is, I agree, more expensive for sure than probably acquiring third party data.

But that means you're at the mercy of. one single company change in the whole of the marketing industry, which, you know, for some big corporations, I don't think

Alex Lakin: it's very wise. We have to be agnostic. Portfolio approach is the way to go with any tech stack these days. Who knows what's going to happen with cookies, who knows what's going to happen, the outcome of these DOJ antitrust cases.

The future of Google is bleak. Uncertain.

Michele Reale: There's also huge differences in terms of geographies, which had, which adds a little bit of complexity. Some countries, obviously, for example, in Europe, they, they're being quite strict and giving the user a lot more power. There's countries where the barriers to access data are a little bit lower.

Again, there's a question mark on the quality of the data. So for global companies, so many variables, legislation, user behavior, Understanding of the impact of your consent, as well as obviously the technology players, which brings me to my earlier point, which is the companies need to be in the driving seat, not in the receiving seat.

Jon Busby: I think that investment approach, the portfolio approach, like you say, Alex, is key. Actually, I was debating this with someone the other day about being, you should be, we were talking less about integration and more about connectivity is the word that we used. And I, in developer parlance, I would tend to refer to that thing.

Being, you have to loosely couple systems. Don't try and build or buy into something that's just gives you no chance of any flexibility. You've got to be building the best of breed and finding ways to couple those systems together so that you can easily swap them out. I'm going to start to bring us to a close here because I think this is, this has been a short kind of news bulletin type episode, so thank you listeners for.

Sticking with us through this wonderful debate, what I want, I'm going to try and summarize us with a bit of, with the bring us back to the gold mining analogy, because actually what the vision I've had in my head, as we've been talking about this data is most companies are sitting on a mountain. The size of that mountain maybe depends on the type of business they are, and it depends on, on how much data they've been collecting, but many of them are only digging one or two mines.

And really you should be looking at that and saying, how can I dig more? And then how can I get that gold out of those different individual minds and into a refinement plant that means I can then go out there and use that gold to be even more valuable. And really the news that Google have come out with recently, although it's moved us back to a third party cookie world, really just means the price of gold is going to continue to go up and really you should be looking.

to get more out of it. So hopefully I've managed to tie all that analogy back together. But Michele and Alex, any closing thoughts?

Alex Lakin: It's never too late to start looking internally. Like I said earlier on, it's a mindset change, but just look inside your own mountain and see what gold exists would be my takeaway.

Michele Reale: Do not procrastinate this any longer. It's, you're probably sitting already. As John mentioned on, on a mountain of data and there's a huge opportunity there for you to uncover. It's as simple as that.

Jon Busby: Even though the third party cookie deadline has been moved out, that doesn't mean that we should slow down.

So thank you very much, Alex and Michele for joining me on today's podcast. If anything has interested you today, then do join us on the 1st of October in London. We make sure we drop the link in the show notes for this episode, and we hope to see you again in two weeks. Thanks everybody.

Michele Reale: Thank you. Bye bye.