On a recent episode of the B2B Influence podcast, we spoke with Datari Ladejo, founder and CEO of Fernhill Digital Consulting, a strategic marketing agency specializing in the West African market. With experience guiding both global and local brands to adapt their messaging for African buyers, Datari dove into her proven framework for creating impactful B2B campaigns across the diverse regions of this continent. Here are the key components of that framework:

1. Use Authentic Storytelling as Your Foundation

In African culture, stories and proverbs have been passed down through generations, and they continue to influence how people on the continent teach, learn and share information.

"Storytelling has always preserved our culture. Even now in a B2B context, we're able to adapt storytelling to this new reality that we have in the digital economy and tell our stories to people in a way that resonates with them.”

What's changed is that brands are no longer relying on Western cultural references to connect. Instead, they're embracing African narratives on their terms—through music, fashion, art, and digital platforms—creating more authentic and compelling messaging.

This shift in ownership of the narrative, powered by digital connectivity and cultural pride, has made storytelling a critical brand differentiator. Datari emphasized that companies that fail to reflect regional identity in their campaigns risk appearing tone-deaf or disconnected.

2. Hyper-localization Is Essential

Datari emphasizes that Africa is not one market. West Africa alone contains multiple countries with very different cultures, values, and languages. That's why her firm often partners with local specialists in each country to ensure campaigns reflect the appropriate cultural context. What resonates in Nigeria may fall flat in Ghana or Kenya. Even within countries, urban and rural experiences vary widely.

For a parallel to U.S. regional differences, consider this: a campaign directed at a New York audience would differ vastly from one targeted at the Deep South.

The takeaway for marketers is that hyper-localization is essential. Broad-brush approaches won’t work. Today's most successful B2B brands are tailoring language, visuals, and platforms to match the expectations of specific audiences—not entire continents.

3. Prioritize Mobile-First, Not Just Digital-First

Smartphone adoption in Africa is rising rapidly, and for many people, it’s their only digital access point. That’s why Datari says mobile-first design is non-negotiable for any B2B campaign.

Even in rural communities, someone may not own a laptop, but they’re more likely going to have access to a phone even if it’s shared within a community. She emphasizes that if marketers don't optimize their content for mobile, they’ll miss their audience.

At the same time, mobile usage comes with infrastructure constraints. Most Africans pay for data by the gigabyte, so content must be lightweight and fast-loading.

4. Use Content Formats That Fit the Infrastructure

Because mobile data is costly, brands must be strategic about content formats. Datari focuses on short, snackable videos that immediately grab attention and include a clear call to action.

Snackable content doesn’t mean simplistic content—it means focused—and It’s not about compressing a two-minute pitch into 15 seconds. It's about delivering a hook that invites the user to learn more.

Datari recommends:

• Short-form video (7–15 seconds) that leads to lightweight landing pages
• Text-based explainers for low-bandwidth users
• Localized visuals and languages to improve comprehension

5. Embrace Influencer-Led Trust Building

In a region where Datari says distrust can run deep, influencers have emerged as powerful bridges between brands and audiences. While influencer marketing started in B2C sectors like fashion, telecom, and food, B2B brands are now seeing success using influencers to drive awareness and engagement.

“These influencers built genuine communities before the hype arose,” she said. “When they endorse certain products, services, visions, companies, it adds that extra layer of trust … their audiences trust them, and that trust transfers to the brands they endorse.”

The bottom line is that, in Africa, trust, authenticity, and connection are key.

Final Takeaway

As more brands around the world seek to enter the African market, a top takeaway from the conversation with Datari is that marketers need to take time to understand the specific African region they are targeting. When they do this, their impact rises exponentially.

As an agency specializing in customer acquisition, we agree with this principle wholeheartedly. From our experience in the U.S. market, we know that when we dig deep to provide clients with robust knowledge of their target audience—whether through precision audience-building, B2B2C matching, intent data, or a combination of these or other approaches—we can realize dramatic improvements in campaign relevance, engagement, and business impact. You can read more about our services and our award-winning B2B2C database here.

For more information about Fernhill Digital, Datari can be reached at hello@fernhilldigital.com or visit fernhilldigital.com.

To catch the full podcast episode or learn about becoming a guest on B2B Influence, visit https://podcast.outwardmedia.com/.

B2B Marketers Are All In on AI—But Now What?

According to a recent MediaPost article, 88% of marketers are already using generative AI tools. More than half (56%) say they use them “heavily.” From content creation to ideation and personalization, AI is no longer experimental—it’s embedded in day-to-day workflows.

But for Ginny, simply using AI isn’t enough.

“AI is fast and low cost, but if it doesn’t reflect your brand’s voice and personality, the content is useless,” she says.

Her agency built its own AI tools—using engines like ChatGPT as a base—specifically to preserve brand consistency across channels for clients. It’s a move she says is essential to scaling without diluting identity.

The Risk of Losing Brand Identity

As more content is generated faster, inconsistency becomes a real threat. Visuals, tone of voice, and message alignment often fall apart when multiple tools and templates are involved.

Ginny’s solution: enforce branding at every touchpoint. From custom AI content generators to tools like Canva (used with preloaded brand kits), VDS ensures that every asset—whether a LinkedIn post or a blog—reflects the brand’s look and feel.

“If your colors, tone, or design elements shift constantly, people won’t recognize your brand. And if they don’t recognize you, you’ve lost the first battle in marketing: recall.”

Marketing Education Is More Important Than Ever

Ginny also stressed the need to reset client expectations in the AI era. With the promise of speed and scale, many clients expect instant results—high rankings on Google, viral content, and immediate leads.

That’s where education comes in.

“You can create content quickly with AI, but without a strategy behind it, it won’t drive results. We have to slow down to define purpose, user journey, and ROI—then scale,” she states.

She encourages agencies and marketers to continuously educate clients on the realities of today’s marketing landscape, emphasizing the importance of relevance, timing, and omnichannel integration.

Key Takeaways for B2B Marketers

To summarize the conversation with Ginny, here are five key takeaways for marketers:

• Use AI—but don’t outsource your brand voice. AI can supercharge productivity, but it must be trained or customized to reflect your tone, visuals, and values.
• Consistency is non-negotiable. Whether through design tools or proprietary workflows, align every asset to the brand’s personality.
• Educate clients on strategy and ROI. Fast doesn’t always mean effective. Clients need help connecting tactics to outcomes and resetting unrealistic expectations.
• Think user-first, not product-first. “Is this content relevant to the user right now?” is a more powerful question than “Is this the best product?”
• Avoid one-channel traps. Ginny recommends integrating at least two to three channels (e.g., social, email, and website) to avoid gaps in the buyer journey.

Looking Ahead: What Will Set Winning B2B Brands Apart?

AI will only grow in influence, but so will the demand for genuine human connection.

“By 2027, users will have figured out AI,” Ginny says. “They’ll know when they’re interacting with a robot—and they’ll crave real connection. The brands that blend AI with storytelling and user-first experiences will win.”

She sees this playing out in content formats, journey mapping, and even lead generation. For example, static forms and gated content may not be enough. Instead, brands must deliver value upfront—think educational content, interactive tools, and clear value exchanges—to earn engagement and trust.

AI will continue to shape the future of B2B marketing, but technology alone isn’t a differentiator anymore. Marketers must use it intentionally—anchored in strategy, brand voice, and human relevance.

As Ginny puts it: “Marketing doesn’t have to be aggressive—it just has to exist. If you’re consistent, helpful, and authentic, the right people will raise their hand when they’re ready.”

We couldn’t agree more, and big thanks to Ginny for sharing her expertise with us. To watch or listen to the full podcast episode, go here. To sign up to be a guest on the podcast, fill out our online application.

Also, please check out our recent blog with practical tips for leveraging email in B2B marketing and beyond, and reach out to our team at request@outwardmedia.com to discuss how our award-winning B2B2C prospect data and audience-building services can create measurable outcomes for your business.

Recently on the B2B Influence podcast I had the opportunity to talk with VisionEdge Marketing President Laura Patterson, who has guided more than 300 companies to turn the concept of customer-first into a disciplined, scalable growth engine. Her perspectives echo recent findings from McKinsey. Their article, “The CMO’s Comeback: Aligning the C-suite to Drive Customer-Centric Growth,” notes that companies that elevate the CMO’s role and align the C-suite around customer-led growth strategies can achieve up to 2.5x higher revenue growth than peers.

Here are five essential takeaways from the discussion with Laura, along with insights from McKinsey, that every business leader should consider:

1. Operationalize Customer-Centricity Company-Wide

“Customer-centricity” may be a common mantra, but Laura stresses that most organizations struggle to put it into practice. Being customer-centric means making every strategic and tactical decision through the lens of delivering measurable customer value. This involves breaking down silos, coordinating cross-functional execution, and ensuring even well-intentioned programs don’t result in “random acts” that alienate loyal customers.

“If you create customer value, you’ll create business value,” Laura says.

Did you know?
According to McKinsey, companies that embed customer insights into cross-functional processes are 60% more likely to exceed growth targets.

2. Define What Success Means to You

VisionEdge’s Circle of Traction model emphasizes aligning growth initiatives with customer outcomes and measuring accordingly. Too often, however, businesses treat metrics as an afterthought or pull generic KPIs from a checklist.

“There’s no universal list of KPIs,” Laura explains. “Your KPIs, your metrics, and your measures are going to be tied to the outcomes of success for you. And what your outcomes are might be very different than another company’s, and your strategy for achieving them might be very different than another company’s.”

She recommends starting with clear definitions of success, such as growing your product adoption rate with a specific segment of customers, then building the measurement framework from there.

Did you know?
McKinsey reports that only 12% of CMOs feel they have access to the right data to influence strategic decisions—yet those who do help their companies achieve outsized returns.

3. Align Around the Customer Buying Journey

Laura compares business growth to football: each player—marketing, sales, product, customer success—has a role, but the team must be coordinated and aligned toward a common goal. The buying journey, not departmental functions, should determine who does what and when.

“You need to know who owns each step of moving the buyer forward. It’s not just about generating leads—it’s about orchestrating the journey.”

Did you know?
Millennials now make up 72% of B2B buyers, and most prefer to self-educate, “completing up to 70% of the buying process online before engaging with a supplier,” according to Salesforce. B2B marketing and sales teams must understand where and how these buyers seek information. For more insight on engaging younger audiences, check out our recent blog on generational marketing.

4. Be Disciplined

Growth isn’t about doing more; it’s about doing the right things well. Laura urges marketers to invest in routines, team structures, and technology that reinforce customer-centered processes, without chasing disconnected trends or spreading budgets too thin.

“Talk the talk all you want. If you don’t have the discipline to operationalize customer-centricity, it’s just another buzzword,” she says.

Did you know?
McKinsey finds that companies with unified C-suite alignment around customer value are 3x more likely to outperform their peers on customer satisfaction and retention.

5. Bring It All Together

Through her strategic work with hundreds of companies, Laura said these are some of the traits the most successful ones have in common:

• A relentless focus on delivering measurable customer value
• Strong cross-functional collaboration
• Intentional discipline in how they plan and execute

“They don’t just guess or plug questions into the latest AI tool—they gather real data from their customers and markets to inform their decisions,” she explains.

These companies align their internal incentives around customers. They experiment, but they don’t follow trends for the sake of novelty. Instead, they use technology, including AI, to enhance execution—not replace strategic thinking.

Laura underscores that customer-centricity isn’t “a one-time initiative, but a long-term business investment” with the potential to unlock new engines of growth. Go here to watch or listen to this very insightful podcast episode, and to access all of our B2B Influence interviews.

Our team is always ready to answer any questions you may have about our award-winning B2B2C prospect data and audience-building services and our innovative approach to performance marketing, omni-channel campaign management and execution, intent data, and much more. Reach out to us at request@outwardmedia.com to discuss how our data and expertise creates measurable business outcomes.

What we discussed with Kathleen on the podcast was an eye opener: many leaders across the B2B landscape, including marketers, share a common perspective that PR is a “nice to have”—a function limited to media outreach or company announcements. During our conversation, we unpacked how this perspective has become not only increasingly outdated but also detrimental to business success.

Kathleen, who brings deep experience from both the corporate and startup worlds, having led communications for global companies like JPMorgan and IBM before founding Red Fan, shared how modern PR has evolved. It’s now a powerful growth engine, fueling everything from sales enablement to stakeholder alignment and long-term brand equity.

Here are four powerful takeaways from our conversation that show why PR, when done right, is a critical driver of measurable business outcomes.

1. PR Bridges the Sales and Marketing Divide

PR should be viewed and executed as much more than an awareness play. It’s a strategic connector that unifies marketing, sales and other stakeholder under a shared narrative.

Kathleen described how her team begins each engagement by anonymously gathering insights from internal sales teams and external customer interviews. These findings reveal messaging gaps, friction points in the buyer journey, and missed opportunities that sales and marketing often overlook in isolation.

“When we start doing this together,” she said, “we can really make some magic happen.”

The result is more than refined language that reflects real pain points and what’s actually happening in the market. It also creates alignment—between departments, with customers, and across channels. This collaboration can eliminate friction, boost internal morale, drive more effective, revenue-focused campaigns, and ultimately, improve business outcomes.

2. Thought Leadership As an AI Imperative

With buyers now researching independently and AI tools surfacing authoritative sources before anyone clicks a link, the role of PR in building thought leadership has taken on new urgency. Kathleen emphasized that companies need to be proactive in positioning their leaders and subject matter experts as credible voices to gain share of voice (SOV) across the top AI-driven platforms.

“Eventually, what you want AI to do,” Kathleen explained, “is to cite your expert as the authority.”

That only happens when companies consistently contribute expert insights to the conversations that matter across their industry. This not only builds brand trust but it also ensures that your thought leaders are part of the information ecosystem that AI is learning from.

3. High-Stakes Moments Demand Strategic PR, Not Reactive Tactics

Kathleen noted that many companies still treat PR as an afterthought during critical moments, such as acquisitions, leadership changes, or product launches. But without a strategy, these events can backfire.

For example, during M&As, if customers learn about the deal through a press release or news article instead of directly from the brand, it can create confusion, mistrust, or even churn. Red Fan advises clients to map out stakeholder communication strategies well in advance, ensuring customers, employees, and partners all understand what the change means for them.

“If you don’t control the message,” she warned, “you could spend months cleaning up what should have been a celebration.”

This approach also applies to earned media. Before any announcement, Kathleen’s team aligns with clients on goals—whether it’s visibility, reputation management, or audience engagement—and defines what success should look like beyond simple press coverage.

4. AI Is a Powerful Tool, But Human Insight Still Leads

AI is transforming the PR function, but Kathleen is clear: it’s an enabler, not a replacement. From media research and competitive benchmarking to organizing speaker recommendations and tracking executive visibility, AI is helping agencies move faster and smarter.

She cautioned that success with AI depends on guardrails. Companies need policies around AI usage, especially when tools are used by different departments without central oversight. AI should be used to support strategy, not dictate it.

“AI is a friend,” she said. “But it can’t replace the human voice or thoughtful leadership.”

PR, at its core, is about storytelling, trust, and connection—elements that still require human perspective, creativity, and empathy.

At OMI, we’ve seen firsthand how strategic communications, grounded in data and aligned with business goals, can drive real outcomes. As PR continues to evolve alongside AI and the broader marketing tech stack, brands that treat it as a core business function, rather than an add-on, will be better positioned to lead with influence and integrity.

Go here to watch the podcast interview and subscribe to our show, and complete our questionnaire if you’d like to be considered for a guest spot on an upcoming podcast.

Our team is always standing by to answer any questions you may have about our award-winning B2B2C prospect data and audience building services and our innovative approach to performance marketing, omni-channel campaign management and execution, and much more. Reach out to us at request@outwardmedia.com to discuss how our data and expertise creates measurable business outcomes.

1. Kneko Burney Miller: Reach the Right People, Not the Most People

Kneko Burney Miller, Founder and Chief Innovator for Change3, a full-service marketing and lead generation agency, is a long-time friend and OMI partner. We have the utmost respect for her expertise. On the podcast, she emphasized the pervasiveness of digital advertising, noting that many SMBs don’t grasp that it often delivers poor results when used without a clear targeting strategy.

“Unless you can really craft a well-known audience that aligns with your brand, your product, and your targeting, digital ads are like taking your money and dumping it into your barbecue,” she said.

Her point is that ads only work when they’re built on a solid foundation of customer understanding. Kneko encourages SMBs in the B2B sector to stop chasing impressions and instead focus on reaching the right people. “Don’t worry about going viral,” she advised. “Worry about reaching your target customer—your persona” and the accounts that matter.. This approach is measurable, which is key to understanding what’s working and what’s not.

She also highlighted a common blind spot in digital marketing: attribution. Many business decisions are made offline or across multiple devices, making it difficult to tie conversions back to any one channel. Instead of obsessing over incomplete metrics, she recommends focusing on building authentic engagement through value-driven experiences like thought leadership and podcasts.

“500 podcast listeners may not sound like much,” she said, “but if they’re the right 500 future customers, that’s incredibly powerful.”

Kneko’s practical advice is a reminder that scale isn’t everything. Effective marketing is about depth, not breadth. It connects your message with the right audience, in the right context, at the right time.

2. Debra Bowers: Understand Your Customer Before You Market

Debra Bowers, CEO of Hexagon Media LLC and host of the Deals with Heels podcast, sees many SMBs making the same critical error: they jump into marketing without first taking the time to understand who their customers really are.

“As the small business owner, you have to understand—who are my customers? Which ones am I trying to reach in this campaign? What’s my offer? What’s my message? What’s the call to action?” she said.

Without that clarity, outsourcing content creation or media buying is unlikely to deliver results. Content creators can be highly skilled, but unless business owners provide direction rooted in their own customer insight, campaigns risk becoming generic or misaligned.

Debra also cautioned against relying solely on marketing agencies that offer a narrow scope of services. In one example, a client with an extremely niche B2B audience—just 15 viable prospects in a single state—was sold a broad social media program that didn’t match the need. “He went to a social media agency, so he got a social media solution,” she said. What he really needed was precision targeting through paid digital and curated lists.

Her key message: Business owners must stay closely connected to their audience and tailor their strategy and tactics accordingly. Above all, Debra underscored the importance of aligning marketing with an effective sales strategy.

3. Adam Sinkus: Find a Consultant Who Builds, Not Just Advises

For many SMBs, hiring a marketing consultant is the first step in getting their strategy off the ground. But too often, the help stops at the planning phase.

Agencies “need to get away from just dumping strategies into people's laps,” explains Adam Sinkus, Managing Partner for A Purpose Partnership.  “We need to actually help them build a plan and build the pieces they need to execute.”

He emphasized that strategy without support is a setup for failure. Too many SMBs are left with a roadmap and no vehicle to drive it. His advice: choose a consultant who doesn’t just deliver slide decks, but who rolls up their sleeves to implement the work, whether that’s content, social media, PR, or paid campaigns.

Foundational marketing understanding is also essential. “Probably 70% of the people we talk to have no idea who their ideal customer is,” he said. Adam and his team start with defining the target audience and building around that insight before anything is pushed out the door.

In his view, execution isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the difference between seeing marketing results or watching a strategy gather dust.

Go here to watch all three podcast episodes.

Top Takeaways

Across all three conversations, one truth came through clearly: successful marketing for SMBs doesn’t start with trendy tactics, but with solid fundamentals. In addition, in a noisy, ever-changing marketplace, SMBs can’t afford imprecise marketing. With the right approach, they can stand out, connect with customers, and drive real business growth—even in uncertain times.

If your goal is to connect with and sell to more SMBs, did you know that OMI offers the largest database of U.S.-based SMB businesses in the world, with more than 123 million business contacts with email addresses? Go here for a case study highlighting a leading telecom provider’s success selling into the SMB market using OMI’s B2B prospect data.

Reach out to our team today at request@outwardmedia.com for a complimentary consultation on how to create a precision custom audience that will have a meaningful impact on your business.

What isn’t overwhelming? Direct mail—the traditional “snail mail” ads that land in a physical mailbox.

While email and digital tactics continue to be vital to omnichannel marketing, direct mail is gaining new traction, especially among younger audiences, according to another study shared by MediaPost. It's no longer a legacy tactic; it's a strategic channel that complements digital exceptionally well. When used intentionally, direct mail can lift engagement, support channel integration strategies, and improve campaign attribution.

Recently on the B2B Influence podcast we sat down with Keith Goodman, VP of Corporate Sales and Marketing at Modern Postcard, to discuss the current state of direct mail in modern marketing. Here are five key takeaways for B2B marketers from the conversation, with insights into why direct mail belongs in your omnichannel mix and how to integrate it effectively:

1. Direct Mail Cuts Through the Noise

Consumers can feel inundated by digital ads and email, but direct mail lands differently. Unlike a fleeting subject line or banner ad, a physical mail piece is tangible and enduring. It commands attention by its physical presence. You're not swiping past it on a screen—you're holding it in your hands.

It may even sit on a desk or kitchen counter for days or weeks, reinforcing brand awareness over time. That longevity gives direct mail a unique ability to "do the heavy lifting" in a campaign, initiating interest that digital touches can later convert into sales.

2. It Plays Well with Digital and Strengthens Channel Sequencing and Integration

At a minimum, it takes 10 touches to move a buyer to action, but today, it's typically 15 or more. No single channel can do it alone. That's where direct mail fits in. It's not about replacing digital or email but amplifying them.

Consider this common buyer journey:

• A prospect receives a mailer at home while off-device.
• Days later, an email with the same message lands in their inbox—now they’re at their desk and ready to click.
• Later still, a programmatic ad appears while they’re browsing on mobile, offering the perfect moment to complete the purchase.

By sequencing touchpoints intentionally, you create a more seamless and persuasive buyer experience. With its unique timing and format, direct mail often serves as the catalyst behind this multi-touch journey.

3. Data-Driven Targeting Makes It Smarter Than Ever

Modern direct mail is no longer broad or generic like it was in years past. Today, it is fueled by data, and many of the targeting benefits associated with digital campaigns now apply to email, too. At OMI, we can match demographic and firmographic data to physical addresses, providing access to intelligence that complements digital IDs for use across our clients’ omnichannel campaigns, including those involving direct mail.

And while digital data excels at behavioral targeting, mail data offers depth with location-based, household-level, and B2B firmographic details. When these two datasets are combined, the result is a more powerful and precise B2B2C targeting strategy that reaches buyers wherever they are, physically and digitally.

4. Attribution Challenges Call for Cross-Channel Collaboration

In large organizations, channel silos are common and often competitive. One team might push for email attribution, another for digital, and another for direct mail. The result is fragmented reporting and suboptimal insights.

To overcome this, successful marketers align on attribution before the campaign even launches. Is it first-touch, last-touch, or weighted attribution? Or better yet, which sequence of touches delivers the highest conversion rate?

By testing combinations—direct mail first, digital second, email third (or any variation thereof)—marketers can identify the most effective path to purchase. Attribution becomes less about credit and more about strategy.

5. Testing Sequences, Not Just Channels, Unlocks Performance

Marketers often test creative and media channels, but they will forego testing the order in which they deploy those channels. That's a missed opportunity because sequencing and  the way you integrate channels matters. A piece of direct mail may generate interest, but it's often a follow-up email or digital ad that captures the conversion.

Today, our team employs a variety of integration strategies, such as retargeting via postal mail after digital engagements or sending direct mail early in the cycle to soften the market before digital activation. The key is to leverage the strengths of each medium, not in isolation but in tandem.

Final Thoughts: Direct Mail Isn’t a Relic—It’s a Revenue Driver

Omnichannel success means more than running campaigns across multiple platforms—it means integrating those platforms in a way that maximizes the impact of each one. Direct mail, when combined with digital, social, and email, creates a layered, responsive journey that increases response and conversion rates.

The data shows that direct mail is not only relevant—it’s increasingly essential. If you’re not yet using it to support your digital strategy, now is the time to reconsider. Contact us at request@outwardmedia.com for a complimentary consultation. Go here for the complete podcast episode featuring Keith Goodwin of Modern Postcard.

Take a look at the insights below from our B2B Influence podcast guests and recent industry articles, with each expert offering their point of view (POV) on why prioritizing your audience matters:

• From a Programmatic POV: On a recent B2B Influence podcast interview, Chris DeMartine, Founder and CEO of Programmatic B2B, shared that he and his team made an important shift to dig deeper into their audience data. They now have the capability with every client report to show which companies are engaging – such as website visits and time on site. Reporting back at the account level, they can tell clients with certainty if the message is getting to the right people. Email has always been transparent with measurement, Chris said, but his goal was to take that to display and native advertising. With more knowledge in hand, they know who their audience is and can further refine their targeting to improve outcomes with future campaigns.

Chris is also using contextual AI to identify audiences looking up specific topics in real time, based on an intent keyword – and that’s an entirely different discussion, which we hope to write about soon. Go here for the full podcast episode.

• From an SEO POV, understanding your target audience helps you find the right keywords, identify warm leads, and optimize SEO, according to Brandon Leibowitz, Owner of SEO Optimizers. He breaks down audience targeting, budgeting, remarketing, backlinks, and more on the B2B Influence podcast. Go here for the full episode.

• From a Strategy and Measurement POV: Using an ideal customer profile and then blanketing as large an audience as possible with your marketing messages is no longer a viable strategy. “Measure the buyer journey to find the gaps in your marketing funnel and sales pipeline --  and to unlock the strategies to close those gaps…Use data to understand who your targets are.” Kyle Mealy, Founder and CEO of Next Level Revenue, shares why measurement is key to audience targeting and SMB marketing success on the B2Binfluence podcast. Go here for the full episode.

• From a Campaign Performance POV: “The best tech stack ever won't drive marketing success: You need a good strategy and an understanding of your audience first,” says David Zimmerman, Fractional CMO and Digital Marketing Consultant. David recently shared his tips for building campaigns that perform, delivering real business impact (on the B2B Influence podcast). Go here for the full podcast episode.

• From Our Own Customer Acquisition POV: We were recently quoted in Forbes about the power of B2B2C matching for more effective targeting, personalization, and reach with prospect-focused email automation. This same approach can be applied to custom audience building across a variety of omni-channel strategies:

“The more information you can collect about your prospects, the better you can customize your email automation. You can build more complete prospect profiles using techniques like B2B2C matching, which provides insights into personal and professional attributes for improved personalization and reach.”

Make no mistake, it’s a losing proposition to cut corners when it comes to understanding your audience. In today’s often volatile economic climate--where marketers are under pressure to do more with less, from driving results to reducing waste and proving ROI--one of the most powerful levers available is to focus on the audience data fueling your campaigns. But finding and engaging the right people isn’t a one-and-done task—it’s an ongoing process of refinement.

Check out our recent blog on AI-powered precision audience building for more insights, and reach out to our team today at request@outwardmedia.com for a complimentary consultation on how to create a precision custom audience that will have a meaningful impact on your business.

Meanwhile, a separate survey by ZeroBounce shows that Gen Z favors email at work despite their fascination with instant messaging. This study found that “42% of Gen Z consumers surveyed say email is their favorite work channel, twice as many as those who say the same about Slack or WhatsApp.”

So, the big question clients often ask us is this: should email and other content be tailored toward the different generational groups?

Based on what we’ve seen and heard across our client base, including top telecom providers, the answer continues to move in the direction of “yes.” The ZeroBounce study reports that 34% of Gen Z is influenced by content geared toward their generation, compared to 24% for millennials, 23% for Gen X, and 21% of boomers.

It’s About Feelings

What do Gen Z and millennials buyers want from the brands they do business with? A recent Adweek article states that younger consumers build trust differently than their older counterparts. “Gen Xers and boomers judged brands based on how the products performed; many of today’s youngest consumers assess brands based on how the brands make them feel.”

As you prepare to engage these younger buyers, don’t forget that they value much more than product performance. They want to feel good about your brand, what it represents, and what you’re selling. In other words, they want to understand and trust almost every aspect of your brand.

Four Ways to Target Younger Buyers

Here are a few tips from our team on tailoring your B2B customer acquisition and lead generation campaigns for younger buyers:

1. Take Steps to Know More About Them: Whether your acquisition marketing is of the B2B or B2C variety, it's valuable to get to know your prospects better to target and engage them more effectively. When building custom audiences for clients’ cold email campaigns, we use a B2B2C data strategy to gain a more complete personal-professional view of each prospect. This approach involves layering demographics, such as marital status, children, income, gender, and age, into your B2B audience profiles, which include job titles, business email addresses, and much more.

The age attribute is key – it’s where critical generational tailoring comes into play with your content. For younger buyers, zero in on facets of your company that will appeal to what they value, such as social responsibility. And be transparent and authentic with your marketing – make it less about selling and more about carefully building a trusted relationship, which takes time.

Also, be aware of generational channel preferences, as noted above. Email is the universally preferred channel for B2B, with a recent consumer study by Twilio noting that 79% of respondents said email is their most preferred channel. From a generational perspective, 70% of Gen Z respondents prefer it, along with 77% of millennials.

2. Mix Things Up, Use Multiple Touches: While email may be king, decision-makers (especially the younger ones) rely upon multiple channels for information and communication. In addition, today it takes 10 or more touches to reach and engage a prospect-- and they’re not all email touches, or in some cases, not even digital. It can take different types of media, including direct mail, to successfully reach a prospect.
   
   One of our differentiators as a performance marketing agency lies in our "one-two punch," which combines email with triggered programmatic, social media outreach, or both.  By strategically placing programmatic ads in front of users who have previously engaged with email or social content and vice versa, you maximize the chances of conversion. Using a tailored approach to triggering, you stand to increase the number of prospect touches, gain efficiency in your targeting, along with scalability, and more. There are privacy laws to consider, making execution of this approach complex, with specialized expertise around anonymized data and other factors a requirement. Our OMI team has that expertise.
3. Level Up Your QR Code IQ: QR codes are having a moment, and marketers like leveraging them because of the customer insights they provide. Not surprisingly, some email recipients won’t use them because of factors like age, device, location, or industry. If you’re targeting Gen Z and millennials, however, rest assured -- they’re likely to be comfortable with QR codes.
   Pro tip: We’ve seen higher conversions and improved campaign results overall when a phone number or URL is included in the content alongside the QR code. We also recommend scaling your acquisition campaigns first with multiple verticals and, from there, segmenting audiences into smaller groups based on age and other factors that determine which prospects are more likely to use a QR code.
4. Find Ready-to-Buy Prospects and Segment Them by Generation: A strategy we use to double down on campaign ROI is matching digital intent insights to prospect data from the OMI Living File®  B2B2C database. The database can be segmented according to a variety of factors, including age. Combining intent data with our B2B2C prospect data gives marketers the capability to scale their email acquisition campaign reach to more custom audiences that are in-market for their offers while remaining in compliance with privacy requirements. Relative to younger buyers, your creative process can include looking at the age group of the recipients within the custom in-market audience and aligning your content approach to generational attributes that will best capture their interest.
   Side note: All 162+ million contacts in the OMI Living File® database are verified, constantly updated, and ready for campaign activation across CTV, email, social, programmatic, and other channels. The database offers manager, director, and professional-level and above records with email/HEM, social URL, and other attributes. We also deliver the largest reach into the SMB marketplace. Ask us about our 95% email validity guarantee.

Reach out to our team today to find out more. Go here for our acquisition email case studies.

Customer acquisition campaigns have long been a specialty of ours at OMI, and we’ve helped the world’s largest brands find more customers (check out our case studies). Below are three key takeaways from our playbook —and actions B2B marketers can take now—to stay resilient and ROI-focused with customer acquisition.

1. Connect Data to Reveal Real Opportunity

Siloed data remains one of the biggest obstacles to growth. MediaPost reports that marketers are “working with bloated tech stacks — 60% of marketing teams have 6-15 tools. So while companies are embracing cross-channel journeys, many are struggling to unify data.”  

Removing the siloes from your customer and prospect data allows you to gain a holistic understanding of your target audience. This hinges upon seamless integration, but seamless integration in modern marketing environments is complex – because numerous data sources exist, including customer relationship management (CRM) data, real-time analytics, cross-channel analytics, telemetry data, third-party business contact data, and intent data. That’s why building APIs that connect data to popular tools and platforms to activate it quickly, easily and safely is critical for marketers today.

At OMI, one of our most common integrations involves layering intent data on top of B2B prospect contact data to enable reach to specific, qualified, and interested prospects—people who have already shown an interest in what you have to offer. The combined data can be integrated across an entire marketing technology stack and applied to targeted acquisition campaigns spanning email marketing, social networks, CTV, programmatic display ads, and more.

2. Target with Precision, Engage with Relevance

Precision targeting is essential for reducing waste and improving results in your marketing efforts. Here are a few strategies we use to drive higher ROI and better outcomes with acquisition campaigns:

• Develop Robust Profiles: One of the top emerging data unification strategies we use to gain a robust understanding of prospects from a variety of perspectives is B2B2C data linkage. The premise behind it is this: today’s B2B decision-makers don’t just engage through work email. They stream CTV, scroll social platforms, and interact across a range of personal and professional touchpoints.

To unify those touchpoints, we start with a B2B buyer’s company IP address to uncover the titles of the buyers most likely to be the decision-makers within that organization. From there, we identify key consumer contact data such as mobile advertising ID, connected TV ID, and/or personal email. We then connect the dots between the professional role and the personal attributes and structure a campaign around the unified contact data. It's still a B2B offer, but you use consumer channels to promote and evangelize.

For the creative content, we customize messaging to the targeted decision-makers in all of the relevant ad-buying platforms, whether it’s META, TikTok, CTV, or a combination of these.

Combining intent data with more robust B2B2C prospect data will enhance targeting and relevance even further. For example, integrating behavioral intent signals (like topic research or buying stage) with firmographic and personal/lifestyle data, allows us to connect—across both personal and professional channels—with a VP of IT who has viewed the campaign content and is not just “a tech buyer,” but also currently interested in buying a new enterprise security solution for her organization.

The creative process includes looking at the age group of the recipient and aligning the creative to common generational attributes to better capture their interest.

• Target Buying Groups: We all know that B2B buying is done in groups today. B2B purchases now involve 11 decision-makers and more than 800 vendor reactions, according to ANA. Developing a strategy to build buyer cohorts and deliver personalized content at the appropriate time is critical: marketers must work to  “create experiences unique to each individual buyer journey...AI email strategies should analyze intent signals across entire buying teams, identifying when accounts are researching solutions,” ANA reports. For example, if multiple team members from a company are exploring related technologies, generative AI can craft personalized emails informed by data about individual buyer priorities targeting different personas within a buying committee.

3.  Prioritize Quality, Not Just Quantity

Recent research shows that B2B email lists decay at 28% per year: layoffs, job changes, company closures, and mergers all contribute to the churn. Beyond email, your entire repository of B2B data can degrade by up to 60% per year. The bottom line is, if you’re not actively maintaining your data, you’re likely wasting time and money on marketing campaigns that will never reach the right people.

That’s why we treat our award-winning OMI B2B prospect database as a Living File® —continuously updating it to reflect market shifts and business changes. For example, we leverage the true power of AI – which is its feedback loop—to continuously learn, iterate, and incorporate new AI-powered audience insights and profile attributes into the Living File® database, which fuels our custom audience-building services.

Our B2B Living File® licenses are crafted from our Master File, which is created through the processing of over 40 billion data signals per month. It provides access to accurate, actionable contacts across all key decision-making roles to fuel more effective customer acquisition campaigns. When leading brands keep coming back to us and our data to power their campaigns, we know we have the formula for success.

The Living File® database includes manager, director, and professional-level and above records with email/HEM, social URL, and other attributes. We also deliver the largest reach into the SMB marketplace and back up every client engagement with a 95% email validity guarantee for 30 days.

Lastly, remember that data quality starts with strong hygiene practices and trusted data partners. Ask us about our data cleansing services.

Final Takeaway: Invest in Your Data Foundation

Customer acquisition may be getting more expensive, but that doesn’t mean your marketing has to. By integrating clean, connected data, focusing on high-intent prospects, and optimizing reach through intelligent targeting, B2B marketers can stay ahead of rising costs while driving better ROI.

To learn how to cut waste and acquire more customers with clean, accurate data, contact our team at request@outwardmedia.com.

Today, with AI and its ability to analyze vast datasets, our team at OMI is enhancing our ability to uncover hidden insights at scale and further elevate our precision audiences into dynamic engines of growth.

Here are three techniques from our playbook for optimizing and iterating audiences across social media, programmatic advertising, and email, and why it’s mission-critical now:

1. Sharpening Audience Insights with AI Analysis

AI platforms can be used to ingest and synthesize data from multiple sources, including CRM systems, social media, email engagement, website interactions, and more, to build a clearer picture of who your audience is and how they behave. A few strategies these platforms use to increase audience precision include:

• Predictive Analytics: To anticipate behaviors like churn, purchase intent, or likely engagement.
• Sentiment Analysis: To understand audience attitudes based on social posts, reviews, and feedback.
• Psychographic Profiling: To move beyond demographics to capture motivations, preferences, and interests.

These techniques allow you to not only understand who you’re targeting but also why that segment is likely to engage.

2. Smarter Segmentation and Lookalike Targeting

AI can bolster your segmentation efforts. For example, you can use it to perform:

• Micro-segmentation: AI can reveal niche groups that offer outsized engagement potential.
• Real-Time Adjustments: Update segments in real-time as behaviors shift.
• Lookalike Modeling: This technique has been successfully utilized by OMI for years, leveraging our B2B Living File® database, which contains over 162 million director, manager, and professional-level contacts and above. Today, OMI is increasingly called upon to enhance clients’ AI-sourced company target lists. Our OMI data experts analyze the common attributes from the list (such as industry and employee size) and then identify companies in our database that match the same criteria. We can then also provide additional firmographic, behavioral, and consumer attributes (utilizing our B2B2C data matching service), as well as intent–based information and direct contact names, to enable deeper segmentation, improved targeting using the prospect’s preferred channels, and more personalized outreach. 

3. Closing the Loop with Integrated Intelligence

The true power of AI lies in its feedback loop—constantly learning and iterating to improve targeting, messaging, and outcomes. The more you use it, the more it will learn and the better your audience data outputs will be. We use this strategy at OMI and incorporate new AI-powered audience insights and profile attributes continuously into the Living File® database, which fuels our custom audience-building service.

As described in our recent blog, when working with OMI, you gain access to a comprehensive suite of custom audience-building tools including our massive B2B database, intent data (for identifying buyers whose online activity indicates they are warm leads), B2B2C data matching (for combining B2B and B2C attributes that enable you to deeply personalize your reach with decision-makers on the personal and professional channels they prefer), and much more.

We also integrate our custom audience data into clients’ preferred platforms for campaign activation across a variety of channels including email, social media, programmatic and CTV advertising, and more.

Why It Matters Now

When every marketing dollar is scrutinized, precision audiences enable brands to:

• Cut through the noise and reach real people, not just impressions.
• Focus on what's working and continuously optimize.
• Align budget and strategy with audience intent and behavior.

By pairing emerging AI capabilities with data intelligence and audience-building expertise from data partners like OMI, marketers gain the precision, agility, scale, and performance edge needed to succeed—no matter what the economy throws their way.

Reach out to our team today at request@outwardmedia.com for a complimentary consultation on how to create a precision custom audience that will have a meaningful impact on your omni-channel campaigns and your business.

Authenticity is the biggest downside. Messages that are irrelevant, badly timed, and so generic that it’s clear they weren’t written by a human is a big turnoff that can negatively impact campaign performance. ANA says these types of misfires can be attributed to insufficient data and failure to effectively integrate voice, brand identity, and understanding of the end user into your AI systems and models.

The article goes on to say that “the paramount question for B2B marketers is this: How to begin using AI effectively and make progress toward the holy grail of one-to-one, personalized emails delivered automatically, and at scale?”

At OMI, AI has had a strategic impact on our performance marketing services for the past several years. I’m proud to say our team has used it to conquer the holy grail of personalization at scale (see below for more details). In fact, we integrate AI across the entire marketing funnel, from uncovering and filtering audience insights to optimizing content and execution. Here are a few examples of how we put it to work:

• Personalization at Scale: With AI and machine learning, we automate and optimize email personalization using the firmographics and contact-level data contained in our Living File® database of 162+ million freshly updated professional-level and above contacts. This enables dynamic adjustments to messaging, subject lines, calls to action, and even images—at scale—so our clients can deliver truly relevant experiences.
• Content Development Kickstart: Tools like ChatGPT act as starting points for content creation across channels, including email and landing pages. We view this AI-generated content as a first draft. Our team fine-tunes the first draft content to align with brand voice, compliance standards, and audience needs.
• Filtering Intent Data for Smarter Targeting: AI gives us powerful filtering capabilities to make sense of billions of weekly digital intent signals. This allows us to surface deep insights into preferences and buying behavior, helping us build more targeted programmatic advertising and email campaigns for our clients.
• Updating Our Massive B2B Database: With over 162 million professional-level and above contacts, our Living File® database doesn’t stay up to date on its own. We continually update it using AI and other methods to ensure it’s always ready for campaign activation across CTV, email, social, programmatic, and other channels. One feature clients love: it comes with a 95% email validity guarantee for 30 days.

Top Takeaways from Our AI Journey

Recent research cited in the ANA article reveals that 57% of marketers in companies with 500-plus employees are using AI in their email campaigns across areas such as personalization, retargeting, and subject line optimization.

But can AI keep up with the level of success that B2B marketers are already enjoying with email? Another report that ANA shared, based on senior-level responses spanning 10 years, found that a whopping 75% of businesses claim that email produces "good to excellent" ROI.

To ensure peak B2B email performance as you dive further into AI, here are five top takeaways we’ve learned during our own journey and from resources like ANA:

1. Continuous Learning: Be ready to constantly adapt as the AI landscape shifts with new innovations and strategies. Ongoing education and continuous usage are imperative for staying current with new tools and technologies and remaining on top of best practices. At OMI, we encourage our team to participate in learning opportunities throughout the year.

2. Take a Human-Centered Approach: ANA states – and we agree – that you can only unleash AI’s full value by pairing it with human creativity, emotion, and judgment. Getting email campaigns AI-ready requires an often-overlooked element, ANA says: people. For example, tagging content to “gauge what is performing well in a campaign becomes even more critical and requires human oversight. With AI, you can take that further and look at the content pieces — images, links, copy — that drive the ideal behaviors and give the best relevant content to each individual subscriber of your email program,” the article states.

With human oversight, you ensure you are tagging your content “in the best way for the machine to learn and develop the right formula for each individual." The key is to allocate more people toward marketing operations in order to set up an effective system. In fact, one of the business leaders quoted in the ANA article says the most effective AI strategies include human oversight. "Treat AI as a tool that supports creativity and decision-making rather than attempting to automate everything," she says.

3. Consider Buying Teams: We all know that B2B buying is done in groups today. B2B purchases now involve 11 decision-makers and more than 800 vendor reactions, according to one of the ANA members interviewed for the article. “Developing a formula for AI to build buyer cohorts and deliver personalized content at the appropriate time is crucial,” she says. She adds that marketers must work to  “create experiences unique to each individual buyer journey...AI email strategies should analyze intent signals across entire buying teams, identifying when accounts are researching solutions. For instance, if multiple team members from a company are exploring related technologies, generative AI can craft personalized emails informed by data about individual buyer priorities targeting different personas within a buying committee."

4. Start Incrementally with Pilot Programs: The most effective approach to leveraging AI for B2B email marketing is to think incrementally, the ANA article points out. "It's best to begin with a pilot project, focusing on a single AI use case, and then gradually expand based on insights and measurable outcomes.” We do this with AI and with other innovations we adopt at OMI.

5. Ensure Oversight: Our agency leaders champion responsible AI practices and ongoing team training to ensure we’re using AI tools ethically, transparently, and effectively. We recommend that organizations form their own internal AI councils to ensure best practices are in place and to guide teams to do their best work with the technology.

How is your organization leveraging AI in marketing? Reach out to our team at request@outwardmedia.com to discuss how we can assist you in elevating your campaign performance through the thoughtful use of AI and data.

Titled "Google Is Keeping Cookies So Advertisers Will Keep Buying Junk Data in Bulk," Mark’s article highlights what many of us already know: outdated, questionable audience data has been propping up the advertising industry for far too long. And now, Google's delay in killing third-party cookies signals how deeply entrenched that system remains.

For marketers, it’s a clear warning—change is overdue. Here are three paths to change that our team is already putting to use across our client campaigns:

1. Start with Real Data

Advertisers today still pay premium rates for impressions that often don't reach real people. The AdExchanger piece points out that some of the data being bought and sold at scale is so imprecise that it borders on worthless. This backs up what we've been saying: bad data costs brands real money, not to mention real results.

At OMI, we’ve made it our mission to deliver accurate reach to real people through high-quality, verified data sets. Our Living File® database of 162+ million professional-level contacts isn’t scraped or stitched together through guesswork. It’s verified, segmented, constantly updated, and ready for campaign activation across CTV, email, social, programmatic, and other channels. And it comes with a 95% email validity guarantee for 30 days.

The database includes manager, director, and professional-level and above records with email/HEM, social URL, and other attributes. We also deliver the largest reach into the SMB marketplace.

Another one of our most strategic assets in the effort to remove fraud from the data fueling our client campaigns is FouAnalytics, a leader in fighting ad fraud. Learn more by reading our recent blog or watching the podcast interview.

2. Elevate Precision Targeting

If you’re still relying on cookie-based targeting or broad, unvetted third-party segments, it’s time to rethink your audience strategy. As platforms grow more fragmented and privacy concerns mount, you need more than general demographic overlays—you need audience data that embraces a holistic understanding of your audience, enabling precision targeting and alignment with your exact campaign objectives.

One way we are accomplishing this is through B2B2C data linkage. It has fast become one of our most popular services because it breaks down the silos that exist between consumer and professional prospect data, opening up new paths to personalization, relevance, and reach. This is made possible through a process we use to weave together a prospect's B2B attributes --sourced from our own massive B2B database--with that prospect's B2C attributes, such as their LinkedIn profile, demographics, and residential address. OMI then sends the combined B2B2C audience data to theTradeDesk, Google DV360, or other DSPs and leading social channels to fuel media activation, email acquisition marketing, CTV, programmatic, social, and other omni-channel campaigns for clients.

The result is more robust and complete prospect profiles. At the same time, it enables our clients to reach prospects on their personal and professional channels for higher ROI, increasing their opportunities to engage successfully.  

We also layer intent data on top of our B2B prospect contact data to enable reach to specific, qualified, and interested prospects. Marketers can integrate the combined data across an entire marketing technology stack and apply it to targeted audience campaigns across email acquisition marketing, social networks, programmatic display ads, and more. As a result, precision targeting is amplified for more impactful engagement across multiple channels – and most importantly, you’re reaching people, at scale, who want to hear from you.

3. Transparent Measurement and the Right Partnerships Are a Must

The AdExchanger article underscores a significant point of frustration in digital advertising—measurement opacity. With bots in the mix and metrics that often can't be verified, marketers are left wondering whether their campaigns are driving actual business outcomes. Ultimately, it means paying for advertising that offers little to no value, resulting in enormous financial implications. 

Speaking of which, when seeking out a performance media partnership, one of the most critical areas of transparency surrounds payouts. Because you invest substantial resources in campaigns, it's crucial to understand precisely where every slice of the allocated budget goes and how the campaign is being run—from the advertising platforms to the sites serving the ads and every partner or player who touches those ads across the ecosystem.

Many times, these payouts aren’t equitable or favorable for advertisers. That’s why you must ask your media activation or performance marketing partner for detailed specifics about their processes.

The right partner will ensure you can avoid fraud, measure actual performance, and understand the financial payouts. They’ll also set you up for success with the right data that allows you to track behavior, engagement, and results across multiple platforms. For example, when partnering with OMI, we actively eliminate non-human activity, ensuring your results reflect actual engagement—not artificial noise. Take a look at our recent case study demonstrating how we drive tangible business outcomes for clients.

It’s Time to Stop Funding the Problem

As Mark states, as long as marketers continue pouring dollars into opaque data marketplaces and cookie-based media buys, the incentives won’t change. That’s why a growing number of brands are turning to performance media. As the IAB recently reported, ROI pressure is the most significant force driving this shift, making it critical for marketers to leave vague impressions and vanity metrics behind and focus on results.

Contact our team today at request@outwardmedia.com to discuss a path to achieving results you can trust.

So how do you evolve your ABM strategy in step with today’s demands? It starts with data and extends through experience and intelligent automation. From our perspective as a performance marketing agency, here’s what’s working now in ABM:

1. Measure Engagement, Not Just Volume

One of the shifts in ABM—and a cornerstone of ABX—is redefining how success is measured. Traditional digital campaigns often focus on volume metrics: impressions, clicks, open rates. But ABM is different. It’s about the depth of engagement across an account.

As shared recently on our podcast, The Marketing Vanguard, Kneko Burney, Founder and CEO of Change3, a full-service growth agency, says that when it comes to the kind of campaigns that deliver high-quality, fully-vetted lead opportunities, look to interest signals for measurement. This could be, for example, a potential prospect visiting a specific website page repeatedly or multiple stakeholders from the same account interacting with content.

Another tip: measuring engagement by brand and account lets you see how buying group interest is unfolding. This kind of knowledge really drives opportunity creation in B2B

This shift in measurement also highlights why email—despite growing challenges—remains a powerful tool when connected to a high-quality database. Email continues to play a pivotal role in delivering personalized, trackable experiences that align to an account-based framework. At OMI, where B2B customer acquisition is our specialty, we partner with our clients to give them a fully-measurable email marketing experience, driven by our Living File® B2B database, to support their ABM efforts at scale. Check out our recent case study.

2. Amplify Your Strategy with AI

Artificial Intelligence is transforming how B2B marketers approach ABM and ABX. From smarter targeting to hyper-personalization and campaign optimization, AI enables marketers to deliver more relevant experiences—at scale. To implement AI effectively in your account-based strategy:

• Integrate AI tools with your existing systems (CRM, email, analytics).
• Prioritize data accuracy to give AI the right inputs.
• Educate your teams so they can fully leverage AI capabilities and interpret results meaningfully.

AI doesn’t replace strategy—it strengthens it. It brings speed, scale, and intelligence to your ABM and ABX efforts.

3. Aligning Sales and Marketing: It Starts with Accurate Data

Alignment isn’t just a buzzword—it’s a critical success factor in ABM. The best programs ensure marketing and sales work together from the start to identify target accounts, craft personalized engagement strategies, and close deals.

This collaboration is paying off. A study by ITSMA states that nearly 70% of ABM leaders say their efforts are significantly improving sales and marketing alignment. The result is a more unified customer experience and better outcomes across the board. Effective ABM and ABX strategies begin with data that is accurate, complete, and actionable. Without it, personalization falls flat and targeting becomes guesswork.

Recent insights from MarTech and DemandGen Report underscore the need for marketers to ensure data quality and completeness across the full customer record. Our massive Living File® B2B database—which features a 95% email validity guarantee for 30 days--forms the foundation for our clients’ ABM marketing efforts. The OMI B2B database encompasses 145MM+ verified contacts, including manager, director, and professional-level and above records with email/HEM, social URL, and other attributes. We also deliver the largest reach into the SMB marketplace and back up every client engagement with a 95% email validity guarantee for 30 days.

Today we are also layering B2B2C matching on top of our B2B records to enable a more robust view of each ABM prospect. By linking B2B profiles to B2C-level insights, you gain access to personal context that traditional business data may overlook. Knowing that a target decision-maker is also a homeowner with children and specific lifestyle interests, like hiking or tennis, opens the door to message customization that aligns more closely with their real-world priorities.

This expanded B2B2C view opens the door to new opportunities for your ABM marketing, whether it’s digital or traditional. You can combine a targeted email campaign with connected TV ad placements, social advertising, or direct mail—to engage the individual in the channels where they are most active. Go here to read more about our B2B2C matching and linkage services.

Last but not least, when it comes to prospect data, marketers should also prioritize data cleansing, as data regularly decays when people change jobs, email addresses, phone numbers, etc. Outdated records can derail even the best campaigns. Keeping data fresh enables smarter segmentation and more precise messaging.

4. Find High-Interest Leads with Intent Data

Good data helps you reach real people—but intent data helps you target warm leads with the highest potential to convert. ABM success increasingly hinges on knowing which accounts are actively in-market. Intent data reveals which prospects are researching your category, product, or even your competitors—so you can focus your efforts on those most likely to convert.

Strategies like audience mirroring can be a useful starting point, identifying new prospects that resemble your best existing customers. But layering in intent data takes it a step further, allowing marketers to prioritize accounts showing actual buying signals. Go here to read more about our intent data offerings.

From ABM to ABX: A Strategic Evolution

As ABM continues to mature, the shift toward ABX reflects a broader trend: moving from targeting accounts to engaging them with meaningful, value-driven experiences. It’s about building trust, fostering long-term relationships, and creating momentum that continues after the initial sale.

By combining robust, high-quality data, real-time intent signals, AI-powered insights, and strong collaboration with sales, marketers can deliver personalized, scalable experiences—and drive measurable growth.

Reach out to our team for insight into how to use data to drive stronger outcomes with your ABM program: request@outwardmedia.com.

Case Study

As one of the nation’s top telecom providers, our client set out to expand awareness and drive sales for two key service offerings. The ongoing campaign—with the first phase executed across December 2024 and January 2025—focuses on reaching previously untapped prospects using the client’s internal contact database.

Though sizable, this internal file had never been marketed to—and had not been validated for email deliverability. That’s where OMI came in.

Campaign Objectives

- Elevate brand and solution awareness

- Drive qualified leads and attributed sales

- Improve ROI over prior-year email marketing efforts

Our Process

We began with the most critical element of a successful email campaign: the data. Our team performed a full re-validation of the client’s file, categorizing email domains and assigning outbound domains to boost deliverability.

With the data optimized, we launched a sequenced three-touch email campaign over two months, using the client’s creative assets. This structure created consistent engagement, building familiarity across touchpoints with high-value prospects.

Throughout, we ensured full CAN-SPAM compliance, managed weekly opt-outs, and monitored performance metrics in real time.

Results

- Emails Sent: 9 million

- Leads Delivered: 872,411

- Open Leads: 335,188

- Open Clicks: 537,223

- Sales Attributed (as of 12/31/24): 3,514

- Cost per Lead: $0.295

- ROI: 13-point increase over prior-year campaign

Since the campaign will continue through the end of June 2025, stay tuned for updated results.

What Drove Success?

- Sequenced, Three-Touch Model: Our tested cadence built engagement and improved conversions.

- Data Quality: Cleansing and validation elevated performance and inbox placement.

- Expert Execution: Every aspect—from strategy to compliance—was tightly managed by our results-focused team.

This campaign reflects the strength of OMI’s performance-driven model. But for us, it’s just business as usual: using data, strategy, and experience to drive real results.

In Their Words

“We’re extremely proud of these results. Our clients know that partnering with OMI is always a win because we focus on business outcomes.”
— Paula Chiocchi, CEO, OMI

“Our success in this campaign was driven by a formula of proven practices, an experienced team, and relentless attention to data quality. That’s why we continue to partner with OMI.”
— Telecom Client

Ready to activate your data and see results like this? Contact us: request@outwardmedia.com

As a B2B data compiling and performance marketing agency, we can tell you that modern B2B buyers demand more personalized, timely and cross-channel engagement. Getting lead gen right today requires a smarter, more connected strategy that blends data, AI and content to meet buyers where they are.

Check out our latest Forbes article for insights into the B2B lead gen best practices that are driving success for our Fortune 1000 clients in 2025:

The B2B Lead Generation Playbook: What’s Working in 2025

The strategies featured in the article are making an impact for our clients now. Reach out to our team to find out about leveraging them for your business to drive additional growth this year and beyond: request@outwardmedia.com.

In reality, many B2B organizations are sitting on valuable first-party data that doesn't tell the whole story. Contact records are often outdated or incomplete. Buyer personas may reflect a narrow snapshot rather than the entire buying group, and even when data is current, it's often limited to professional identifiers. These limitations can hinder targeting, dilute messaging effectiveness, and limit campaign performance.

By connecting data sets, you can better understand who the B2B decision-makers are while uncovering their attitudes, behaviors, and demographics. This gives you a better chance of customizing how to target them, and at the same time, you can tailor your messaging and channel mix to optimize performance and outcomes.

With all of this in mind, here are four ways to connect your marketing data to improve ROI and turn B2B prospects into customers faster:

1. Understand the Complete Customer: Today, enriching internal data with verified third-party sources and identity graphs is essential for better marketing outcomes. One way to take your data insights to the next level is to link B2B profiles to B2C-level insights, which enables you to gain access to personal context that traditional business data may overlook. For example, knowing that a target decision-maker is also a homeowner with children and specific lifestyle interests opens the door to message customization that aligns more closely with their real-world priorities. While the offering remains B2B, the delivery becomes more tailored, timely, and human.                                                                                                                                    

An expanded B2B2C view unlocks new opportunities across digital and traditional channels. You can now pair a targeted email campaign with connected TV ad placements, social advertising, and even direct mail—all coordinated to engage the individual where they are most active. Go here to read more about our B2B2C matching and linkage services.

2. More Channels Mean More Brand Exposure: Uncovering your prospects’ B2C identifiers can be a real game-changer for your marketing. For example, starting with a B2B buyer’s company IP address, we can uncover their business email address and then unlock consumer contact data such as mobile advertising ID, connected TV ID, and/or personal email. In this way, we connect the dots between the professional role and the personal attributes. We can then customize messaging to that decision-maker in all of those ad-buying platforms, whether it’s Meta, TikTok, CTV, or a combination of these. It's still a B2B offer, but you use consumer channels to promote and evangelize.

3. More Diversity, Touch Points, and Measurability: While media strategists have historically focused on direct mail, LinkedIn, or email advertising—which are outstanding channels—B2B marketers can take advantage of the many identifiers now available to create a more diverse media strategy, with more measurable touchpoints (since CTV and other identifiers are highly measurable). You can see where you’re getting traction and where you aren’t and start optimizing your channel mix based on knowing what's working and what's not. You can also maximize your spend and your ROI and be more discriminating about where you put your money.

4. Know Their Buying Interests: Last but not least, intent data brings another dimension to your marketing strategy. By tracking online behavior, marketers can identify buyers who are already researching related solutions. These in-market data signals add timeliness to the personalization equation, enabling brands to prioritize outreach to prospects more likely to convert. Go here to read more about how we approach intent data for our clients.

Together, these connected data strategies transform your ability to reach and resonate with target audiences. By starting with a clear, accurate view of the prospect and activating that insight across the right mix of channels at the right time, you can increase campaign relevance, improve engagement, and, ultimately, achieve the business outcomes you seek.

At OMI, we can assist in all of these areas. We provide B2B and B2C data and actionable customer intelligence to B2B marketers. From custom audience building to intent data, performance media, and omni-channel campaign execution, our team works to create clarity, connection, and conversion across every stage of the buyer journey.

For more on connecting the marketing data “dots,” watch our recent podcast interview with Dave Nugent, EVP of Data & Analytics of Fusion92, or contact our team at request@outwardmedia.com.

As a performance marketing agency specializing in data compilation and customer acquisition, here are four strategies we rely upon to solve daily data headaches and eliminate those pesky silos:

1. Seamless Data Integration for Precision Targeting

Making the most of customer and prospect data while also gaining a holistic understanding of your target audience hinges upon seamless integration. But seamless integration in modern marketing environments is complex – because numerous data sources exist, including customer relationship management (CRM) data, real-time analytics, cross-channel analytics, telemetry data, third-party business contact data, and intent data. That’s why building APIs that connect data to popular tools and platforms to activate it quickly, easily and safely is critical for marketers today.

At OMI, one of our common integrations involves layering intent data on top of B2B prospect contact data to enable reach to specific, qualified and interested prospects. The combined data can be integrated across an entire marketing technology stack and applied to targeted audience campaigns across email acquisition marketing, social networks, programmatic display ads, and more. As a result, precision targeting is amplified for more impactful engagement across multiple channels. Suddenly, you’re not just marketing—you’re reaching people, at scale, who want to hear from you.

As another example, the topic of using AI as part of a marketing data strategy came up during a recent conversation on our podcast, The Marketing Vanguard. Our guest, Keith Goodman, VP of Corporate Sales and Marketing for Modern Postcard, mentioned that his company relies upon OpenAI to generate a list of targets for some clients and to append the domains of those targets. Then, leveraging their data team, they structure that list for integration into an ABM program, resulting in a ready-to-use custom audience.

Keith will also turn to OMI to drill down further after uncovering a list of companies that engaged with a client campaign. OMI will deliver more attributes for the prospects in that list, providing a robust profile for improved personalization and targeting.

2. Smart Data Collaboration for Scaling Your Reach

More data translates into more possibilities, but siloed data is a roadblock. Data collaboration is the answer. Merging and analyzing data sets while maintaining privacy and compliance requires breaking down silos both within the organization and external to the organization (such as when working with trusted third-party data providers and other partners). The aim is to ensure data is shared seamlessly and securely.

Modern identity graphs provide an efficient solution to this challenge, removing silos by bringing together diverse audience profiles including an organization’s first-party data and data sourced from multiple third-party data vendors. By providing seamless access to prospect data at massive scale, identify graphs unleash access to your most ideal targets, allow you to personalize your engagements with them, and enable more accurate omni-channel campaign measurement. Go here for a look at how top brands are advancing their identity graph strategies today by building their own graphs for improved control and cost savings.

3. B2B2C Matching for More Meaningful Connections

Today's marketers want more meaningful and direct ways to connect with their audiences—both at work and at home. That’s where B2B and B2C data convergence comes in: B2B2C data linkage breaks down the silos that exist between consumer and professional prospect data. As one of our most popular new services at OMI, it involves weaving together a prospect’s B2B attributes--sourced from our own massive B2B database--with that prospect’s B2C attributes, such as their LinkedIn profile, demographics and residential address. OMI then sends the combined B2B2C audience data to theTradeDesk, Google DV360, or other DSPs and leading social channels to fuel media activation, email acquisition marketing, CTV, programmatic, social, and other omni-channel campaigns for clients.

The bottom line is that B2B2C data linkage results in a more robust and complete prospect profile that elevates personalization and relevance while enabling our clients to reach prospects on personal and professional channels for higher ROI.

4. Uncompromising Data Quality to Fuel Your Success

Even with all the tools in the world, if your data isn’t clean, you’re building on a shaky foundation. Data quality underpins every successful marketing initiative, especially as AI and GenAI continue to take center stage.

Quality data starts with strong hygiene practices and trusted data partners. You need confidence that your data is accurate, up to date, and ready for action. That’s why we treat our award-winning OMI B2B prospect database as a Living File—continuously updating it to reflect market shifts and business changes. Our B2B Living File® licenses are crafted from our Master File, which is created through the processing of over 40 billion data signals per month.

The OMI B2B database encompasses 145MM+ verified contacts, including manager, director, and professional-level and above records with email/HEM, social URL, and other attributes. We also deliver the largest reach into the SMB marketplace and back up every client engagement with a 95% email validity guarantee for 30 days.

Reach out to our team at request@outwardmedia.com for guidance with optimizing your stack and gaining a competitive edge with data that works as hard as you do.

Digital advertising has been plagued by ad fraud, bots, and shady practices that prevent marketers from effectively measuring campaign performance. TikTok ads reportedly have a 74% fraud rate; Facebook, 57%.

In this environment, MarTech stresses the need to align marketing with broader business goals. But first, marketers need visibility into what’s impacting those goals now and what isn’t. At OMI, where our mission is to deliver real data, real results, and real reach to real people, we focus on these three fundamentals to do just that:

1. Trackability and Measurement
Digital channels, when managed right, offer better tracking than traditional platforms, but not all digital is equal. With the right agency partner, tools, and audience targeting, you can avoid fraud and measure true performance to clearly understand how your campaign is delivering on business goals.

Take Connected TV (CTV) advertising, for example. It allows:

• Conversion tracking: Identify website visitors who made a purchase after ad exposure.
• Footfall attribution: Track viewers who visited a physical location post-ad.

This level of tracking and insight optimizes targeting and leads to higher lead gen and conversion rates.

2. Increased Transparency
Ad fraud inflates metrics and masks real performance. At OMI, we rely on the depth and accuracy of our massive B2B prospect database to ensure that the targets we identify for your campaigns are not only human, but also the right decision-makers for your offers. We eliminate non-human activity from our audiences, so your performance metrics reflect actual engagement—not noise.

Our view is that when metrics aren’t grounded in reality, marketers risk wasting their media budgets. That’s why we believe the ability to create real business impact with marketing starts with clean, honest data and transparent attribution practices

Another one of our most strategic assets in the effort to remove fraud from client campaigns is FouAnalytics, a leader in fighting ad fraud. FouAnalytics President and Founder Dr. Augustine Fou has been on the front lines of digital marketing for nearly three decades, studying and documenting the nexus of cybercrime including ad fraud. Learn more by reading our recent blog or watching the podcast interview

3. Reach and Engage the Right Decision-Makers

We continue to advise our clients that the most essential building block for creating business impact with marketing is taking the time and effort to target the right audiences and decision-makers. That’s our specialty at OMI. Our high-quality prospect data gives clients a way to cut through the hype and focus on who and what matters so that they can reach their long-term financial goals.

Case in point: we recently executed a 2024 email acquisition campaign for a leading telecom provider to promote awareness and sales for two of their solutions. We deployed a three-touch campaign totaling 9 million sends over four months.

Campaign Results:

• Leads Delivered: 872,411
• Sales Attributed: 3,514
• Cost per Lead: $0.295
• 13-point ROI increase over 2022–23 campaigns

Our proven three-touch model, backed by strategic execution and an unrelenting focus on data quality, made the difference.

The telecom client is now poised for continued growth in 2025, with more sales on the horizon. Whether they turn to us for email acquisition, online or programmatic advertising, or full omni-channel campaigns, they now understand that precision audience building is a game changer.

Top Takeaway

Having high-quality data that ensures you’re reaching the right decision-makers—and tracking their engagement all the way to conversion accurately and transparently--is essential to B2B marketing success, both short-term and long-term. Without this critical data driving and informing your marketing and sales efforts, business growth falls short of goals.

That’s why our team begins every client engagement by building a custom audience using our proprietary Living File® B2B database, client data (after deep cleansing it first), or a combination of the two. With 145MM+ verified B2B contacts, our database encompasses 145MM+ manager-, director-, and professional-level and above records with email/HEM, social URL, and other attributes. We also deliver the largest reach into the SMB marketplace.

One of our most popular add-on capabilities, B2B2C data linkage, weaves together our Living File B2B attributes with B2C attributes for each prospect sourced from 15+ available platforms—including theTradeDesk and leading social channels. This results in a more robust prospect profile that elevates personalization and relevance while enabling us to reach prospects on personal and professional channels for bigger impact and higher ROI. Our audience data can be used on the demand-side platform of your choice for use across media activation, email acquisition marketing, CTV, programmatic, social, and other omni-channel campaigns.

Ready to grow the long-term financial impact of your marketing?
Contact us at request@outwardmedia.com.

At OMI, we’re feeling the love. As an independent agency trusted by Fortune 1000 brands for audience data, performance marketing, and campaign executions, we’re not driven by shareholder value and not held back by layers of red tape. We keep it simple. Our only focus is helping clients succeed.

Here are a few reasons why independent agencies like ours are resonating more than ever with today’s modern marketers.

1. Pure Client Focus With No Distractions

Independent agencies have one goal: solve the client’s challenge. There are no quarterly earnings reports or inter-agency politics shaping decisions. That's one of the most significant reasons why top brands partner with OMI. They want an agency focused on results, not bureaucracy—and one that can adjust strategies quickly when needed.

We don't bring in a dozen different teams to pitch or even service a new client. We have one multi-talented and experienced team that listens, builds, and executes while embracing data, creativity, and speed.

2. Performance That’s Hard to Ignore

One of the biggest reasons clients stick with independent agencies sounds simple yet it is very difficult to achieve: we deliver results. Speaking of which, we’re excited to share a sneak peek into a case study we’ll be posting soon that showcases how we define success at scale for our clients:

Telecom Email Acquisition Campaign Highlights

The 2024 email acquisition campaign, conducted during a three-month period, consisted of 9 million email sends and spanned two of the provider’s solution offerings. Our primary goals were to elevate awareness and sales. At a high level, the campaign demonstrated how well-planned sequencing and high-quality data come together to drive conversions.

The telecom client provided the prospect contact data to fuel the campaign and had not previously marketed to any of the records. In addition, the records were unverified, meaning additional work needed to be done to ensure the highest levels of deliverability.

Process

OMI’s first step was to focus on the data. We re-validated the client’s prospect file for email deliverability and analyzed the email domains for deliverability categorization and outbound email domain assignment. Throughout the campaign, we also maintained opt-out cleaning compliance on a weekly basis with the client.

Using the client’s creative assets, OMI initiated a three-touch email marketing campaign to the supplied data each month over the three-month period.

Results

Our performance data shows the following achievements:

• Emails Sent: 9 Million
• Leads Delivered: 872,411
• Open Leads: 335,188
• Open Clicks: 537,223
• Sales Attributed (as of 12/31/24): 3,514
• Cost per Lead: $0.295
• A 13-point increase in ROI over 2022 and 2023 campaigns

What made the difference?

• Our proven three-touch acquisition email model, designed to build engagement over time.
• A deep cleanse of the client’s internal prospect list to boost data quality and email deliverability.

Our success in this campaign was driven by a formula consisting of proven practices, an experienced team, a focus on results, and relentless attention to data quality. Although you can call it an example of the independent agency model at work, for our team, it's just the way we do business.

3. Flexibility and Speed = Competitive Advantage

As the MediaPost article points out, independent agencies are often more agile. They’re able to turn strategy into action faster than their holding company counterparts. That’s because there’s less internal overhead and more direct access to senior decision-makers.

At OMI, we like to start each client engagement by building a custom audience. After that, we never take a cookie-cutter approach. Whether we’re using high-performing net-new data, cleansing a stale file, running multi-touch campaigns across channels, or a combination of these and other actions, we adapt to what the client needs most and we move quickly.

4. Data-Driven by Design

Modern marketing is powered by data, and independent agencies like ours don’t treat it as an add-on. We have always been focused on enabling clients to reach the right audiences with clean, current, and fresh data, whether it’s for:

• Acquisition email
• Programmatic and CTV campaigns
• Direct mail
• Social media
• Media activation
• All of the above (omni-channel)

The recent telecom campaign is a case in point. By using cleansed, high-quality prospect records, we created a foundation for success.

5. Real Accountability, Real Partnership

When you work with an independent agency, you know who’s doing the work—and you know who’s accountable. You won't be working with a large project team, but you will experience clear communication, shared goals, and performance you can measure.

That's why OMI has long-standing relationships with a growing number of Fortune 1000 brands, including top telecom companies. They count on us not only for our data expertise but also for our partnership mindset.

What’s Next

From our perspective, we're witnessing the evolution of a shift in the agency business. Marketers are tired of complexity and complacency. They want clarity, performance, and partners they can trust to move fast and get results.

Our upcoming case study will dive deeper into how our telecom client scaled conversions using OMI’s campaign and data expertise—but the bigger story is that independent agencies like ours are winning because we’re focused on results.

We know you want to feel the love of campaign success that can only come from partnering with an independent agency. Reach out to our team to have a conversation about partnering with us to achieve the results you want: request@outwardmedia.com.

According to Edelman, modern B2B buyers are looking to influencers, communities, and digital creators to help guide decisions “in a manner that reflects the social-first nature of modern buying groups.” That means it’s time for marketers to look beyond their owned content and customer databases and into ecosystems, partners, and voices that buyers already trust.

Done well, expanding your sphere of influence through strategic partnerships, microinfluencers, and B2B communities can help you gain visibility with high-value buyers you may never reach otherwise. However, as Forrester points out, there’s also a new risk equation to consider: brand safety.

Here are five things to keep in mind if you want to grow wisely and gain trust—without putting your brand at risk.

1. Think Bigger About Brand Safety

Most marketers think of brand safety as a placement issue—don’t let your logo, ads, or articles appear next to questionable content. Recently Forrester’s 2024 B2B Brand and Communications Survey revealed that the definition has dramatically expanded.

As many as 58% of B2B marketing leaders now say brand safety includes how they form partnerships, choose suppliers, and make business decisions—not just where their ads show up.

In other words, the company you keep—the influencers, platforms, communities, and vendors you align with—reflects on your brand. Before joining an ecosystem or launching a co-branded campaign, ask:

• Does this partner’s behavior align with our values?
• How might their reputation affect ours if something goes wrong?
• Would our customers trust this alliance?

The influence you gain by extending your reach is only powerful if it adds to your brand’s credibility. Clearly, you never want it to undermine it.

2. Leverage the Power of “Trust Transference”

Forrester calls it trust transference—the idea that buyers are more likely to trust your brand if you’re associated with a brand they already trust.

Their research found that 74% of business buyers are likely to trust a company affiliated with a trusted brand—compared to just 42% if the affiliation is with an untrusted one.

That makes partnering with well-regarded microinfluencers or niche industry groups a smart trust-building play—especially if you're trying to break into a new audience. It also means vetting your partners is non-negotiable. The same halo effect that can build trust can also burn you if a partner’s reputation falters.

3. Choose Partners That Extend Your Reach—Strategically

At OMI, we see this dynamic in action all the time. As a performance marketing agency specializing in custom audience building, here are a few ways we’ve enabled clients to build new inroads into valuable market segments without compromising their brand:

Partnering with microinfluencers in niche healthcare segments to reach decision-makers in a sensitive, highly regulated space—backed by clean, trusted audience data.

Running acquisition campaigns via co-branded emails that warm up cold contacts with trusted content first—improving response rates while keeping messaging compliant and on-brand.

Powering omni-channel campaigns that pair programmatic ads and email outreach with strategic identity-matched audiences—allowing clients to “borrow” trust from the communities their targets already belong to.

In each case, the goal was to increase visibility while staying anchored in trust, brand alignment, and data quality.

4. Prepare for the “What-Ifs”

Even with careful planning, brand risk is never zero. Forrester recommends that marketers prepare with a crisis communication plan that includes:

• Evaluating high-risk relationships ahead of time
• Aligning with legal and executive leadership on response protocols
• Being ready to act quickly to preserve trust in the event of a reputational hit

Strong brands aren’t just known for good marketing—they’re known for resilience. That means having a plan for what to do when something goes wrong, not just when everything’s going right.

5. Don’t Just Grow—Grow Wisely

The pressure to grow pipelines, reach new markets, and influence buyers is real, but as your brand’s sphere of influence expands, so does its exposure. That’s why it makes sense to take a strategic, values-first approach to partnerships, content ecosystems, and influencer programs. When done right, these alliances:

• Build trust through association
• Extend your reach to new, qualified buyers
• Create opportunities to lead, not just advertise or promote

When done wrong, they erode the very thing you're trying to build -- credibility. Expanding your B2B influence is essential—but brand safety must scale alongside it. In a world of growing interconnection, your brand is only as strong as the company it keeps.

At OMI, we give B2B brands a powerful way to build custom audiences and data-driven campaigns that boost performance without compromising reputation. Connect with our team for a conversation about how we can assist you in reaching your marketing goals: request@outwardmedia.com.

Companies with strong omni-channel strategies retain 89% of their customers, compared to just 33% for companies with weak omni-channel engagement. (Source: Porch Group Media)

In 2025, there is a clear expectation for omni-channel experiences, with 84% of B2B buyers stating that it is essential for sellers to operate across multiple online and offline channels. (Source: Hokodo, the B2B Ecommerce Association, and Greenwood Consulting)

At OMI, we’ve spent years refining custom omni-channel solutions that align with real audience behaviors, expectations, and business goals. Following a recent podcast conversation on omni-channel marketing with Keith Goodman, VP of Corporate Sales and Marketing for Modern Postcard, I thought it would be timely to share four secrets to our success, including a few real-world examples.

1. Build Campaigns Around Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

Effective omni-channel marketing starts with a clearly defined ICP—a carefully thought-out description of the types of companies and decision-makers most likely to engage with your brand.

How to define your ICP:

• Analyze current and past customers to identify shared characteristics.
• Look at industry, company size, job titles, and buying behaviors.
• Use real data insights rather than assumptions.

For acquisition campaigns (a specialty of ours at OMI), a strong ICP helps you map out data sources and media channels effectively. No roadmaps are identical, but each one should align with your ICP and business objectives. Go here to read our recent blog on how to build a modern and robust ICP.

2. Choose and Sequence the Right Channels

Omni-channel doesn’t mean being everywhere—it means being where your audience actually engages. When we spoke with Keith, he talked about testing the sequencing of media to see where and how to achieve the best results for a campaign. Modern Postcard leverages the benefits of each type of media to maximize the response and the conversion.

Direct mail plays very well with digital and email, Keith says. For example, postal retargeting is a big focus for his company. They can identify a postal address based on a cookie to a web visitor and then send direct mail to bring that visitor back to the website or move them into a conversion media, from phone calls to catalog orders or something else.

Also, when people respond to a direct mail piece, you can then send them an email and hit them with digital ads. By combining these media in different sequences based on specific activities, you can drive them to certain activities that move them along the funnel in purchasing. When you combine and sequence media in this way, you gain a powerful way to target with greater accuracy.

Example: A consumer-focused brand needed to pilot a new acquisition campaign targeting small businesses. OMI leveraged B2C data through an identity graph, defining a specialized audience of sole proprietors and businesses with 1-4 employees. Triggered email and programmatic ads created a seamless experience across channels, reinforcing brand messaging and increasing engagement.

Key takeaway: More channels don’t always mean better results. Instead of spreading thin, invest in a strategic mix of channels that match your ICP and goals and test out sequencing to determine the best mix.

3. Prioritize Personalization and Precision Targeting

A modern omni-channel strategy isn’t just about reaching people—it’s about reaching the right people with the right message at the right time. An interesting point about using AI to deliver on this promise came up during the podcast conversation with Keith. He mentioned that his company relies upon OpenAI to generate a list of targets for some clients and to append the domains of those targets. Then, leveraging their data team, they structure that list for integration into an ABM program, resulting in a ready-to-use custom audience.

Keith will also turn to OMI to drill down further after uncovering a list of companies that engaged with a client campaign. OMI will deliver more attributes for the prospects in that list, providing clients with a robust profile for improved personalization and targeting.

The bottom line is that success in every omni-channel campaign requires robust, high-quality contact data, which is our core service at OMI. We enable our clients to reach their most ideal prospects across their target markets using our massive Living File® B2B database, containing 145 million+ manager-, director-, and professional-level and above contacts with email/HEM, social URL, and other attributes. We also offer add-on techniques—like B2B2C matching to theTradeDesk and top social platforms, along with intent data—for more precise targeting (for ad serving and other purposes) and improved campaign performance.

4. Use Modern Omni-Channel Attribution & Measurement

A recent eMarketer survey states, "Most marketers (78.4%) use last-click attribution and web analytics to measure media efficacy.” This metric attributes full credit of a conversion to the last ad a user clicked on before converting. But “despite common reliance, most are displeased with last-click attribution.” They need measurement that reflects the entire customer journey, not just the last click.

To optimize advertising measurement and understand how campaigns are performing at every step, our perspective is that marketers need a trusted agency partner. The right partner can guide you in your media choices and ensure you avoid the pitfalls of ad fraud and poor audience data, which negatively impact measurement accuracy. With OMI’s custom audience services, you can track activity across multiple digital channels.

Right now, we are loving the possibilities offered by connected TV (CTV), which is leading the way in modern marketing measurement (check out our recent blog on the rise of CTV advertising) by providing:

• Conversion tracking: Identify website visitors and determine which ones made a purchase after viewing an ad.

• Footfall attribution: Measure how many viewers visited a physical location following an ad exposure.

Measurement capabilities like this make it easier to calculate ROI, and that’s what marketers need more than ever today.

Need a smarter omni-channel strategy? Contact OMI at request@outwardmedia.com for a consultation on custom audience building, data-driven customer acquisition solutions, and campaign execution at scale.

At OMI, we know from years of experience that email is powerful—but it works best as part of a broader strategy. Here are six modern approaches we use with our Fortune 2000 clients to boost lead-gen outcomes using email and other channels.

1. AI- and Intent-Driven Personalization

AI is reshaping how marketers engage audiences. Tools like Marketo Engage and HubSpot’s Smart Content dynamically adjust messaging based on real-time buyer behavior. How this boosts lead-gen:

• AI-driven analytics let you understand how visitors engage with your content.
• Personalizing your messaging dynamically—based on real-time behaviors—can make your content timelier and more relevant.
• With GenAI, you can perform email personalization at incredible scale, tailoring subject lines, CTAs, and content for each prospect.

At OMI, for example, we blend machine learning with our Living File® B2B contact database, automating personalization at scale to ensure our clients’ messages reach and align with the interests of the right buyers. The database includes 145M+ verified decision-maker contacts with manager-, director-, and professional-level and above titles, along with email/HEM, social URL, and other attributes.

Intent data offers another way for our team to take lead gen to the next level. Digital intent signals show a prospect’s online behavior, such as their interests or intent to buy. Using intent insights in combination with machine learning, AI-driven analytics, and our B2B database, we are able to deliver even more personalized and timely messages. We’ve found this approach to be successful for engaging warm leads using CTV and programmatic advertising, email marketing, social media, and other channels.

2. Multi-Channel Retargeting for Higher Conversions

Email alone isn’t enough. Smart marketers use omni-channel retargeting to reinforce their message. For example, you can:

• Trigger programmatic ads for prospects who engaged with your emails.
• Retarget email non-openers with ads on social and digital platforms.
• Create cross-channel journeys that move leads through the funnel efficiently.

Why it matters: Studies show that multi-channel retargeting can boost conversions by 70% compared to single-channel efforts. In addition, research and real-time analytics demonstrate that it takes 12 – 15 touch points before a prospect will engage with a marketing message.

It’s clear that more channels and more touchpoints give you more opportunities to achieve meaningful engagement, and ultimately conversions, and that’s why our team often proposes combining email with  programmatic ads for maximum impact.

3. The Competitive Advantage of High-Quality B2B Data

Lead-gen is only as strong as the data behind it. Bad data = wasted spend, poor targeting, and missed opportunities. New research shows that B2B email lists, whether for customers or prospects, decay at 28% per year—faster than ever. Yet reaching the right contacts with your data is essential to lead-gen success. The key is to keep your database current and clean and work with the right data partners.

At OMI, we’ve built a reputation for high-quality third-party B2B data. We continuously update our Living File® database and it always reflects the changing business environment, such as shifts in remote work, up-to-date social profile data, and more. We specialize in building custom data sets that empower clients to execute highly targeted omni-channel marketing campaigns for email acquisition, media activation, CTV advertising, direct mail, outbound telemarketing, and other channels.

Pro Tip: Always verify data accuracy, validity, and freshness before investing in third-party lists. OMI guarantees 95% email validity, ensuring optimum outcomes.

4. Build a More Complete Prospect Profile

To improve targeting, personalization, and engagement, turn to B2B2C matching, a technique we’ve pioneered at OMI to allow our clients to gain a more complete view of their prospects. Our approach involves matching our award-winning B2B contact data to consumer data attributes found on theTradeDesk® and the top social platforms. The combined B2B2C data, which can be delivered to your demand-side platform of choice to fuel your lead-gen campaigns, blends personal and professional attributes that enable you to engage prospects more effectively at work and home, on the channels they use the most.

5. Elevate Audience Engagement with Episodic Thought Leadership Content

Instead of isolated messages, many B2B brands are thinking like media companies—delivering engaging thought leadership content in an episodic format across emails, blogs, videos, ads, podcasts, social media, and more. This approach works by:

• Boosting engagement and retention: A series of messages that tell a story over time keeps audiences coming back for more.
• Strengthening brand authority: Thought leadership positions you as a trusted industry voice.
• Driving organic reach: Fresh content improves SEO and discoverability.

Pro Tip: Decision-makers actively seek thought leadership—75% of C-suite leaders say it has led them to consider products they hadn’t before, according to Edelman.

6. Final Thoughts: Trust & Influence

Trust in traditional marketing is changing. According to Edelman, B2B leaders are now turning to trusted influencers, communities, and digital creators to inform their buying decisions “in a manner that reflects the social-first nature of modern buying groups.” Edelman says now is the time to consider augmenting your content and lead-gen strategy by forming partnerships with these external experts to open up opportunities with high-value buyers outside of your existing sphere of influence.

Check out our recent blog on the rise of B2B micro-influencers. Adopting this fast-growing strategy early can give you a competitive edge.

Need help leveling up your lead-gen? Our team at OMI specializes in B2B customer acquisition, custom audience building, performance media and marketing, omni-channel campaigns, B2B2C matching, and more. Contact us at request@outwardmedia.com to explore how we can elevate your lead-gen results.

That’s why B2B marketers today are saying that the most essential campaign building block is getting a handle on your audience. Knowing who you’re talking to, what they care about, and how they consume information is more critical than ever.

Recently on our Marketing Vanguard podcast, we sat down with Julie Neumark of Neumarketinggroup and covered six power moves for an effective B2B content strategy. Here are the highlights of our discussion along with a few added thoughts from our team:

1. ICP vs. Persona: Why Both Matter: Before diving into content strategy, it’s essential to define who you’re actually trying to reach—and that starts with understanding the difference between ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) and persona.

Many marketers use these terms interchangeably, but they’re not the same:

• ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) refers to the company you’re targeting—its industry, size, revenue, and other firmographics. It’s especially useful for account-based marketing (ABM).
• Persona focuses on the individual decision-makers within those companies—their job roles, pain points, challenges, and content preferences.

The point is that you need both. Without a clear ICP, you risk targeting the wrong companies. Without detailed personas, you won’t know how to speak to the right people within those companies.

2. Finding the Right Marketing Channels - Test, Learn, Repeat: There’s no single "best" marketing channel—it depends entirely on where your audience engages most. That’s why testing and iteration are crucial.

For example, one B2B brand found that organic LinkedIn posts from its executive team were the highest-performing content. Another brand—targeting professionals in the education sector—saw stronger engagement with email sequences than with social media.

The takeaway? There’s no universal answer. To ensure success:

• Test different channels (LinkedIn, email, paid ads, syndication, etc.).
• Analyze engagement metrics and double down on what works.
• Continuously refine your approach instead of relying on assumptions.

3. The Power of Content Syndication Partnerships: Beyond owned channels, partnering with complementary brands is a smart way to expand your audience reach. Many B2B marketers are leveraging:

• Co-branded webinars or podcasts to tap into shared audiences.
• Guest blog collaborations with industry partners.
• Joint email campaigns to introduce their brand to new prospects.

By working with trusted, like-minded brands, marketers can amplify their content and increase visibility without starting from scratch.

4. How AI Is Reshaping Audience Engagement: Tools like HubSpot’s Smart Content and other AI-driven engagement trackers now allow marketers to personalize messaging based on buyer behavior in real time. Instead of taking a one-size-fits-all approach, content can now be tailored to what the audience actually cares about—right now.

This shift makes content marketing less about blindly blasting messages and more about meeting people where they are. For B2B marketers, that means:

• Using AI-driven analytics to understand how visitors engage with website content.
• Adjusting messaging dynamically based on real-time user behavior.
• Creating hyper-personalized content experiences that resonate with different audience segments.

5. The Future - Personalization and Storytelling: Looking ahead, two major trends are shaping B2B content marketing:

• Hyper-Personalization: AI is enabling deeper personalization than ever before. Some brands are even developing dynamic web pages that change based on a visitor’s persona—offering tailored experiences based on their role, industry, or interests.
• B2B Storytelling: B2B brands are starting to think more like media companies, producing episodic video content and interactive experiences to engage audiences.

6. Start Strong: Having the right audience data is just as critical as having the right audience strategy. That’s where OMI comes in. We specialize in building custom data sets that empower clients to execute highly targeted omni-channel marketing campaigns for media activation, CTV advertising, email marketing, direct mail, outbound telemarketing, and other channels.

Every client has a unique market, and we ensure they have high-quality data to reach their most ideal prospects across that market. We also offer add-on techniques—like B2B2C matching to Trade Desk and the top social platforms, along with intent data—for more precise targeting (for ad serving and other purposes) and improved campaign performance. All of our audience services are anchored by our massive Living File® B2B database—consisting of 145 million+ manager-, director-, and professional-level and above contacts with email/HEM, social URL, and other attributes.

For a quick pro tip from Julie on increasing engagement with bite-size content, go here, and if you want to discuss audience strategy, our team is always willing to talk. Please reach out to us at request@outwardmedia.com for a no-cost consultation. Go here to read our white papers and case studies to find out about how we power marketing success with data.

New research shows that B2B email lists decay at 28% per year—faster than ever before. (Think about it: nearly a third of your carefully-built list could be outdated in just 12 months!) Layoffs, job changes, company closures, and mergers all contribute to the churn. And if you’re not actively maintaining your data, you’re likely wasting time and money on emails that will never reach the right people.

So, what should B2B marketers be doing right now? Here are six key moves to keep your email list clean, your campaigns effective, and your ROI strong.

1. Take a Hard Look at Your List

Not all industries and businesses are affected equally by turnover and email decay. Some are seeing rapid changes, while others remain relatively stable. If you haven’t already, take a fresh look at your target audience. Which sectors are experiencing the most volatility? Are key accounts shifting? Does your ideal customer profile (ICP) need updating? (Check out our recent blog on modernizing your ICP to improve campaign results).

Understanding how external shifts impact your audience will help you fine-tune your list and messaging.

2. Track the Right Numbers

A sudden dip in your email engagement isn’t just a sign of a weak subject line—it could be data decay at work. Pay close attention to:

• Hard bounce rates – These indicate invalid email addresses. If they’re climbing, your list needs attention.
• Open and click-through rates – If they’re steadily dropping, it could mean more of your emails are landing in inactive inboxes.
• Reply rates – If previously engaged contacts have gone silent, they may no longer be there.

These metrics will tell you if data decay is impacting your marketing, and where to focus your cleanup efforts.

3. Don’t Ignore the Cost of Bad Data

Outdated email addresses aren’t just an inconvenience—they’re costly. Every email to a dead address is wasted marketing spend. Worse, sending too many emails to invalid addresses can damage your sender reputation, leading to lower deliverability across the board. If ESPs (email service providers) see you as a risky sender, even your best, most engaged contacts may stop receiving your emails.

4. Get Serious About Data Cleansing

Manually updating your database is time-consuming, and for large lists, nearly impossible to keep up with. And even if you do a one-time cleanup, the decay never stops. That’s why ongoing data cleansing is essential.

Using automated tools or a professional database cleansing service streamlines and strengthens your processes for removing outdated contacts, error correction, and replacing invalid addresses—keeping your list as fresh as possible. At OMI, we use data cleansing to maintain the quality of our own massive business contact database and offer it as a service for our clients’ databases to increase deliverability and engagement.

In one case, for a leading telecom provider with 35 million records, data cleansing improved their email validity and accuracy by 37%. For ongoing accuracy, look for a service that also provides a cleansing maintenance program to continuously optimize data accuracy and validity.

Want to maintain accuracy long-term? A monthly data maintenance program is the way to go.

5. Replace Lost Contacts with New, High-Quality Data

If a big chunk of your list is outdated, you don’t just need to clean it—you need to replace lost contacts. That’s where acquisition email data comes in.

Instead of relying only on inbound leads (which take time to build), acquisition data allows you to proactively find and reach new contacts who match your buyer personas. Just make sure you’re sourcing data from a reputable provider that guarantees accuracy. (At OMI, for example, we offer 95% email validity for 30 days, which is well above industry standards.)

We use our Living File® B2B database—consisting of 145 million+ manager-, director-, and professional-level and above contacts with email/HEM, social URL, and other attributes—to perform custom audience building for clients. These audiences can be used for media activation, email acquisition marketing, CTV, programmatic, social, and other omni-channel campaigns.

6. Build More Robust Data Records to Improve Personalization

Today, as B2B and B2C personas are converging,  we are seeing the emergence of "B2B2C" data to unlock the personal and professional attributes of your prospects, enabling improved campaign targeting, personalization, and relevance. In step with this movement, it’s becoming clear that those marketers who adopt new techniques, channels, and data sets to activate audience reach to decision-makers—both at work and home—are successfully turning more prospects into customers.

OMI is addressing this shift with our colossal B2B2C database and B2B2C linkage service, which provide our clients with a more robust personal-professional profile of each prospect they target. We combine B2B attributes such as email, firmographics, and job title with B2C attributes like the prospect's LinkedIn profile, demographics, and residential address.

How it works: Our service spans 145 million business contact records with residential/consumer linkage on 90 million of those records, which is exceptional in the marketing industry.

We match our data records to Trade Desk and the top social platforms, with up to 15 total platforms available for matching. Our aim is to provide our clients with custom, highly-targeted audiences made up of comprehensive prospect profiles that can be leveraged to elevate digital advertising personalization, relevance, and ultimately, campaign ROI across omni-channel points, including direct mail, email, social, and programmatic.

Here's a quick example of how B2B2C data linkage works: A marketer can send direct mail to a B2B contact’s home address while also engaging with them on their business email using the same offer to reinforce the message.

The Bottom Line

With email lists decaying faster than ever, B2B marketers need to be proactive. If you’re still relying on the same old list without maintaining, updating, and modernizing it, you’re losing potential leads—and hurting your deliverability.

The fix? Regularly clean your data, replace lost contacts, and keep a close eye on engagement metrics. A data-driven, proactive approach that embraces new data strategies like B2B2C will help you get the most out of your email marketing efforts and keep your pipeline full.

Please reach out to our team at request@outwardmedia.com for a no-cost marketing data consultation. Go here to read our white papers and case studies to find out about how we power marketing success with data.

What is OMI best known for?

OMI is a performance agency and we are best known for our massive B2B database containing over 18 million businesses and 140 million contacts, which our clients can access to develop new customers. We also have a core competency in the SMB marketplace, with the world’s largest U.S.-focused SMB database. Clients come to us to have us build them custom data sets for media activation, email marketing, direct mail, outbound telemarketing, and much more. Each client has a unique marketplace they're trying to reach, and we build them a data file that empowers them to execute targeted omni-channel marketing campaigns.

What is the state of B2B data in 2025?

Marketing leaders are looking closely at the quality of the data they use today because reaching real people and the right people with their marketing is more important than ever. Data quality is essential for building trust, creating relationships with prospects, and gaining improved transparency and measurement capabilities across your marketing campaigns. There are so many different data companies out there today, and the main thing that we coach our clients on is getting a read on data quality. Is the contact data accurate? Are the addresses and phone numbers current and valid? Is the company description correct? It's a big deal because the error rate is significant across the provider landscape. We pride ourselves in a 95% contact quality validity guarantee for email addresses. That's something else we advise people to do: Get a guarantee on the quality of the data.

What else is on the B2B marketing radar this year?

Another data trend we’re seeing in marketing is that B2B and B2C personas are converging, creating a world where "B2B2C" data unlocks your prospects' personal and professional attributes, enabling improved targeting, personalization, and relevance. Questions are coming up across the marketing community around the techniques, channels, and data sets that activate reach to the right companies and decision-makers--whether at work or home--to turn a prospect into a customer.

OMI is ahead of the curve in addressing this movement with our colossal B2B2C database and B2B2C linkage service, which provide our clients with a more robust personal-professional profile of each prospect they target. We combine B2B attributes such as email, firmographics, and job title with B2C attributes, such as the prospect's LinkedIn profile, demographics, and residential address. This lets brands target and engage prospects more effectively -- across both B2B and B2C channels. For example, with B2B2C data linkage, a marketer can send direct mail to a B2B contact’s home address while also engaging with them on their business email using the same offer to reinforce the message.

Our service spans 140 million business contact records with residential/consumer linkage on 90 million of those records, which is an exceptional match rate. We can customize this contact data for each client's needs and then leverage it to fuel campaigns across omni-channel points, including direct mail, email, social, and programmatic.

Lastly, by adding intent data and our audience media activation services, Fortune 2000 companies and mid-size enterprises can achieve invaluable reach, increase their ROI, and grow their target audiences.

Who will be interviewed on the B2B Innovation?

Listeners will hear from marketing leaders and innovators who specialize in data compilation and are skilled at campaign execution. Technologies around data are moving so fast and we’ll want to interview people who can cover what’s new and what’s trending. The focus will also be on what's on the horizon, what's worked in the past, what we anticipate will work in the future, and how marketers and their teams can execute to get new customers.

The ideal guest would be anybody who's currently managing their database for marketing outreach, involved in campaign management in the trenches and expected to deliver results, responsible for helping gain market share for their company through new business development, and driving innovation in marketing to SMBs. We will also hear from people who are behind the scenes across these areas and don't necessarily get the credit they deserve.

If you're a successful business leader or marketing professional with insights to share, we'd love to feature you as a guest. Visit outward media.com/podcast to learn more. Be sure to subscribe to "B2B Innovation" so you never miss an episode. You can find the live podcast on any of these directories:

Please reach out to our team for a no-cost data consultation. Go here to read our white papers and case studies to find out about how we power marketing success with data.

While these high-profile influencers can drive massive awareness for B2C companies, big names don’t necessarily translate into big impact when it comes to selling complex B2B solutions or services. Instead, a more strategic approach—powered by micro-influencers—is now giving brands a competitive edge.

Why Micro-Influencers Matter in B2B Marketing

Micro-influencers possess niche expertise and tout highly-engaged followings. With their deep knowledge and credibility, they can effectively influence B2B purchase decisions within specialized markets, offering these advantages to brands:

1. Trust and Credibility: B2B buyers rely on expert recommendations over traditional advertising. Micro-influencers have built their reputations within niche communities, making their endorsements more authentic and persuasive.

2. Higher Engagement Rates: Unlike macro-influencers or celebrities with millions of followers, micro-influencers typically have smaller but more dedicated audiences. This translates to better engagement, more meaningful interactions, and higher conversion rates.

3. Cost-Effective Impact: Engaging multiple micro-influencers can often be more effective—and affordable—than a single high-cost endorsement. This approach allows brands to target different segments of their audience more precisely.

4. Industry-Specific Reach: Many micro-influencers are active on LinkedIn, industry-specific blogs, and niche podcasts, making them ideal for reaching B2B decision-makers where they already consume content.

Read more here about how to leverage micro-influencers.

Beyond Micro-Influencers: 3 More Ways to Elevate Your Audience Reach

While micro-influencers now play a more crucial role in B2B marketing, a multi-pronged approach is essential for sustained growth. Here are three additional strategies we use at our performance marketing agency to enable B2B brands to expand their audience reach to high-value prospects:

1. Precision Audience Targeting for Performance Media and Advertising: Precision audience targeting is a key advantage for performance media and advertising, but unlocking its full potential requires not only strategic targeting skills but also assembling and leveraging the right audience data. OMI is a recognized leader in this area, with Fortune 2000 firms and other organizations already turning to us and our massive Living File® B2B database -- consisting of 145MM+ manager-, director-, and professional-level and above contacts with email/HEM, social URL, and other attributes -- to perform custom audience building. These audiences can be used for media activation, email acquisition marketing, CTV, programmatic, social, and other omni-channel campaigns.

For those brands that target SMBs, OMI delivers the largest reach into the SMB marketplace with our data. We also offer high match rates to Trade Desk and the top social platforms, with up to 15 total platforms available for matching. Our aim is to provide our clients with custom, highly-targeted audiences made up of comprehensive prospect profiles that can be leveraged to elevate digital advertising personalization, relevance, and ultimately, campaign ROI.

2. B2B2C Data for More Effective Targeting and Personalization: The lines between our personal and professional lives are overlapping today, requiring marketers to create a more complete view of their prospects—spanning their lives at work and at home. Our Universal Person Marketing (UPM) database supports this shift by weaving together a variety of B2B2C prospect attributes to enable more personalized and effective campaign targeting prospects across personal and professional channels--from direct mail and email to social media, connected TV, programmatic advertising and more. The database contains 145 million business contact records with linkage to residential addresses and alternate emails on 90 million of those records, which is an exceptional match rate. 

Through our data linkage service, we can link and overlay consumer audience demographics such as:

- Marital status

 - Children

- Income

- Gender

- Age

- Residential address

- LinkedIn profile

These demographics are layered on top of B2B attributes, such as:

- Email

- Firmographics

- Job title

In addition, we offer both company- and contact-level social URLs, mobile phone numbers, and a range of LinkID overlays.

This B2B2C data remains anonymized at the execution interface to support privacy regulations. Here is an example of how we worked with a leading e-commerce platform provider to execute a B2B2C strategy as part of a campaign.

3. Build Your Own Identity Graph for Anonymized Targeting: Our team has witnessed first-hand how businesses are shifting away from third-party identity solutions to fuel their campaigns—and towards building their own identity graphs. This gives them more control of their data, greater flexibility, and cost savings.

A well-structured identity graph integrates first-party customer data with external firmographic and behavioral insights, allowing for more precise personalization while maintaining privacy compliance through anonymized data. To enhance their identity graphs and fill in any data gaps in prospect and customer records, brands can leverage the data services of B2B2C data providers like OMI. With a more complete view of the prospects across your target audience, you can ensure that your marketing outreach connects with the right individuals across multiple touchpoints—at work and home.

OMI: Your Micro-Influencer for B2B2C Data

The rise of micro-influencers in B2B marketing, along with innovations in audience building, signals a shift towards trust-based, expertise-driven engagement. At OMI, for example, we are micro-influencers in B2B2C data, custom audience building, and performance media and marketing. For more insights on these topics, check out our new podcast, “The Marketing Vanguard: Leading Voices in B2B Innovation.” Or reach out to our team for a deep dive into what it takes to reach the right audiences in B2B marketing today.

The truth is, without a structured ICP, businesses risk targeting the wrong prospects and missing out on high-value opportunities. A well-crafted ICP ensures that your campaigns reach the right companies and decision-makers—those most likely to benefit from your product or service—and that your budget and resource allocations are optimized.

Heinz Marketing, a B2B marketing consulting company, notes that “once your ICP is established, identifying the buying groups within your targeted companies is critical.” These groups will include key decision-makers and influencers with varying levels of responsibility or authority.

According to the Heinz team, a proper ICP includes:

Firmographics: Who They Are

- Industry & geography

- Company size (employees/revenue)

- Growth stage & revenue model

- Regulatory considerations

Technographics: What They Use

- Tech stack & integration needs

- IT budget & compliance standards

Psychographics: Why They Buy

- Key pain points & business objectives

- Buying triggers (expansion, compliance changes, etc.)

- Decision-making processes

Once your ICP and buying committee are defined, personas serve as the bridge between strategy and execution. Heinz Marketing says they help answer critical questions:

- What messaging resonates with different decision-makers?

- Where do they consume content?

- What information do they need at each stage of the buying journey?

From Insights to Action: Level Up Your ICP

Your ICP and buyer committee definitions provide a framework for understanding who your prospects are—but more insights are needed for a successful campaign. To dig in deeper, here are three modern approaches we use with our Fortune 2000 clients to unlock additional data findings about prospects, leading to improved personalization, relevance, and results, from increased conversions to higher campaign ROI:

1. Bring in B2B2C Data: We have all witnessed the emergence of the B2B2C movement, where the lines between our personal and professional lives are blurring. In step with this shift, it makes good marketing sense for our ICPs--and the campaign audiences we build to align with them--to focus on a more complete view of the prospect, encompassing their life at work and home.

Our Universal Person Marketing (UPM) database, used by our Fortune 2000 clients to fuel highly scalable customer acquisition campaigns, addresses the B2B2C movement, weaving together a variety of B2B2C prospect attributes. It enables more personalized and effective campaign targeting across channels like direct mail, email, social media, connected TV, and programmatic advertising. The database contains 145 million business contact records with linkage to residential addresses and alternate emails on 90 million of those records, which is an exceptional match rate. 

Through our data linkage service, we can link and overlay consumer audience demographics such as:

-  Marital status

 - Children

- Income

- Gender

- Age

- Residential address

- LinkedIn profile

These demographics are layered on top of B2B attributes, such as:

- Email

- Firmographics

- Job title

In addition, we offer both company- and contact-level social URLs, mobile phone numbers, and a range of LinkID overlays.

With all of this added information, you can't help but better understand who your prospects are and what motivates them. Most importantly, the B2B2C data remains anonymized at the execution interface to support privacy regulations. Here is an example of how we worked with a leading e-commerce platform provider to execute this strategy.

2. Precision Audience Building and Targeting: Today, with personalization being more critical than ever, every marketing message you craft and activate should demonstrate that you know who you’re engaging with and what that person values. To deliver on this promise, the most critical first step in every campaign should be audience building that not only aligns with your ICP but also takes it up a notch – whether it's for email marketing, connected TV or programmatic advertising, or omni-channel.

In reality, generic audiences built around a limited or non-descript set of attributes don't cut it anymore. That’s why OMI developed a results-driven digital audience-building service. Leveraging our extensive B2B Living File® data, which includes over 145 million professional contacts with director-, manager- and professional-level and above titles, we craft highly targeted, precision audiences to fuel omni-channel campaigns. This ensures you use your marketing budget efficiently, reaching the most relevant prospects to boost campaign results.

By incorporating intent monitoring—uncovering prospects whose recent online behavior shows interest in specific offerings just like yours—and using B2B2C data, we help you execute more personalized and relevant campaigns, leading to higher ROI. Simply put, intent-driven strategies ensure that marketing messages reach the right people at the right time.

3. Build an In-House Identity Graph: As data privacy regulations have evolved, identity graphs have come into play to give brands a powerful way to use anonymized prospect data at scale. However, many brands are now moving away from third-party identity solutions to build their own in-house identity graphs to gain more control of their data. A robust identity graph integrates first-party customer data with external firmographic and behavioral insights, allowing for more effective personalization while maintaining privacy compliance.

To optimize and build out their identity graphs, top brands are turning to third-party data providers like OMI to fill in the data gaps. For example, by leveraging our comprehensive B2B2C data, brands can ensure that outreach efforts connect with the right individuals across multiple personal and professional touchpoints to optimize campaign results.

Ready to refine your ICP and supercharge your customer acquisition efforts? Let's talk. We offer guidance, solutions, and support across all three strategies above--and more. Reach out to our team today.

Since our founding in 1998, OMI has been guiding brands to connect effectively with decision-makers across the SMB market, and we built the world's largest U.S.-focused SMB database—with 95M+ SMB contacts with email addresses—to anchor our SMB services. SMBs are often the overlooked giants in the business world, representing 99% of all U.S. businesses and serving as a critical growth channel for B2B organizations.

With a mission to explore what drives SMBs and how marketers can reach this important target audience, our podcast B2B Innovation will debut this month. We’ll bring together thought leaders, marketers, and SMB experts to discuss what SMBs want and best practices for marketing to them. The podcast will be available on Spotify, Apple, Amazon Music, iHeart Radio, Audible, and RSS.

Diving Into the Podcast Details

This podcast is more than a conversation—it’s a deep dive into change across marketing, database management, data analytics, media, and advertising. Each episode covers:

• Real-world strategies that drive impactful B2B marketing.
• The principles and values that define great leadership.
• Proven techniques for audience segmentation, omni-channel marketing, and leveraging data for business growth.

Be a Podcast Guest: If you’re a B2B leader with innovative ideas, apply to be a guest and share your insights with a growing audience of marketers and decision-makers. Learn more and apply here.

5 Strategies for SMB Marketing Success

Here are a few topics we plan to address as we assist marketers around the world in effectively targeting this dynamic sector:

1. SMBs Demand Personalization

To succeed with SMBs, vendors must focus on personalized approaches—tailored messaging, unique offerings, and scalable solutions that fit SMBs’ specific demands. Taking a one-size-fits-all strategy with this market won't work because each SMB has unique challenges and needs.

Customer acquisition campaigns that target SMBs are one of our most in-demand services at OMI, and we always stress the importance of crafting an ideal customer profile (ICP) and investing in well-planned audience building. As part of our audience-building strategies, we use a B2B2C data matching approach that links and overlays consumer audience demographics,  such as marital status, children, income, gender, age, residential address, and LinkedIn profile, on top of B2B attributes, such as email, firmographics, and job title.

This more complete view gives you increased clarity about your prospects, allowing you to target and engage them more effectively and provide greater relevance across B2B and B2C omni-channel points, including direct mail, email, social, and programmatic. Go here for more information.

2. SMBs Value Quality Over Price

As you tailor your offerings, remember that SMB decision-makers prioritize efficiency and high-quality solutions over cost alone, according to Accenture. They wear many hats and have limited time available for sales calls. They would prefer to save time by purchasing the best solution for their business rather than the cheapest solution, and when researching their options, they want plenty of online self-help resources that enable informed and expedited decisions.

SMBs seek products designed specifically for their scale and needs, rather than stripped-down enterprise solutions, and they prioritize ease of use. This underscores the importance of delivering SMB-focused innovation that drives real results.

3. Peer Trust Drives SMB Decision-Making

When looking for the best solution, as many as 58% of SMB decision-makers consult their peers before making a purchase. This makes reviews, testimonials, and case studies extremely valuable. Highlighting success stories from SMB clients can significantly improve trust and accelerate your sales funnel.

4. Reaching SMBs Can Be Challenging

SMBs tend to have shorter sales cycles than larger enterprises. Still, for marketers, the challenge is reaching them because they often change personnel and email addresses more frequently than larger organizations. That’s why we continuously monitor and cleanse our SMB database to ensure it’s up to date and we offer a 95% email validity guarantee for 30 days.

When creating a custom SMB audience segment for client campaigns, we drill down into industry segments using firmographics, with manager-, director-, and professional-level and above titles that fuel precision targeting and improved personalization. You'll receive a full B2B2C data record with every file, including corporate emails and residential addresses.

Go here for a case study highlighting a leading telecom provider’s success using OMI’s SMB data.

5. Privacy Matters to SMBs

Like other prospects, SMBs value data privacy. With new regulations reshaping marketing strategies and the removal of third-party tracking cookies on the horizon, alternative privacy solutions should be considered. For example, larger brands are now building their own identity graphs, aiming to gain better control of their data while supporting privacy regulations, with profiles anonymized at the execution interface.

They are pulling together data from multiple quality resources to get their graphs where they need to be. Many are working with specialized third-party data providers like OMI to add scale and fill in any data gaps about their prospects’ personal and professional identifiers. After using the identity graph to build a custom SMB audience, marketers can then take the anonymized IDs from the graph to a demand-side platform (DSP) to deliver the ads.

Whether through our comprehensive SMB database or thought leadership like our podcast, we're here to help you make meaningful connections that drive results. We invite you to subscribe to the podcast and contact our team to discuss new ways to elevate your impact with SMBs.

In late 2023, as this chaos proliferated, our team defined our mission: To break the mold and deliver real data, real results, and invaluable reach for our clients to real people. This continues to be our mission today. But even as advertising is (thankfully) turning the corner, challenges still remain.

With IAB recently reporting that pressure to achieve ROI is the biggest driver behind today’s big brand shift to performance advertising – which is characterized by accurate tracking, measurement, and results -- we're sharing our checklist for those looking to embrace this fast-growing advertising strategy. These insights, compiled in collaboration with our Director of Client Services Chris Lelles, will empower you to gain approval for increased spend for CTV advertising and other performance marketing initiatives:

1. Improved Trackability and Measurement to Demonstrate Real Results: According to the IAB study, “this year there seems to be an accelerated push for more measurable results as platforms become more fragmented” across the advertising landscape. To optimize advertising measurement, our perspective is that today’s brands need to lean into digital. But here’s the catch: you need a trusted agency partner to guide you in your media choices while assisting you in avoiding the pitfalls of ad fraud and poor audience data.

The reality is that digital channels offer better tracking than direct mail, standard TV, or radio. People use unique phone numbers to track calls, but there are no clicks or opens to measure activity across those channels. With OMI’s custom audience services, however, you can track activity across multiple digital channels (not just advertising), whereas if you build an audience inside LinkedIn, that tracking is not available.

As an example of the measurement capabilities of performance media, connected TV (CTV) is leading the way (check out our recent blog on the rise of CTV advertising) by offering:

• Conversion tracking: Identify website visitors and determine which ones made a purchase after viewing an ad.

• Footfall attribution: Measure how many viewers visited a physical location following an ad exposure.

Measurement capabilities like this make it easier to calculate ROI and refine future campaigns, ensuring that every dollar delivers maximum impact.

2. Precision Targeting: Precision audience targeting is a key performance advertising advantage, but unlocking its full potential requires not only strategic targeting skills but also assembling and leveraging the right audience data. OMI is a recognized leader in this area, with Fortune 2000 firms and other organizations already turning to us and our massive Living File® B2B database -- consisting of 145MM+ manager-, director-, and professional-level and above contacts with email/HEM, social URL, and other attributes -- to perform custom audience building. Our audiences can be used for media activation, email acquisition marketing, CTV, programmatic, social, and other omni-channel campaigns.

We deliver the largest reach into the SMB marketplace with our data while also offering high match rates to Trade Desk and the top social platforms, with up to 15 total platforms available for matching. Our aim is to provide our clients with custom, highly-targeted audiences made up of comprehensive prospect profiles that can be leveraged to elevate digital advertising personalization, relevance, and ultimately, campaign ROI.

3. Increased Transparency. Bots and ad fraud continue to haunt marketers, presenting misleading performance metrics. As part of our performance media services, our team actively works to eliminate non-human activity or non-human inclusion within our audiences, meaning that your performance metrics will no longer reflect “fake” activity driven by bots.

The bottom line is, when campaign outcomes don’t reflect reality, advertisers lack insight into whether their ad spend and impressions are being wasted on bots. In the end, it means marketers pay for advertising that offers little to no value, resulting in enormous financial implications. 

Speaking of financial implications, when seeking out a performance media partnership, one of the most critical areas of transparency surrounds payouts. Because you invest substantial resources in campaigns, it's crucial to understand precisely where every slice of the allocated budget goes and how the campaign is being run—from the advertising platforms to the sites serving the ads and every partner or player who touches those ads across the ecosystem.

Many times, these payouts aren’t equitable or favorable for advertisers. That’s why you must ask your media activation or performance marketing partner for detailed specifics about their processes. At OMI, you can rest assured that we are committed to full transparency.

Data doesn’t lie, and the IAB study revealed that more marketers are turning to performance media in 2025. When they get it right, they are able to regain their ability to accurately measure and report results, achieve greater transparency with regard to results and payouts, and engage their most optimal target audiences. Please reach out to our team for more insights into performance media and how we can support your success this year.

Our deepest gratitude goes out to our firefighters and first responders for their courage and strength, and our hearts go out to our many neighbors who lost their homes and so much more.

With our communities under threat, the emotional toll on our team has been significant. The situation is constantly evolving as wind and weather impact the direction the fire takes and the ability for firefighters to get the upper hand on containment.

In the hopes of providing guidance to other businesses facing crisis situations like this, here are a few of the ways our tight-knit team is navigating this natural disaster:

1. Go Remote
   1. To alleviate stress and prioritize safety, we immediately shifted all operations to remote work. This allowed employees the flexibility to focus on their families and homes while maintaining business continuity.
   2. At the same time, keeping the roadways clear for emergency vehicles was critical.
2. Employee Wellbeing Is Paramount
   1. Safety first: Always confirm the well-being of employees and their families during a disaster. Proactively reach out and offer support. This came naturally to our team.
   2. Flexible policies: Provide paid time off or flexible hours for those directly affected. This demonstrates care and fosters loyalty.
3. Communication Is Key
   1. Stay connected: Use multiple communication channels to ensure everyone receives updates. In our case, our usual assortment of tools--like Skype, Zoom, SMS, and email--have proved invaluable.
   2. Transparency: Be clear and honest about the situation, company expectations, and available resources. This builds trust during uncertain times.
4. Prepare for Business Continuity
   1. Disaster recovery plan: Before disaster even strikes, develop a detailed plan covering remote work, data backup, and emergency contacts.
   2. Regular discussions: Discuss your disaster plan at least twice a year to identify gaps, ensure readiness, and get new employees up to speed. Familiarity breeds confidence in times of crisis.
5. Support the Community
   1. Extend support: Offer resources, such as temporary accommodations or financial aid, to employees impacted by the disaster.
   2. Volunteer or donate: Volunteering not only makes an impact but it can be very healing. For donations, here are a few organizations doing good work in the LA community by actively supporting those impacted by the fires:

World Central Kitchen

LA Food Bank

Baby2Baby

LAFD Foundation

6. Stay Adaptable
   1. Quick decision-making: Be ready to pivot operations based on rapidly changing conditions.
   2. Post-crisis evaluation: After the immediate danger passes, reflect on what worked and where improvements are needed. Use these insights to strengthen future preparedness.

Our team’s support for one another during this crisis is a testimony to the strength of our culture. We were quick to check on one another’s wellbeing from the beginning. The way we came together showed how we have always prioritized people over processes, and I recommend other companies take the same approach.

As we witness our community continue to fight the fires, we are committed to helping it rebuild and move forward. While incredible obstacles remain, we know that we can weather any storm (or fire) that comes our way if we all work together.

Go here to read our recent Forbes article about the strategies we lean into at our agency to build trust  from the inside out. We know these strategies helped us navigate the challenges of the past few weeks. And because, with gratitude, we remain open for business, we also invite you to reach out to our team to connect on our award-winning customer acquisition solution and services, including our B2B Living File® database – used by Fortune 1000 firms and startups to fuel omni-channel campaigns; our B2B2C linkage and performance media services; and custom audience building for CTV advertising, email marketing, media activation and much more.

As dentsu revealed, for the first time in the four-year history of the Superpowers study, personal decision drivers have surpassed functional professional ones in shaping the B2B buyer journey. This change underscores a crucial truth: Brand and trust have never been more pivotal in the business-to-business sector.

Personal decision drivers, deeply rooted in elements like trust, personal values, ethics and opportunities for learning and growth, are now taking the lead. In contrast, professional drivers, which traditionally focus on concrete metrics such as cost, product features and service efficiency, are taking a back seat. The dentsu report reflects a growing emphasis on the human side of B2B relationships—which drives trust, loyalty and long-term collaboration.

As a performance marketing agency, our team has always prioritized data and outcomes. However, we also understand that these pragmatic factors need to be balanced with creativity, emotional resonance and storytelling. Building campaigns for our diverse B2B clients—from Fortune 1000 companies to small enterprises—has shown us that success lies in forging authentic connections with target audiences.

The foundation of these connections, however, begins within. In other words, the culture you build within your own organization is the starting point for gaining trust and building success with customers, partners, investors and other stakeholders.

Go here to read more in Forbes about the strategies we lean into at our agency to build trust  from the inside out. We also invite you to reach out to our team to connect on our award-winning customer acquisition solution and services, including our B2B Living File® database – used by Fortune 1000 firms and startups to fuel omni-channel campaigns; our B2B2C linkage service; and custom audience building for CTV advertising, email marketing, media activation and much more.

I decided to try her idea, and in December our team adopted "awareness" as our one-word theme for 2025. Here’s why: As a performance marketing agency, we’ve seen an overwhelming array of tools and solutions recently become available – many driven by AI innovation. With so many options, knowing which ones will truly move the needle for your customer acquisition campaigns is tough.

We advise leveraging AI innovation and use it ourselves – within our solutions, services and across our operations -- but unless you focus on marketing basics, such as the data that fuels your campaigns, you’ll miss out on the results you deserve.

These three under-the-radar solutions and strategies – successfully used by our Fortune 2000 clients in 2024—are foundational to effective results. They can make a monumental impact on your customer acquisition marketing in 2025 and beyond (read our case studies to find out how):

1. The Evolving ICP:  We are now witnessing an expansion of the B2B2C movement, where the lines between our personal and professional lives are blurring. As this occurs, today’s ideal customer profiles (ICP) need to evolve. They should encompass attributes that reflect customers’ and prospects’ lives at work and home. Further, marketing programs should be designed to include the channels they use the most, whether personal, professional -- or both.

Our Universal Person Marketing (UPM) database addresses the B2B2C movement by weaving together a variety of B2B2C prospect attributes to enable more personalized and effective campaigns across channels like direct mail, email, social media, and connected TV and programmatic advertising. The database contains 145 million business contact records, with linkage to residential addresses and alternate emails on 90 million of those records. This is an exceptional match rate. 

How It Works: Through our data linkage service, we can work with you to link and overlay consumer audience demographics -- such as marital status, children, income, gender, age, residential address, and LinkedIn profile – on top of B2B attributes, such as email, firmographics, and job title. In addition, we offer both company- and contact-level social URLs, mobile phone numbers, and a range of LinkID overlays. Most importantly, the B2B2C data remains anonymized at the execution interface to support privacy regulations.

Go here for an example of how we worked with a leading e-commerce platform provider to execute this strategy.

2. The Critical Custom Audience: Personalization is more important than ever in marketing. Every marketing message you craft and activate should demonstrate that you know who you’re engaging with and what that person values. To deliver on this promise, your most critical first step in every campaign should be audience building – whether it's for email marketing, connected TV or programmatic advertising, or omni-channel.

In reality, generic audiences built around a limited or non-descript set of attributes just don’t cut it anymore. That’s why OMI developed a results-driven digital audience-building service. Leveraging our extensive B2B Living File® data, which includes over 145 million professional contacts, we craft highly targeted, precision audiences to fuel omni-channel campaigns. This ensures you use your marketing budget efficiently, reaching the most relevant prospects to boost campaign results.

By incorporating intent monitoring—uncovering prospects whose recent online behavior shows interest in specific offerings—and using B2B2C data, we help you execute more personalized and relevant campaigns, leading to higher ROI.

3. The Robust In-House Identity Graph: As more brands seek improved control of their own customer and prospect data, they are moving away from third-party identity graphs and working to build their own in-house graphs. This is why our targeted audience data has become essential. By providing comprehensive B2B and B2C data elements, we assist companies in creating robust identity graphs. This capability enhances reach and scale for campaigns, allowing you to connect with individual prospects more effectively while adhering to privacy regulations.

Ashleigh also stated that while embracing a one-word goal will keep you focused, it's essential to be open to change as time passes. We all need to learn and grow with each new opportunity and experience – and sometimes departing from that focus is the right decision.

We invite you to reach out to our team for guidance on expanding your awareness of the tools available to improve your campaign reach and connect with the right prospects in the New Year.

OMI is fast becoming instrumental in our clients' CTV advertising initiatives, offering critical custom audience-building services to ensure campaigns target and reach those most likely to buy. We match our data to platforms like Trade Desk, social and many others, to provide our clients with comprehensive prospect profiles that elevate personalization, relevance, and ultimately, campaign ROI.

Here's what B2B marketers need to know about the powerful CTV medium and how to leverage it for success:

Unstoppable Growth

CTV is not just a consumer favorite but a marketing essential. Consider these stats from Statista and other sources:

• Young audiences dominate: In 2023, most CTV viewers were between 18 and 34 years old, making it a prime channel for reaching digitally savvy demographics.
• Daily engagement: Nearly two-thirds of CTV users interact with their devices daily, while 27% of viewers aged 55+ also tune in daily.
• Broad reach: An impressive 92% of U.S. households are accessible via CTV programmatic advertising.

According to eMarketer, CTV outperformed traditional online video and display ads in attention metrics in Q3 2024, achieving a remarkable 69.5 attention units (AU) compared to 38.4 AU and 22.1 AU, respectively. An October 2024 forecast also published in eMarketer reported that CTV drove a higher Cost Per Mille (CPM) for YouTube, where 7 out of 10 U.S. viewers watch via CTV, outpacing both TikTok and Snapchat.

Precision Targeting: CTV’s Biggest Advantage

What makes CTV especially valuable for B2B marketers is its advanced targeting capabilities, rivaling platforms like Facebook and Google. With CTV, you can:

• Segment audiences based on education level, income, personal interests, consumer behaviors, and other factors.
• Integrate first-party data with your third-party data to reach not only prospects, but also targeted segments of current customers, website visitors, and loyalty program members.
• Utilize advanced targeting options, including retargeting, lookalike modeling, geolocation, and contextual targeting.
• Reach niche audiences while avoiding others, which is particularly valuable for brands wanting to zero in on specific customer and prospect segments.
• Activate hyper-local targeting through IP-based geolocation to customize ads for small geographic regions, which is ideal for local or regional campaigns or for businesses with multiple locations, like medical or optometry practices.
• Target hyper-local audiences, synching regions on a nationwide scale to align strategy and ad spend with national KPIs while achieving real-time campaign optimization.

Accurate Measurement and Attribution

Compared to other digital channels, CTV offers marketers superior transparency and measurement including:

• Conversion tracking: Identify website visitors and determine which ones made a purchase after viewing an ad.
• Footfall attribution: Measure how many viewers visited a physical location following an ad exposure.

Measurement capabilities like this make it easier to calculate ROI and refine future campaigns, ensuring that every dollar delivers maximum impact.

The OMI Edge: Unparalleled SMB Reach, Targeting, and Multi-Platform Matching

Precision targeting is a key CTV advertising advantage, but unlocking its full potential requires not only strategic targeting skills but also assembling and leveraging the right audience data. OMI has the answer. Fortune 2000 firms and other organizations already turn to us and our massive Living File® B2B database -- consisting of 145MM+ manager-, director-, and professional-level and above contacts with email/HEM, social URL, and other attributes -- to perform custom audience building for media activation, email acquisition marketing, programmatic, and other omni-channel campaigns.

We deliver the largest reach into the SMB marketplace with our data while also offering high match rates to Trade Desk and the top social platforms, with up to 15 total platforms available for matching. Our aim, as mentioned previously, is to provide our clients with custom, highly-targeted audiences made up of comprehensive prospect profiles that can be leveraged to elevate CTV advertising personalization, relevance, and ultimately, campaign ROI.

Final Thoughts

The CTV era has arrived, offering a golden opportunity for B2B brands to drive awareness, engagement, and conversions. Now is the time to explore how it can elevate your marketing strategy.

Contact our OMI team today at request@outwardmedia.com to learn how we can optimize your CTV advertising investment with unparalleled CTV-focused audience-building capabilities.

If you’ve never attended one of the Digital Summit conferences (they are held in cities throughout the US all year long), then take a look at these top takeaways and insights about the event, provided by two of our senior agency leaders -- Director of Client Services Chris Lelles and Senior Client Services Manager Angel Pizano-Hernandez:

1. AI’s Growing Influence on Marketing

AI is no longer just a buzzword; it’s a transformative force reshaping how marketers approach content creation and analytics. A standout presentation by Kirstin Benson, VP of Global Entertainment at Getty Images, focused on AI's role in visual storytelling. She emphasized the importance of crafting precise AI prompts to achieve compelling and audience-relevant visuals. Her advice to marketers was to avoid vague or overly simplistic prompts; instead, aim for specificity and clarity to maximize AI’s creative potential.

Beyond visual creation, AI-driven analytics are revolutionizing campaign performance. These tools help marketers refine their strategies by offering actionable insights, enabling more effective targeting and engagement.

2. Storytelling Across Generations

Marketers must tailor their messages to resonate authentically with diverse generational audiences. Whether engaging Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, or Gen Z, the key is understanding their unique values and communication preferences. The emphasis on visual creativity was clear: storytelling should transcend features and benefits, focusing instead on emotional connections and personalization. By prioritizing audience-centric content, brands can build trust and foster loyalty across demographic lines.

Our team completely agrees with this approach, and to more comprehensively target, align and engage with today’s diverse audiences, we also recommend using custom audience building and an omni-channel strategy for your campaigns. According to recent McKinsey research, 72% of B2B companies that sell via seven or more channels grew their market share.  Check out this case study on an omni-channel B2B2C strategy that drove successful outcomes for an OMI client.

3. Overcoming Content Challenges

In today’s fast-paced marketing environments, the demand for high-quality, personalized content has reached unprecedented levels. Attendees discussed the need for innovative strategies to meet this demand while navigating common challenges like copyright considerations and scaling content production. AI tools are playing a pivotal role here, offering solutions to generate tailored content at scale.

4. The Event Experience: Hits and Misses

We appreciated the engaging and friendly atmosphere of Digital Summit LA. The setup was well-organized and many of the speakers left a lasting impression. As a regional event, it is ideal for those who want or need to stay close to home yet still have the opportunity to elevate their industry knowledge.

However, it leaned more toward vendors than practitioners, and while the ideas shared were valuable, we felt the agenda could have been broader to better address the full scope of challenges we face each day. The event was on the small side as far as the number of speakers and attendees. A marketing conference with a larger footprint that opens our eyes to new possibilities and opportunities for growth is on our radar for the future.

Final Thoughts

Digital Summit reinforced the importance of staying ahead in a rapidly evolving marketing landscape. From AI-powered tools to generational storytelling, the insights gained serve as valuable guideposts for crafting impactful campaigns. As the role of technology continues to expand, the biggest takeaway for our team was that marketers must always embrace innovation while keeping their messaging authentic and audience-centric.

Did you attend any marketing conferences this year? If so, which events would you recommend? We’d love to hear from you.

Feel free to reach out to our team for insights into the solutions that our Fortune 2000 clients are using to advance their marketing in the New Year -- from custom audience building for email marketing and media activation to B2B2C data that elevates marketing reach and personalization.

1. Digital Self-Service Transactions: Forrester predicts that over half of large B2B transactions (valued at $1 million or more) will be conducted through digital self-service channels, such as vendor websites or marketplaces. This shift is driven by Millennials and Gen Z buyers who prefer digital interactions. Our message to marketers: Get your digital properties ready for the new era of younger buyers and modernize, update and expand your self-service content and the customer and buyer journeys it supports.
2. GenAI Adoption: Both firms highlight the growing integration of GenAI in marketing strategies. Gartner notes that by 2026, 80% of creative professionals will use GenAI daily, enhancing efficiency and creativity. Forrester emphasizes that B2B organizations will test GenAI's potential as a growth driver, preparing for both its benefits and challenges. Our message to marketers: Train your team on GenAI – not just once each year but on an ongoing basis, because what it can do and how you can best use it changes rapidly. Staying ahead of the curve is essential in today’s competitive landscape.
3. Evolving Buyer Preferences: Forrester observes that younger business buyers will continue to reshape the B2B landscape in 2025, necessitating adaptations in marketing and sales approaches to meet their digital-first expectations. Our message to marketers: Know your audience. Speak their language. Engage them on the channels they prefer. Younger buyers – and their propensity to blend their personal and professional lives -- is one of the reasons we launched our B2B2C file earlier this year. It provides both personal and professional attributes for your prospects, allowing you to gain more complete insights into their profiles for improved targeting and personalization.
4. Content Authenticity and Trust: Gartner anticipates that by 2026, 60% of CMOs will implement measures like content authenticity technologies and enhanced monitoring to protect their brands from misinformation and maintain trust. Our message to marketers: Trust is the most valuable currency for today’s brands. Invest in the training and technologies that not only protect the trust you’ve built but also enable you to grow it successfully. For our team, ensuring that our data is of the highest quality is essential for building and retaining customer trust. That’s one reason why all OMI contact data is backed by a 30-day 95% email data validity guarantee.
5. AI-Free Brand Positioning: Gartner states that by 2027, 20% of brands will differentiate themselves by emphasizing the absence of AI in their products and services, appealing to consumers seeking authenticity. It’s a trend to watch for sure. Our message to marketers: As your use of AI expands, don’t lose sight of the fact that the human connection will always matter. Finding the right balance will be key for brands as the AI journey continues.

These insights underscore the importance of digital transformation, AI aptitude and balance, and maintaining brand trust in the evolving B2B marketing landscape.

Check out our recent blog post on building customer trust and reach out to our team for guidance on scaling your reach and resonating with the right prospects in 2025.

These are some of the many reasons I’m feeling thankful this year:

1. Above All -- Our Incredible Team

In the fast-paced world of marketing, consistency is rare. That’s why I’m deeply grateful for our exceptional team of talented data scientists and performance marketers, who bring their best every single day. Their loyalty, expertise, and passion are the backbone of everything we do.

2. Our Inspiring Clients and Their Continued Success

Nothing inspires us more than seeing our clients succeed. From start-ups to Fortune 1000 firms, helping businesses achieve measurable results through our data-driven strategies has been immensely rewarding. One highlight? Supporting a leading e-commerce platform provider in achieving SMB engagement at scale. Here’s what they had to say about our efforts:

“We knew we needed a data partner we could trust to take on this important initiative. Based on my experience with OMI and the accuracy and quality of their data, as well as their leadership in the SMB space, I knew they were the best choice. The results have been outstanding and we’re just getting started.” – Third-Party Data Executive, Leading E-commerce Platform Provider (Check out the case study for more details.)

It’s a privilege to not only play a role in our clients’ growth stories but to also earn their ongoing trust and business.

3. Our Legacy in SMB and B2B2C Data

Through perseverance and innovation, OMI has built the world’s largest U.S.-focused SMB database—and it’s still growing. It is part of our award-winning B2B Living File® database, which also includes our recently-launched B2B2C file containing 145 million business contact records, with linkage to residential addresses and alternate emails for 90 million of those records. We developed our B2B2C data linkage capabilities in 2024 to address a growing trend – the blurring of the lines between our personal and professional lives. With our new file, marketers can now gain a more complete view of their prospects, with access to the personal and professional attributes that define them in their everyday lives – all in a single place. Go here to check out our case study on how a client leveraged our B2B2C data matching capabilities to power improved marketing reach and more personalized campaigns.

4. Staying Agile and Forward-Thinking

Leading a business is an exhilarating blend of opportunity and challenge. Small businesses like ours thrive by staying nimble in the face of change. This year, as economic shifts brought new complexities, we doubled down on our commitment to top-tier data quality, guiding our clients to navigate uncertainty and optimize ROI -- and their budgets -- by more effectively reaching the right target audiences. That’s why custom audience building for media activation and acquisition email campaigns has been one of our most popular services throughout 2024.

As “do-it-yourself” identity graphs became a priority for those brands wanting more control of their data, we also tapped into our massive database this year to help them fill in any data gaps. These gaps include important personal and professional attributes, which OMI offers in our B2B2C file to aid marketers in precision targeting and personalization.

Reflecting on OMI’s evolution, I’m proud of our adaptability and the way we’ve expanded beyond B2B email data to earn customer recognition and trust for the high quality, depth and scale we bring to our omni-channel and B2B2C audience data offerings. Staying ahead of the curve has always been our mantra, and we continue to embrace new innovations and shifting marketing trends to better anticipate our clients’ needs.

As we prepare for the future, we know change is constant. At OMI, we welcome change because it presents us with new opportunities to grow, innovate, and lead. One more thing I’m grateful for this year is to work alongside a dedicated team as well as the best customers and partners who all share this mindset.

What has brought you gratitude this year?

Reach out to our team today for assistance with your 2025 custom audience building needs.

1. They want their data to bridge B2B and B2C: This year more brands are turning to OMI to incorporate both B2B and B2C attributes into their customer acquisition data sets to achieve a more complete view of their prospects’ profiles. This involves matching personal contact data to B2B data to power improved relevance and more personalized campaigns.

At OMI, we’ve embraced B2B2C convergence, launching a new B2B2C data linkage service this year that enables marketers to identify and connect with prospects and customers at work and at home on their personal and professional channels, including direct mail, email, social, and programmatic. It lets you link and overlay consumer audience demographics -- such as marital status, children, income, gender, age, residential address, and LinkedIn profile – on top of B2B attributes, such as email, firmographics, and job title. In addition, we offer both company- and contact-level social URLs along with , mobile phone, and a range of LinkID overlays. Most importantly, the B2B2C data remains anonymized at the execution interface to support privacy regulations.

Officially known as our Universal Person Marketing (UPM) database, the B2B2C file contains 145 million business contact records, with linkage to residential addresses and alternate emails on 90 million of those records. This is an exceptional match rate -- check out this recent case study for more details.

2. They want custom audiences for media activation: There are clear benefits to programmatic advertising, but over the past few years a lot of criticism has been leveled around its lack of transparency. As advertisers rely on algorithms and data to make decisions about where their ads will appear, there’s limited visibility into the specifics and contexts around where ads are displayed. This makes transparent media activation a requirement to get the most out of your advertising budget. Getting to transparency starts with the quality and accuracy of your data, and that’s why OMI’s new results-driven, digital audience-building service for media activation has become one of our most popular offerings this year.

OMI’s competitive advantage in audience-building lies in our B2B Living File® data, consisting of 145MM+ manager-, director-, and professional-level and above contacts with email/HEM, social URL, and other attributes. Leveraging this massive database, we link interest paths to the prospect from both a consumer and a business perspective to gain a more complete B2B2C view of their profile. We also use real-time intent signals and leverage our proven programmatic digital media buying expertise. Ultimately our end-to-end media activation service lets you engage and activate the most accurate, targeted omni-channel audiences to dramatically improve campaign results. Go here to read more about the benefits of working with OMI on audience-building for media activation.

3.  They want custom audiences for email marketing: Email marketing has long been a core service of ours, with our specialization being customer acquisition email campaigns and the prospect data that fuels them. While licensing our data has always been a big part of our business, in 2024 a greater number of our clients asked us to provide higher levels of customization across our audience building services. The goal is to enable them to drive stronger precision with their targeting, resulting in higher ROI. We’re using new tools and techniques, such as intent monitoring and B2B2C data, to do just that. Intent monitoring is based on client-selected market keywords that zero in on prospects whose recent digital behavior (browsing online, reading articles, downloading white papers) indicates interest in our client’s offerings, and the B2B2C data creates a more complete prospect profile that unleashes improved personalization and relevance in email marketing.

4. They want to license our targeted audience data for ID graph building: Today, as more brands amass both B2B and B2C data, they’re finding they have the data elements required to build their own in-house identity graphs. This allows them to sidestep the need for using costly third-party graphs to fuel improved reach and scale for their campaigns.

As we wrote in Forbes earlier this year, “the B2B2C movement arrived in tandem with the rise of do-it-yourself (DIY) identity graphs.” Identity graphs are tables or databases that stitch together customer and prospect data with online identifiers to create a single profile for each potential customer. The B2B2C data remains anonymized at the execution interface to support privacy regulations, while also giving brands a better way to target and connect with individual prospects—and market to them more effectively.

For those companies building their own identity graphs, the aim is to gain more control of their data. To get their graphs where they need to be, many are working with specialized third-party data providers like OMI to add scale and fill in any data gaps about their prospects’ personal and professional identifiers. We're seeing that many clients have either started building their own identity graphs or have shown an interest in doing so. It has been an interesting development in our business for sure in 2024!

Please reach out to our team for guidance on scaling your reach and resonating with the right prospects now and in the New Year.

Personal decision drivers are grounded in trust -- think personal values, ethics, and the opportunity to learn new skills or gain knowledge. Conversely, professional decision drivers are rooted in more pragmatic factors such as pricing, product and service ratings, variety, and choice.

The bottom line is that brand has never mattered more in B2B. As a performance marketing agency with a mission to deliver ROI and outcomes, we've based our business model on pragmatic factors, such as data and results. However, we also recognize the importance of brand and trust. We value creativity, storytelling, and the emotional side of our agency business just as much as we value the practical side. That’s because there’s an undeniable connection between the two.

As we develop and implement campaigns for our B2B clients, which include Fortune 1000 firms, agencies, and small businesses, we know that getting to outcomes requires establishing trust and relevance with target audiences. In a recent blog we offered marketing tips and strategies for doing just that, but here’s another perspective I wanted to share today: Whether you’re a brand or an agency, trust begins with your culture. It needs to be built and strengthened from the inside out.

According to an article by ANA (the Association of National Advertisers) on the topic of in-house agency cultures, “Effective leaders create an environment where trust, transparency, and open communication are the norm, empowering team members to use their unique talents toward shared goals. It's about creating a welcoming space and a high-performing, inclusive environment where creativity thrives for individuals and the team.”

I couldn’t agree more, and the rewards can include happier employees, customers and partners; more successful marketing campaigns; better business outcomes; and much more. However, it’s also clear that building and maintaining a strong culture takes hard work. Here are three of my top takeaways from ANA, along with my own thoughts, on how to get it right:

Prioritize Consistency: Leaders should consider culture as part of every decision they make, reflecting on how it may support or detract from the values they have established for the company. It's also important to recognize that culture doesn't happen overnight, and it isn't a "one-and-done" decision. Keeping culture alive and thriving takes ongoing attention and work -- from leaders especially – but from the entire team as well. Like most things in business and life, when it comes to culture, consistency breeds trust.

Encourage Innovation and Risk Taking: Leaders must actively foster an environment where innovation is encouraged and teams can experiment and push boundaries without fear of failure, says ANA. Risk-taking and even failure should be viewed as a learning opportunity. This will keep your culture innovative, dynamic, and forward-thinking. As employees recognize they have the freedom to create change, the culture of trust will grow.

Communicate Transparently: Consistent, transparent communication is essential to maintaining a strong culture in good times, bad times, and when change occurs. As ANA states, “explaining the ‘why’ behind these changes helps team members understand the bigger picture and feel connected” to the journey. Communication must also be bi-directional: All of your stakeholders should feel they have the freedom to ask questions and express opinions and ideas. The philosophy that I've always shared with our team, business partners, and clients is to speak up when something doesn't feel right. This opens the door to working more effectively together, which allows trust and culture to thrive.

How do you maintain a strong culture within your organization? We’d love to hear from you.

Reach out to us today for a no-cost consultation on performance marketing and brand building.

The cost of undelivered emails for U.S. businesses has reached $59.5+ billion annually, according to a recent Mailtrap study. Another study reports that emails see an average deliverability rate of 83.1%, meaning one in six emails never makes it to the inbox. The silver lining is that the majority of email marketers are putting in the hard work needed to get deliverability right, even as new challenges emerge.

Here are 11 strategies we use to drive successful deliverability across our clients’ email  acquisition campaigns:

1. Achieve a positive sender reputation by meeting Internet service provider (ISP) guidelines. ISPs keep track of blacklisted IP addresses and will block those they deem suspicious to protect their users from spam. To prevent any impact on the reputation of your main or root domain, which would hit your business hard, we recommend using a subdomain for email campaigns.

2. Choose your platform wisely. As noted in our recent blog, sending  “cold” acquisition emails through a CRM platform is not only potentially against the platform's policy, but it can also result in significant deliverability issues and lower open rates. Acquisition email platforms are ideal for “cold” or third-party data campaigns because they have different standards for white-listing, reputation management, and IP address cleanliness. 

3. Use a warm-up process. We recommend “warming up” contacts by sending the first “cold” email through an email prospecting transmission platform. We do this for our clients at OMI using our co-developed platform. From there, we can transfer any contacts that open or click the initial email to a client’s CRM platform for ongoing outreach, such as sequenced nurture emails and automated follow-ups.

4. Abide by basic authentication policies such as DKIM, SPF, and DMARC to boost your domain reputation and gain easier access – via ISPs -- to the intended inbox. Update for 2024: DMARC adoption has become more critical than ever this year due to new mandates by Google and Yahoo for large email senders, according to Dark Reading. 

5. Adhere to applicable laws, such as CAN-SPAM in the U.S., CASL in Canada, and GDPR in the European Union.

6. Encourage recipients to reply to your messages. This sends a positive signal to ISPs because it demonstrates that your prospects and customers are interested in what you have to say. Don’t use a "no reply" address.

7. Include safe-sender links in your messages, such as a clear link guiding your audiences to add your company's "from" address to safe sender lists or address books.

8. Don’t use attachments. Emails with attachments are more heavily scrutinized by SPAM filters.

9. Keep file sizes low. Emails over 100KB will likely be blocked.

10. Use a proper image-to-text ratio for your content. An 80% text/20% image ratio is viewed as a good standard to follow.

11. Maintain email list hygiene. Promptly delete unsubscribes from your database and remove spam traps and bounced addresses frequently. Keep contacts updated and ensure the data is error-free.

Email list hygiene is such a persistent challenge that many brands turn to experts to keep their marketing data clean. We offer data cleansing at OMI and it’s one of our most popular services. Additionally, as a third-party data provider, we are hyper-focused on email data quality and understand its importance for fueling effective customer acquisition campaigns. Our B2B2C contact data file, which contains 145 million contacts with email addresses and manager, director- and professional-level and above titles, features a 30-day 95% email validity guarantee.

Email Deliverability: A Case Study Example

Recently our team executed an email acquisition campaign for a Fortune 500 client – a leading telecom provider. After experiencing lower than expected cold email delivery rates and prospect conversions using their own CRM platform, the provider came to us in need of a solution for improving ROI across their acquisition campaigns.

We proposed and executed a 90-day email transmission and campaign management pilot campaign consisting of 250k contacts three times per month for three months, with 250k additional unique contacts used for the second and third months. Of the 750k records in the campaign, approximately 40% were sourced from OMI data and the balance came from other data vendors. Using two platforms to deliver the emails, we were able to transfer contacts that engaged with the content to the client’s CRM platform.

Key campaign outcomes included:

• An average deliverability rate of 92.66% by the third wave – very high for an acquisition campaign.
• Nearly 56,000 contacts delivered to the client’s CRM platform, driving strong sales and setting the stage for future opportunities for upselling.
• The first and second campaign wave realized 150 sales, resulting in $500k in Lifetime Value (LTV) and achieving an ROI of 25 to 1 based on the transmission costs.
• Total LTV ROI for the campaign reached $1MM, with half of the revenue attributed to direct mail (with one piece sent by the client) and the other half attributed to OMI’s three email transmissions.

For the complete case study, go here. Reach out to our team today to let us know how we can support you in optimizing your email or omni-channel campaigns.

Looking at it from a generational perspective, only 70% of Gen Z respondents said they prefer email, compared to 77% of millennials.

No matter how it stacks up across generations, email's still got it, and marketers need to know how to use it to their advantage, especially when it comes to “cold” email campaigns, which can be tricky. Designed to reach and engage new prospects (not existing customers), these campaigns—also known as customer acquisition campaigns--require specialized knowledge due to their many nuances.

Our team of email marketing experts has shared these timely tips, learned through years of success with our Fortune 1000 clients, to ensure flawless campaign execution

1. Use the Right Email Platform: It’s common for CRM platforms to follow strict guidelines for data privacy and reputation management, with many not allowing the use of third-party data. Sending “cold” acquisition emails through a CRM is not only potentially against the platform's policy, but it can also result in significant deliverability issues and lower open rates. Acquisition email platforms have different standards for white-listing, reputation management, and IP address cleanliness, making them ideal for third-party data campaigns. So as you plan your campaigns, start with planning for the platform you will use.

2. Keep It Clean: The email list you used last year, let alone last month or even last week, is no longer what it used to be. Data decays at an alarming rate – as much as 70+% each year. Don’t underestimate the impact of bad data on your acquisition campaign results. The pros know that ongoing database cleansing is a must. We support many Fortune 1000 clients with not only acquisition email campaign management but also third-party marketing data and database cleansing. As leaders in their respective fields, these clients understand that clean data doesn’t happen by accident. They turn to OMI for professional, automated data cleansing at scale. They also know they can count on us for quality business contact data (featuring a 30-day 95% email validity guarantee) to augment their own databases and identity graphs and fuel more effective omni-channel campaigns. Find out more about the OMI Living File® B2B2C database containing 145 million contacts (with email addresses) here.

3. Warm It Up: We recommend “warming up” contacts by sending the first “cold” email through an email prospecting transmission platform. We do this for our clients at OMI using our own platform. From there, we can transfer any contacts that open or click the initial email to a client’s CRM platform for ongoing outreach, such as sequenced nurture emails and automated follow-ups.

4. Take Steps to Know More About Your Audience: Whether your acquisition marketing is of the B2B or B2C variety, it's valuable to get to know your prospects better to target and engage them more effectively. When building custom audiences for clients’ cold email campaigns, we use a B2B2C data strategy to gain a more complete personal-professional view of each prospect. This approach involves layering demographics -- such as marital status, children, income, gender, and age – into your audience profiles. It also entails overlaying consumer audience data with business information such as job titles. More insight into your prospects’ business and personal lives allows you to boost the relevancy of your content and reach recipients where they are -- via their work or personal email (or another channel, such as targeted ads).

5. Mix It Up: One of our differentiators as a performance marketing agency lies in our "one-two punch," which combines email with triggered programmatic, social media outreach or both. By strategically placing programmatic ads in front of users who have previously engaged with email content and vice versa, you maximize the chances of conversion. Using a tailored approach to triggering, you gain increased efficiency, scalability, and targeting capabilities. There are privacy laws to consider, making execution of this approach complex, with specialized expertise around anonymized data and other factors a requirement. Our OMI team has that expertise.

6. Level Up Your QR Code IQ: Marketers like QR codes due to the customer insights they provide but, surprisingly, we’ve found that some email recipients won’t use them because of factors like age, device, location, or industry. We’ve seen higher conversions and improved campaign results overall when a phone number or URL is included in the content alongside the QR code. We also recommend scaling your acquisition campaigns first with multiple verticals and, from there, segmenting audiences into smaller groups based on insights into those more likely to use a QR code.

7. Find Ready-to-Buy Prospects: Digital intent data provides a fast track to identifying relevant, down-funnel digital prospects. It puts marketers in position to get in front of warm prospects--decision makers who are in-market for your solutions right now-- before others have the chance. It works by anonymously monitoring, capturing, and analyzing potential buyers’ digital activity (such as browsing or content downloads) to uncover purchase intent signals. A strategy we use to double down on results is matching intent insights to contact data from the OMI Living File®  B2B2C database. This gives marketers the capability to scale their email acquisition campaign reach to more custom audiences that are in-market for their offers while remaining in compliance with privacy requirements. Read more about our intent monitoring services here.

From our perspective, a simple truth about the state of cold emails today is this: They have the potential to become more like warm emails because of the data capabilities now available to ensure you’re delivering timely, relevant information directly to targeted prospects who, in some cases, are already looking what you have to offer. Reach out to our team today to find out more. Go here for our acquisition email case studies.

These brands need to think again because today’s customers are more likely than ever to take their business elsewhere if their needs aren’t being met. A global study by Qualtrics XM states that in 2025, 53% of customers worldwide will walk away from a brand or reduce their spend after a single bad experience. This is up 2.7% from earlier in 2024.

The upside is that those B2B companies that meet and exceed expectations are seeing big returns—including market share growth.

Here are my thoughts on three “must-have” B2B moves marketers must make to level up their omni-channel strategies to win customers’ trust and their business:

1. Listen and Learn: Simply put, building a trusted relationship with your audience leads to more sales, according to recent Dentsu research. What is the best way to earn that trust? Like any relationship, listening is everything. Marketers need to listen intently and learn quickly about customers’ changing priorities, interests and channel preferences. Unfortunately, many are falling short.

MediaPost recently shared that a company isn’t expected to fix everything, but to show they are listening and caring about what they hear: “It is how the customer feels heard, and they are far more likely to continue providing feedback when they feel like the company listens.” Our recent blog covers how to collect customer insights and perform effective listening, from social channel monitoring to surveys, telemetry data, intent monitoring insights, and more. If you can’t do all of these, choose one or two. The key is to just get started because what you learn will lay the groundwork for more impactful, relevant marketing.

2. Know Your Audience, Know Their Channels: Most brands today only maintain a one-dimensional view of customers and prospects, whether it’s a personal view or a professional view. This is a mistake because if you’re not connecting with buyers in a more complete way—a way that cultivates trust and provides greater convenience to the buyer across channels—your campaigns will see reduced ROI.

OMI’s B2B2C data linkage service addresses this challenge, enabling marketers to identify and connect with prospects and customers on their personal and professional channels at work and at home. Our new data service lets you link and overlay consumer audience demographics -- such as marital status, children, income, gender, age, residential address, and LinkedIn profile – on top of B2B attributes, such as email, firmographics, and job title.

This more complete view gives you increased clarity about your prospects, allowing you to target and engage them more effectively and provide greater relevance across B2B and B2C omni-channel points, including direct mail, email, social, and programmatic. For example, if a prospect views ads for a new product or service at work, then completes the purchase later at home on another device after seeing a retargeted ad, you have simplified the purchase process and their overall experience by extending your reach beyond the office.

3. Be Present: Marketers who aren’t yet thinking in terms of omni-channel for every stage of the buying journey from the educational phase to purchase are risking lost business. A McKinsey report says buyers want all three of the general buying methods—traditional in-person, remote (such as video conference or phone calls), and self-service e-commerce in “equal measure throughout the purchasing journey.” When considering various options for B2B buying, it shouldn’t be an “either/or” situation but an all-inclusive blend – unless the customer indicates otherwise.

According to the McKinsey research, 72% of B2B companies that sell via seven or more channels grew their market share. That’s huge and, from my perspective, it leaves no question as to the value of omni-channel and B2B2C. Check out this case study on an omni-channel B2B2C strategy that drove successful outcomes for an OMI client.

Thanks for reading. Reach out to our team for more insights and best practices on planning and implementing a successful omni-channel strategy.

• The importance of trust and brand building
• The ever-narrowing competitive gap between winning and losing as a B2B brand
• The growing influence of thought leadership

The new study uncovered a finding that resonated with me: While there's a lot of talk in B2B about personalization, more than anything, relevance is what buyers crave – and right now, they don't feel brands are hitting the mark. For B2B marketers, this presents both a challenge and an opportunity. When you achieve relevance, you also gain greater customer trust, loyalty, and confidence, which, in turn, drives more wins for your brand.

According to Dentsu, B2B marketers should be able to harness the power of new technology and data to meet buyers where they are, scale personalization, and deliver the relevance that buyers demand. Being in the marketing data business since 1998, I have a few thoughts about this:

1. The Rise of B2B2C Data: The dramatic rise in the number of people working from home has accelerated the growth of a movement that had already been underway. We’ve covered it on this blog before. We call it the B2B2C or “universal person” movement, and it reflects the overlap or blending of our personal and professional lives, with more balance – and fewer boundaries -- between the two.

The problem is that most of the first- and third-party databases fueling today’s omni-channel campaigns don’t reflect this sea change. Instead, they offer only a one-dimensional view of customers and prospects, whether it’s a personal view or a professional view. This hinders campaigns from achieving their full potential when it comes to not only personalization and relevance but also targeting and reach. Your campaigns will fall short if you’re not reaching buyers where they are and not connecting with them in a more complete way—a way that engenders trust and provides greater convenience to the buyer.

That's why OMI launched a new B2B2C data linkage service to enable marketers to identify and connect with prospects and customers on their terms – on the B2B and B2C channels they use the most, whether at work or home.

Our new service links B2B attributes, such as email, firmographics, and job title, to B2C attributes, such as the prospect's LinkedIn profile, demographics, and residential address. Because these attributes give you more insights into each prospect, you can target and engage them more effectively, providing greater relevance across B2B and B2C omni-channel points, including direct mail, email, social, and programmatic.

B2B2C Relevance in Retail Example

Consider this: A B2B2C strategy can make retailers' ad campaigns more impactful during the competitive holiday shopping season. Overlaying consumer audience demographics -- such as marital status, children, income, gender, and age – on top of business information, such as job titles, leads to more effective targeting, personalization, and relevance. In addition, serving ads on work devices also aids conversions; for example, if recipients view ads at work, then complete the purchase later at home on another device.

Go here for more insights into how clients use our B2B2C data to improve marketing ROI.

2. Scaling Personalization and Relevance: Achieving personalization and relevance takes less effort if your target audience is extremely small, but what if it numbers into the millions? For many brands, new customer acquisition campaigns do scale to that size. A dilemma for many marketers is that first-party databases can only go so far as a vehicle for reaching new customers, let alone a substantial number of them. In fact, they are inherently designed to connect brands with the customers they already have. Enter third-party data. At OMI, our business contact database spans 140 million records with email addresses and includes B2B2C residential/consumer linkage on 90 million of those records to enhance personalization and relevance.

Company- and contact-level social URLs, MAIDS, mobile phones, and a range of LinkID overlays are available for reaching prospects on their preferred channels. And there’s no need to start from scratch. We can augment your existing database with B2B2C linkage – ask us how. Go here to find out more.

Using AI to Scale Personalization and Relevance

According to recent research, up to 88% of marketers plan to use AI for personalization, and 84% believe it is a “key enabler” for that purpose, MediaPost reports. Here are a few ways our team is using it to address personalization at scale:

• AI gives our agency powerful filtering capabilities, speed, and scale when using intent data signals to fuel targeted programmatic advertising campaigns for clients. With billions of digital intent signals processed weekly, AI saves us time and resources and enables us to uncover deep insights around preferences and interests to improve campaign targeting and personalization for clients.
• Our team uses AI to streamline and optimize personalization for clients. For example, we combine machine learning with business firmographics and our B2B2C contact data to automate many aspects of email personalization for clients across content, images, calls to action, subject lines, and more.

3. Collect Data Insights: When you have a better pulse on what your target audience wants, it shows in your marketing, allowing you to unlock new levels of personalization and relevance. In turn, as Dentsu’s research shows, you will be more likely to earn their trust and business. Ongoing insights derived from monitoring your social channels for high-value feedback, conducting surveys and interviews, and leveraging telemetry data and analytics tools are very useful for this purpose. We also recommend intent data to identify prospects who are ready to buy the types of solutions you offer, including data that shows what’s driving their interest. Our intent data approach uncovers 14 billion fresh B2B digital signals weekly to ensure the latest insights are given to clients.

Reach out to our team for a no-cost consultation on using these and other approaches to build more relevance – and results -- into your campaigns.

Because the marketing databases driving today’s modern digital campaigns aren’t what they used to be, new solutions to this challenge are needed. Here are five strategies we use to stay on top of the changes -- so that our clients can target and engage the right prospects, unlock better campaign ROI, and win more customers:

1. Automated Data Cleansing

Maintaining an accurate database using manual methods is nearly impossible today, especially if your database contains hundreds of thousands or even millions of prospect contact records. That’s why many businesses turn to database cleansing – but a modern approach is needed. With the tremendous scale and detail that characterize current contact databases, a professional-grade database approach is essential.

Here are a few things to look for:

• Automation: OMI’s database cleansing service uses automation to purge invalid or out-of-date data from your first-party database -- without eliminating high-value prospect records or running the risk of manual typos.
• Scale: With our OMI Living File® B2B database containing 140 million contacts (with email addresses), we know what it takes to handle data cleansing and data management at scale. We use high-powered tools and automation to get the job done efficiently and accurately. Our approach includes:
  • Cleansing to remove or correct inaccurate contacts
  • Continuously maintaining and verifying data accuracy through automation
  • Using real-time processes to identify and replace invalid contacts
  • Guaranteeing a 95% validity rate for email contacts

Find out more here.

2. Build Out Your Prospect Profiles

Don’t limit yourself to a one-dimensional view of your prospects. Building out their profiles to gain a more complete view will improve reach, personalization, and engagement. That's why OMI recently announced a B2B2C data linkage service that enables marketers to connect with prospects and customers on the B2B and B2C channels they use the most, whether at work or at home. For example, with B2B2C data linkage, a marketer can send direct mail to a B2B contact’s home address while also engaging with them on their business email using the same offer to reinforce the message.

Our service spans 140 million business contact records with residential/consumer linkage on 85 million of those records. It links B2B attributes, such as email, firmographics, and job title, to B2C attributes, such as the prospect's LinkedIn profile, demographics, and residential address. We can customize this contact data for each client's needs and then leverage it to fuel campaigns across omni-channel points, including direct mail, email, social, and programmatic.

The service offers company- and contact-level social URLs, MAIDS, mobile phones, and a range of LinkID overlays available for client use to reach prospects on their preferred channels. We can augment your existing database with B2B2C linkage – ask us how. Go here to find out more.

3. Reach Hard-to-Find SMBs

While some SMBs might be struggling, the U.S. Treasury Department states that more than 70% of small business leaders in the U.S. expect revenues to grow over the next year. This presents many opportunities to reach new buyers -- if you have the right contact data.

For marketers, one obstacle to reaching SMBs is that they often change personnel and email addresses more frequently than larger organizations. At OMI, we’re recognized for our specialization in the SMB sector and offer the largest database of U.S.-based SMB businesses in the world, with more than 95 million business contacts with email addresses. Go here for a case study highlighting a leading telecom provider’s success using OMI’s SMB data.

4. Tap Into Hot Verticals

According to Robert Half, “the government, education services, manufacturing and distribution, and healthcare industries demonstrated strong annual job growth in the first half of 2024.”  Job growth reflects industry health, but marketers must ensure they have current business contact data, including new-hire profiles, when targeting hot verticals.

On top of providing fresh, accurate data, one of our most important value-adds at OMI is audience building. When working with you to create a custom audience segment, we drill down into industry segments using firmographics, with manager-, director-, and professional-level and above titles that fuel precision targeting and improved personalization.

We also offer specialty databases, such as our Physician & Allied Health database, which covers all facets of the healthcare industry. From doctors, nurses, and specialty physicians to back office staff and more, the file includes executive-titled decision-makers at healthcare providers; physicians in clinics, group practices, or single practices; nurses in various roles; and other points of service. You’ll receive a full B2B2C data record with every file, including everything from corporate emails to residential addresses.

5. Expedite Your Way to Warm Leads with Intent Data

Why cast a net that’s far too wide and wasteful for your budget when you can immediately narrow your search to those prospects who have already shown an interest in what your brand offers? You can do this with intent data. Potential customers search for solutions to their daily challenges—browsing online, reading articles, downloading white papers, and more. This online behavior reveals your prospects' intentions to buy a specific product or service. Intent monitoring tools track the behavior, enabling you to find those potential customers even before they become aware of you and your solution.

From a marketing perspective, intent data aids in identifying early opportunities and drives more effective lead scoring. It lets marketers focus on high-potential leads and engage in more targeted marketing efforts. Marketers can integrate digital intent signals with direct mail, email, social, and programmatic campaigns for audience targeting and analytics.

Our intent data approach uncovers 14 billion fresh B2B digital signals weekly to ensure clients receive the latest insights. Go here for more information.

Don’t let this year go by without at least one more big push to find more customers. We have successfully leveraged these tips and tools with our clients and know they can work for you as well. Reach out to our team to get a conversation started.

Four Data Trends Making an Impact on Marketing Now

The bottom line is, CMOs and other senior marketers today are stepping into roles that require them to be not just marketers, but also AI experts, data-driven decision-makers, and visionary leaders. This requires a futurist mentality and staying ahead of the curve when it comes to technology, customer needs, data insights and trends, and so much more.

The data trends featured in the article are top-of-mind for us now and we highly recommend learning more about them. Reach out to our team for a conversation on how to leverage these trends to improve your marketing reach, engagement, impact and ROI.

Consider this: B2B data regularly decays up to 70+% per year. So honestly, why even invest in content and creative if your database isn’t going to get your message in front of the right people or even get it anywhere at all – due to data decay or costly errors?

Not only that, but the rise of omni-channel has made it critical to ensure the prospect profiles in your database are comprehensive. They must be capable of fueling campaigns across multiple channel points, including direct mail, email, social, programmatic, and more.

Today, these profiles also need a B2B2C upgrade. With the blending of our personal and professional lives, it only makes sense that prospect contact data should encompass both personal and professional channels. This gives you a better chance of reaching them, wherever they might be. To do this well, marketers must make the shift to a modern business contact database with company- and contact-level social URLs, MAIDS, mobile phone numbers, and a range of LinkID overlays to reach prospects on all of their preferred channels.

New Data Quality Challenges

A few short years ago, the pandemic set off layoffs and a high unemployment rate. Then came the Great Resignation, where people began switching jobs at an unprecedented rate. (In 2020, all of these changes created massive business contact data decay, making it necessary for OMI to purge over 6 million businesses and 13 million contacts from our massive Living File®database.)

Now, we are seeing the following new trends re-shape the workforce. As a marketer, if you don’t react quickly enough to these shifts with database updates, your customer acquisition campaign ROI will surely take a hit:

• Big-Tech Layoffs: As reported in Forbes, 384 tech companies laid off more than 124,000 employees in 2024, adding to the 428,449 tech workers who lost their jobs in 2022 and 2023. More layoffs are continuing, too. 
• Retiring Baby Boomers: Recent study findings show that between 2024 and 2030, employers will have to replace between 10.8 million and 14.8 million “Peak Boomer” employees who are retiring, including 1 to 2 million each in manufacturing, construction, health care, education, and professional services.
• Fast-Growing SMBs: While larger firms may be faltering, many SMBs still plan to grow. According to the U.S. Treasury Department, more than 70% of small business leaders in the U.S. expect revenues to grow over the next year, the most since the pandemic. In addition, “entrepreneurship continues to surge: the U.S. is averaging 430,000 new business applications per month in 2024, 50% more than in 2019.”
• Vertical Markets on Fire: According to recent reports by Robert Half, the global talent solutions and business consulting firm, “the government, education services, manufacturing and distribution, and healthcare industries demonstrated strong annual job growth in the first half of 2024.” In addition, while “the professional services, finance and insurance, and technology industries saw declines in job growth in the first half of 2024, compared with the same period in 2023,” they have “still contributed over 745,000 jobs to the U.S. economy in the first half of this year.”

If you’re targeting any of these sectors with your customer acquisition and prospect marketing campaigns, that’s a lot of change to keep up with. Stay tuned because next week we’ll cover our modern strategies for building and maintaining a robust, accurate database – one that delivers reach and engagement with the right prospects and decision-makers at scale.

You can also reach out directly to our team now for tips on ensuring database accuracy during times of tremendous change.

As Google seeks to balance user privacy and advertiser demands, “marketers now find themselves in an unexpected position: armed with preparatory strategies for a post-cookie world, yet still able to leverage these familiar tracking tools,” says Forbes.

This isn’t the first time Google has changed its plans for third-party cookies and it probably won’t be the last. With a May 2024 study by Statista reporting that Chrome commanded a 52% market share, what should marketers do now as they strive to target and engage its users? Evolve with the times, of course!

Here are a few takeaways from the Forbes article, along with our advice on other modern options that marketers should consider now:

1. Marketers Will Continue to Rely on Cookie-less Solutions: “Market leaders did not go into standby mode due to Chrome’s third-party cookie deprecation. Organizations continued using available tools and practices, regardless of impending changes. Many began exploring new solutions for a cookie-less future, focusing on alternative identifiers for personalized advertising. These ‘cookie-less solutions’ have proven reliable and privacy-centric in testing.” - Alex Yastrebenetsky, InfoTrust (as quoted in Forbes)

2. Third-Party Data Will Still Fuel Customer Acquisition Campaigns: “As a performance marketing agency specializing in third-party data, we've paid close attention to Google's plans. Many leading brands use high-quality data to fuel customer acquisition campaigns, and we expect that to continue, as the ROI is very high. The reality is that third-party data isn't dependent on cookies and remains a powerful source for igniting customer growth. - Paula Chiocchi, Outward Media, Inc. (as quoted in Forbes)

3. User Behavior Analysis Will Help Extract Insights: “Savvy marketers will adopt new tools that analyze user behavior to extract more actionable insights from third-party data (without needing to know who you are). This will allow marketing agencies to deliver hyper-relevant ads while complying with the new rules of the digital game.” - Dennis Kirwan, Dymic Digital (as quoted in Forbes)

4. Identity Graphs As a Cookie Alternative: Our team at OMI has seen many of our customers transition to people-based identity solutions that offer greater visibility into online and offline data while maintaining privacy. Identity graphs represent an innovative example of these solutions, pulling data from multiple quality sources and anonymizing the profiles to ensure privacy.

For example, OMI’s specialized SMB market data is available for licensing in combination with other data sources on the Snowflake marketplace. As the most comprehensive SMB business contact database of its kind, it offers more than 20 million companies matched to 95+ million contacts with email addresses. It is part of our B2B Living File® database, which contains 140 million contacts with manager-, director- and professional-level and above titles.

Identity graphs can include several identifiers per person—including name, company name, address, email address, phone numbers, and devices. The data is anonymized and does not contain personally identifiable information (PII), so marketers can't use it to trace an individual's identity. The anonymized IDs are built within the identity graph and securely taken to a DSP for delivery of a brand’s or agency’s display ads.

5. Intent Monitoring for Powerful Lead Gen: Intent monitoring offers another successful alternative to third-party cookies. Intent insights are obtained when buyers' online activities are anonymously monitored, captured, and analyzed (based on website visits, content downloads, product reviews, registration for webinars, etc.) to uncover purchase intent signals that can lead to improved and more tailored results across email campaigns, content marketing, programmatic advertising, account-based marketing and more. Matching intent insights to contact data from an identity graph, advertisers can build custom audiences that are in-market for their offers and remain in compliance with emerging requirements.

The good thing about constant change is the innovation it unleashes. As a result of its delays, Google has given marketers more time to reinvent and revisit their strategies. Tracking cookies have existed for nearly three decades, but times have changed. Marketers need to modernize and move on.

Connect with our team today for more insights on future-proofing the way you target and engage prospects.

1. Identify Early Interest: When noise levels are especially high, it’s more important than ever to pin down the warmest prospects – people who are likely to be interested in your offerings because they’ve visited your website. Using strategies such as IP address reverse company ID look up and contact estimation, which we offer to our clients, you can go a long way toward identifying these website visitors. Once you have a better idea of who they are, you need to determine how to best engage them. We advise a B2B2C approach (read on to find out more).

2. Reach Prospects at Work and at Home:  As it gets more difficult to rise above the election year noise, it is critical for brands to fine-tune and double down on their reach and engagement strategies. B2B2C data linkage is the answer.

Recently, OMI announced a B2B2C data linkage service that enables marketers to connect with prospects and customers on the B2B and B2C channels they use the most, whether at work or at home. This new offering was developed in response to the dramatic increase in the number of people working from home, which has accelerated the growth of the B2B2C or “universal person” movement. This movement sparked a paradigm shift that calls for marketers to get a more complete view of their prospects – across their B2B and B2C profiles -- to engage them more effectively.

As an example of B2B2C data linkage, a marketer can send direct mail to a B2B contact’s home address while also engaging with them on their business email using the same offer to reinforce the message.

Our new service spans 140 million business contact records, with residential/consumer linkage on 85 million of those records. It links B2B attributes, such as email, firmographics and job title, to B2C attributes, such as the prospect's LinkedIn profile, demographics and residential address. This contact data can be customized for each client’s needs and then leveraged to fuel campaigns across channel points including direct mail, email, social, and programmatic, where available.

The service offers both company- and contact-level social URLs, MAIDS, mobile phone, and a range of LinkID overlays available for client use in reaching prospects on their preferred channels. Go here to find out more.

3. Find Ready-to-Buy Prospects: Moving beyond simply identifying website visitors, you can scale out your search to those prospects who have already shown an interest in what your brand offers with intent data. Here’s how it works: Potential customers actively search for solutions to their challenges every day—browsing online, reading articles, downloading white papers, etc. This online behavior reveals your prospects' intentions to buy a specific type of product or service. Intent monitoring tools track the behavior, enabling you to find those potential customers even before they find you and your solution.

From a marketing perspective, intent data aids in identifying early opportunities and drives more effective lead scoring. It uncovers serious buyers actively researching solutions --- the prospects who are most ready and most likely to buy -- providing a huge advantage over cold outreach. This With intent data, marketers can focus their efforts on high-potential leads and engage in more targeted marketing efforts – which is critical during a “noisy” election year. Another benefit is more efficient use of advertising budgets.

Drilling down a bit further, intent flags are used as part of our B2B2C data linkage service and are based on client-selected market keywords that zero in on prospects whose recent digital behavior (browsing online, reading articles, downloading white papers) indicates interest in the client’s offerings. Go here for more information.

4. Repeat Exposure: Repeat exposure to your defined targets can also give your messages the added attention they need with a politically-distracted audience. At OMI, we offer a “one-two punch” strategy that leverages triggered programmatic and email. By placing programmatic ads in front of prospects who have previously engaged with email content, and vice versa, you maximize the chances of conversion. Using a tailored approach to triggering, you gain increased efficiency, scalability, and targeting capabilities. Because there are privacy laws at play, execution of this approach is complex, making specialized expertise around anonymized data and other factors a requirement. Our team is uniquely qualified with that expertise.

5. Audience Media Activation: Today’s media landscape is complicated. During an election season, digital advertising real estate is more scarce and ad buys become more competitive. This means there is a bigger chance that your ads may end up on a made for advertising (MFA) site or positioned adjacent to a potentially offensive ad that doesn’t align with your mission. When advertisers work with trusted agency partners who have the expertise and tools to navigate the complex programmatic landscape effectively, these risks are greatly reduced. In addition, the right media activation partner has your best interests in mind. They provide transparent measurement and reporting and focus on getting your message in front of real people and the right people – not bots or MFAs. Talk to our team about our media activation services. We are a trusted partner to Fortune 1000 firms.

It takes a multitude of tools and all the expertise you can bring together to rise above the noise this summer and into the Fall. Connect with our team for assistance. We offer all five of the services and tools above and we want nothing more than to see our clients succeed this year and beyond.

We applaud those companies that authentically stand for meaningful issues outside their industry. Along those lines, our team is more likely to do business with partners and others who align with our beliefs.

In the U.S., where the presidential election is just around the corner, avoiding exposure to the many heated discussions is impossible. Here are some thoughts on the pros and cons of tying campaigns to political views, current events, or social causes.

- Be Authentic: If you want to include a politically- or socially-themed message in your campaigns, whether advertising, programmatic, email, social, PR, or something else, be sure it authentically represents your company's genuine values. The messages you deliver must align with your company’s stated mission, and words alone aren’t enough. Actions speak louder than words. For example, a brand that fervently supports social justice could establish a program for aiding marginalized communities and bringing new opportunities to those who might not otherwise be exposed to them.  

Before moving forward, conduct internal and external surveys to understand how employees and customers feel about the issue you plan to embrace. Undoubtedly, if you have reached the point where a campaign is under consideration, your brand has already devoted support to this issue at some level.

After the study results are in, analyze the feedback and use the results to set stakeholder expectations. As you move forward, consider adding a personal touch by having your message attributed to a leader of your company – someone with the passion and commitment to be the chief evangelist behind your message.

While some customers may admire your company for taking a stand, others may stop buying from you if they disagree with your opinion. Be prepared to handle any negative blowback and respond positively to those who may disagree with your stated opinion. Consider that there may also be just as many among your audience experiencing political fatigue and will tune out any political message, regardless of whether they agree.

- Be Timely: Tying your campaigns to a recent event may present an opportunity to rally your customers and prospects and promote your brand in a positive light (such as generating or matching donations to provide aid for a recent natural disaster.) But be mindful that you’ll need to move fast while the event is still fresh in everyone’s mind, or you may miss the window of opportunity. In addition, your audience may also misinterpret your campaign in unexpected ways, such as when Spirit Airlines referenced an oil spill in its communications, only to learn that many interpreted its message as making light of a severe environmental disaster. (Lesson: never use humor when communicating serious events or issues.)

- Be Thoughtful: Businesses have long supported charities and social causes to generate loyalty with customers and prospects. Recent studies show that charitable donations can increase sales and boost your brand reputation. While there are seemingly causes with no downside (such as supporting the Special Olympics), there are just as many that can paint a company into a political corner and potentially offend a specific population of customers. Communications around noble causes can also be mishandled, such as when the World Wildlife Fund tried to draw attention to a devastating tsunami but did so by comparing it to the 9/11 disaster, offending many.

The bottom line? Be authentic to your corporate mission and purpose. If committing to a campaign with political or social messages attached to it is backed by your leaders, stakeholders, employees, and many of the customers you serve, then take the next step – prepare to launch. Remember, it will take wisdom and courage to get it right. That’s why choosing a thoughtful and impassioned leader to guide you is essential.

If doubts exist and key stakeholders are hesitant, you may need to do more internal work before embarking on your plans. All decisions related to these types of endeavors must be carefully considered.

At OMI, we stand ready to assist you in targeting and scaling out your omni-channel campaigns to connect with real people and the right people. Reach out to our team for a no-charge consultation.

At OMI, where performance marketing is our specialty, we continue to expand our use of AI -- and industry experts are starting to take notice. Over the past year and beyond, Forbes has quoted our team about the ways we are leveraging AI to transform how we work and improve client outcomes. Here are four of the quotes:

• Powerful Filtering for Intent Data Signals

“AI gives our agency powerful filtering capabilities, along with speed and scale, when using intent data signals to fuel targeted programmatic advertising campaigns for clients. With billions of digital intent signals processed weekly, AI saves us time and resources and enables us to uncover deep insights around preferences and interests to improve campaign targeting and personalization.” Read more here.

• Time-Saver for Personalization at Scale

“As an agency with deep expertise in omni-channel marketing, we rely on robust personalization. Our team uses AI to streamline and optimize personalization for clients. For example, we combine machine learning with business firmographics and our B2BC contact data to automate many aspects of email personalization across content, images, calls to action, subject lines and more.” Read more here.

• Content Development Starting Point

“AI has worked well for us for SEO and email personalization at scale. We’re now testing ChatGPT as a content development starting point for landing pages, email, lead generation and more. Its output can sound robotic, and since the text it generates can be pulled from existing works, copyright infringement is a potential issue. That’s why it’s critical to customize that text and make it your own.”  Read more here.

• Champion Responsible Use and Conduct Team Training

“Combining human emotions and creativity with AI efficiency and innovation can be a marketing game-changer. For the best outcomes and to foster a sense of purpose and pride, agency leaders must champion the responsible, ethical use of AI along with a culture of trust and transparency. Team training is also essential—and with generative AI evolving so rapidly, it must be ongoing.” Read more here.

How are you using AI in your marketing? We’d love to hear from you. Reach out to our team to learn more about our use of AI as well as our many performance marketing offerings designed to boost your marketing ROI.

First, here’s a little background on the “why” behind this new offering: The dramatic increase in the number of people working from home has accelerated the growth of a movement that had already been underway. We call it the B2B2C or “universal person” movement and it reflects the overlap or blending of our personal and professional lives, with more balance – and fewer boundaries -- between the two.

Now available, the new service links B2B attributes, such as email, firmographics and job title, to B2C attributes, such as the prospect's LinkedIn profile, demographics and residential address. This lets brands target and engage prospects more effectively -- across both B2B and B2C channels.

The channel points covered by our service include direct mail, email, social, and programmatic, where available. As an example of B2B2C linkage, a marketer can send direct mail to a B2B contact’s home address while also engaging with them on their business email using the same offer to reinforce the message.

Brands can use OMI’s B2B2C linkage service to elevate marketing ROI in these key ways:

• Gain expanded marketing reach for B2B prospecting with added consumer attributes for your prospects, and the ability to reach them on new channels
• Acquire ABM-level data elements on contacts and companies to power stronger ABM reach and results
• Identify consumer profiles for existing B2B contacts to achieve a more complete profile to drive greater success in your omni-channel campaigns
• Collect vital data elements to help construct your own in-house identity graph
• Get increased matches to both LinkedIn and Meta to enable stronger results for social marketing programs
• Enhance media activation targeting and reach, with the ability to connect with prospects across business and personal channels via their B2B email address and an alternate email address

Social Media Use Case

Recently, OMI’s B2B2C/Universal Personal data linkage strategy played an instrumental role when working with  a leading global e-commerce platform provider. For the social portion of the omni-channel campaign, B2B2C data linkage drove our match rate to 70% for LinkedIn and 42% for Meta, which is well above industry standards. To match the data, our team delivered the custom audience file we built for the provider to both social platforms.

B2B2C Universal Person File Now Available from OMI

OMI’s Universal Person Marketing (UPM) database file contains 140 million business contact records, with residential/consumer linkage on 85 million of those records. In addition, it offers both company- and contact-level social URLs, MAIDS, mobile phone, and a range of LinkID overlays available for client use. Intent flags are also used as part of our B2B2C data linkage service and are based on client-selected market keywords that zero in on prospects whose recent digital behavior (browsing online, reading articles, downloading white papers) indicates interest in our client’s offerings.

Appending UPM contacts is also a component of OMI’s service, with appends made to an existing company and contact file first, followed by expansion to incremental companies and contacts.

Go here for more information on other OMI data solutions and services including our massive B2B database, intent monitoring, media activation, email campaign management, and B2B database cleansing.

We invite you to reach out to our team with any questions.

So how can marketers – whether they are of the Gen Z or Boomer generation -- adapt to today’s increasingly younger B2B buyers and give them the frictionless experiences they want, both online and off?

Here are three approaches our team takes to win younger buyers’ attention and trust:

1. Know Your Audience: A new study by Ascend 2 reports that an “important positive of younger marketers is their ability to read buyer signals -- either because they have better data, are more focused on buyers, or both.” Staying ahead of these shifts in buyer behavior can give you a competitive advantage if you adapt your marketing strategies to the observed behaviors, the study notes.

To better understand target audiences in order to engage them more effectively, marketers need to gather ongoing data insights. You can do this by monitoring your social channels for high-value feedback, conducting surveys and interviews with prospects and customers, and leveraging data and analytics tools. Our team also uses intent data to identify prospects who are ready to buy the types of solutions our clients offer, including data that shows what’s driving their interest.  Our intent data approach uncovers 14 billion fresh B2B digital signals weekly to ensure the latest insights are given to clients. When you have a better pulse on what your target audience wants, it shows in your marketing – and you will be more likely to earn their trust and their business.

2. Keep Your Data Fresh: As digital natives, younger marketers recognize that data quality is important but they know what they need to do to keep data standards high so that they can deliver seamless digital experiences. To build a strong data foundation, our advice is to set data quality standards for your marketing team and hold everyone accountable to them. Ongoing cleansing is essential, whether it’s your first-party data or the third-party data you acquire for customer acquisition campaigns. Prioritizing fresh, current data about customers and prospects is a must. Without it, your ability to orchestrate engagement across channels and reach the right prospects, at the right time with the right messages will fall short.

Every marketer should know that customer and prospect business contact data decays 2-3% monthly. That’s why, as a performance marketing agency, one of the services we offer to our clients is database cleansing. Our approach includes:

• Cleansing to remove or correct inaccurate contacts
• Continuously maintaining and verifying data accuracy through automation
• Using real-time processes to identify and replace invalid contacts
• Ensuring a 95% validity rate for email contacts

One of our most important value-adds on top of data cleansing is audience building—drilling down by firmographics, such as manager, director, and professional level and above titles—to further fuel precise targeting and improved personalization to reduce disconnects with your customers and prospects.

3. Get a 360-Degree View of Your Prospects: As the overlap between our personal and professional lives increases, especially where younger “always connected” buyers are concerned, B2B marketers need to be able to engage prospects at work and home. At OMI,  we use a B2B2C or "universal person" data linkage strategy to uncover a more complete personal and professional view of prospects, which enables higher conversion rates. 

Linking B2B attributes, such as email, firmographics and job title, to B2C attributes, such as the prospect's LinkedIn profile and residential address, lets us target and engage prospects more effectively -- across both B2B and B2C channels. The channel points we cover include direct mail, email, social, and programmatic -- where available. As an example of B2B2C linkage, a marketer can send direct mail to a B2B contact’s home address while also engaging with them on their business email around the same offer, to reinforce the message.

Another benefit to B2B2C linkage is that it allows for media activation via the B2B email and an alternate email address – again, offering marketers the opportunity to reach and engage with prospects on both business and personal channels.

Go here for more insight into our B2B2C linkage services and check out how a leading e-commerce platform provider used them successfully.

Reach out to our team today to level up your strategy for reaching younger buyers.

The website demonstrates our commitment to empowering you to confidently reach your target audiences and elevate marketing ROI using our innovative B2B2C data solutions and services, including:

• Our Living File® database with more than 140 million B2B contacts with email
• The world’s largest database of U.S.-based SMBs
• Powerful intent data for identifying in-market prospects
• Transparent media activation
• Customer acquisition and prospect marketing campaigns – used by top brands
• End-to-end campaign services for programmatic, email, social and much more
• Professional grade data cleansing including email contacts
• Extensive B2B healthcare database

Why Leading Brands Turn to OMI

At OMI, we know that navigating the complexities of omni-channel audience data and customer acquisition campaigns can be challenging. At the same time, ad fraud related to bot activity is escalating, threatening the success of digital campaign targeting. As you’ll see on the website, OMI addresses all of these issues with next-generation ad fraud detection and an unparalleled dedication to data accuracy. The result is a 30% campaign performance boost, on average, for our clients.

Don’t just take our word for what we can do for you: scroll down here and check out the names of the leading brands that have turned to us to empower their sales and marketing teams.

For an example of new content around our services, the excerpt below highlights our media activation offerings, with insight into how we’re differentiated in the market:

OMI MEDIA ACTIVATION

Harnessing our massive database, omni-channel expertise and strategic partnerships, we empower media buyers and brands to activate the right B2B2C audiences with precision to dramatically Improve campaign results.

MEDIA ACTIVATION: OMNI-CHANNEL USE CASES

•  Campaign analysis
•  Programmatic ad campaigns
•  Social and email marketing
•  Postal data and geolocation

MEDIA ACTIVATION: THREE KEY OMI BENEFITS

Advanced Sourcing Strategy

• Sourced from prospects’ digital search queries, content downloads, and website clicks
• Based on content consumed – not on websites viewed – to provide deep insights into prospects’ interests and preferences
• All signals filtered using natural language processing (NLP) to fuel intent monitoring speed and scale

Up-to-Date Insights

• 14 billion fresh B2B digital signals ingested weekly
• 24-hour feeds provided for clients wanting to create campaign triggers for intent signal execution across channels
• Fresh intent signals provided weekly for data feed applications

Customizable, Comprehensive B2B2C Customer Profiles

• Identify in-market prospects who closely align to your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) using highly-customizable intent monitoring search topics
• Link interest paths to the prospect from both a consumer and a business perspective to gain a more complete view of their profile

Go here to view the site now. Your feedback is always appreciated and we invite you to reach out to our team with any questions around how we can support you in achieving your marketing goals.

With so much on their plates, it's no wonder that upskilling and continuous learning have become essential. As a performance marketing agency with inside perspective into what’s making an impact on our industry now, here are four skillsets and traits that our experience tells us are critical for B2B marketing leaders today:

1. AI Savvy: It’s no surprise that AI is at the forefront of what today’s marketing leaders need to critically understand. Digital Marketing Institute’s (DMI) Insights survey indicates that the most in-demand skills marketers are looking to develop in 2024 are AI, marketing strategy, SEO and content creation. A separate DMI poll found 85% of marketers surveyed believe AI will enhance their work, with another DMI members survey citing that the top benefits for integrating AI include automating routine tasks (68%), improving customer experience (46%), enhancing targeting and personalization (45%), and enabling predictive analytics (39%). Most see AI as an aid and support rather than an altogether replacement, with just 6% of marketers fearing AI could make their role redundant or believing it may take their job.

2. Adaptability: Executives at B2B marketing agencies say adaptability is the most important skill for their team members to have, according to B2B Marketing Benchmark research from LinkedIn. The report was based on data from a survey of 2,000 executives globally, a subset of whom work for B2B marketing/advertising agencies. B2B agency leaders say they seek out professionals who can rise to today’s challenges with agility and adaptability along with good problem solving skills and the capability to be both an innovative and strategic thinker.

3. Digitally Strong: According to LinkedIn’s article, “The Nine Defining Traits of Tomorrow’s B2B Marketing Superstar,” data analysis is the number one digital skill now being added to LinkedIn profiles globally. From predictive analytics to data visualization and more, marketers must have a solid grasp of digital and data and must know how to “put the right measurement systems and technologies in place.” They must also be “technology trailblazers” who aren’t afraid to be early adopters and evangelists while gaining “comfort and understanding” with the tools they deploy.

4. Adept at the Three C’s – Creative, Collaboration & Culture: Marketing leaders must be well-rounded. A deep understanding of all things creative has always been a part of the role, with the LinkedIn article saying that marketers must know how to make their brand stand out in a crowded marketplace. They do this primarily through visual storytelling, without fear of being experimental and innovative. Excellent collaborative skills and the ability to work cross-functionally across teams are also essential to success. And last but not least, true marketing leaders evangelize authentic diversity, equity and inclusion practices both internally and externally. They are visionaries who serve as change agents across their companies, according to LinkedIn.

What traits do you value most in B2B marketing leaders? Reach out to our team for feedback on how we can assist you in making your budget go farther – whether it’s building upon your team’s skillsets or sharing our expertise to empower you to elevate marketing-driven revenue and ROI.

1. Extensive B2B and B2C Reach: Every business should nurture and maintain their own first party data. Realistically, however, this class of data (sourced from existing customers) doesn’t have the scale to make a significant impact on prospect marketing. That’s where third-party data comes in. Our competitive prospecting edge at OMI lies in the expanded marketing reach we offer through our massive B2B business contact database, which is used by Fortune 2000 businesses and start-ups alike to fuel successful customer acquisition campaigns.

Our award-winning prospect marketing database includes:

• 140 million business contact records with email addresses
• ABM-level data elements on contacts and companies
• The world’s largest database of U.S.-based SMB contacts, offering unparalleled reach to SMBs, sole proprietors, and independent contractors
• Consumer profiles on B2B contacts to enable reach and insights into the universal person – including both B2B and B2C attributes
• Data matching to both LinkedIn and Meta for B2B2C social marketing programs
• Data elements to build your own identity graph, which gives you the flexibility to curate custom audiences and quickly tailor data-driven marketing campaigns to your specific needs
• Custom files built and tailored to your business needs
• Company and contact level social, MAIDS, mobile phone, and a range of LinkID

overlays available for internal graph-building projects

2. The Freshest Prospect Insights: Because data decays rapidly, always make sure your third-party data contains the freshest data. We use advanced tools and best practices to keep our data cleansed and updated to deliver optimal results. Our database is always growing, too. Today, we process over 40-60 million monthly data records, gathering up-to-date insights on title changes, postal address changes, workplace moves, and more.

With our proprietary applications and data resources, we can turn a postal record into a multi-channel, universal person record -- with email, social, and intent signal upgrades. Clients can opt to receive a complete multi-channel layout for new business contacts along with intent signals on those records.

The result is a more functional and actionable business data set enhanced into a multi-channel record -- not just an email record -- with more channel data and better data structuring for higher campaign ROI.

3. An ESP Purpose-Built for Prospect Marketing: We co-developed our own Email Service Provider (ESP) platform specifically for prospect marketing. It applies our own proven processes, manages the volume and frequency requirements of building white-listed prospect email-send domains, and programmatically self-monitors IP scores and domain reputations with flexible rules applied to achieve high open and click rates.

OMI is also an intent signal provider and can intelligently segment prospect lists based on signals to achieve better throughput and results. Intent signal data helps sort and prioritize the prospect data. We also offer clients the option to have all leads transferred to their own marketing automation platforms, such as Eloqua.

4. Integrated Channel Marketing: OMI 100% supports our clients to thrive in the rapidly expanding “universal person” era, bridging the gaps between personal and professional (consumer and business) data to power a more complete view of prospects’ profiles. This enables improved prospecting campaign reach and engagement across channels, better personalization and higher campaign ROI.

Our business contact data is designed to support omni-channel integration, with multiple channel points built around a robust and unified B2B2C or “Universal Person” record that spans prospects’ B2B and B2C attributes. We also have our own campaign platform network, which shares signals across channels – from email and social to programmatic and even digital direct mail -- to inform strategies and trigger messaging.

Go here to read more about our Universal Person Marketing (UPM) file, which we believe is the largest of its kind with residential/consumer linkage for 80 million of our 140 million B2B contact records.

5. The Right People: Building the best prospect marketing playbook doesn’t come from data and technology alone. It takes the right people and partners. For example, our team excels at providing end-to-end execution on programmatic and social campaigns for both SMB and consumer audiences, and we are adept at removing ad waste and dramatically increasing measurability. Upskilling, continuing education and ongoing experience in the market keeps us on the cutting edge.

We have also aligned with several key partners, including a DSP accelerator, intent provider and LinkID integrator, and a B2C and B2B full-service programmatic advertising firm, who bring tremendous talent and expertise to our client engagements.

These five pillars are a big part of how we approach prospect marketing, but there’s much more to it and we’re happy to share the details. Please reach out to our team to schedule time with us.

From my perspective, one of the biggest takeaways from the research is that marketers are challenged by the increasing complexity of the marketing ecosystem. MediaPost’s coverage of the survey states that 53% say “their team is overwhelmed by the sheer number of channels they need to manage, 20% strongly so. And 59% agree that the need to have specialists for each marketing channel is creating headaches for the team.”

It’s clear that many brands and agencies are going all in to coordinate and orchestrate direct mail, email, social, and programmatic campaigns, and as the study pointed out, they may have multiple specialists overseeing these channels. But the issue is that most brands don’t truly integrate their channels –  they often operate them in silos -- and that’s one reason why they fail to deliver a fully seamless, omni-channel experience to prospects and customers. This, in turn, hinders CX, conversions, and marketing ROI.

Three Steps to Success with Omni-Channel Integration

So what’s the solution? Integration needs to be baked into your customer acquisition and prospecting campaigns from day one, starting with your data. Here are three steps to success that we use with our clients:

1.   Share Channel Signals: OMI has its own campaign platform network, which shares signals across channels – from email and social to programmatic and even digital direct mail -- to inform strategies and trigger messaging. Succeeding at this integrated approach with a new business/customer acquisition campaign (our specialty at OMI) starts with high-quality business contact data and a strategic understanding of how to best structure it and use it.

2.    Use Data That’s Purpose-Built for Omni-Channel Integration: OMI’s business contact data is purpose-built to support omni-channel integration, with multiple channel points built around a robust and unified B2B2C or “Universal Person” record that spans prospects’ B2B and B2C attributes.

Our Universal Person Marketing (UPM) file, which we believe is the largest of its kind with 140 million business contact records, offers residential/consumer linkage for 80 million of those records. It links B2B attributes, such as email, firmographics and job title, to B2C attributes, such as the prospect's LinkedIn profile, demographics and residential address.

This data powers client campaigns and lets us integrate the way we target and engage prospects, giving marketers access to the “universal person” by reaching them on their preferred personal (B2C) and professional (B2B) channels.

3.    Add ROI Lift and Measurability: Taking it a step further, we apply multi-channel, intent-signaled data and specialized campaign services to add measurability, ROI lift and lower costs to integrated prospect campaigns across channels such as programmatic, social, and direct mail.

Our intent signaling is at the same technical level as Bombora but with a much deeper reach into the B2B market. That B2B edge – combined with digital, multi-channel intent signals that uncover warm leads who are in-market for the types of products and services you have to offer – provides a distinct advantage. It allows you to reach business prospects when their interest levels are high and the opportunity for conversion is peaking.

Don’t let ineffective omni-channel integration get in the way of CX and marketing ROI. Connect with us to find out how we can fully integrate your campaigns to enable a seamless omni-channel experience.

As a marketing data company, OMI has gone all in to support our clients in the rapidly expanding “universal person” era by bridging the gaps between personal and professional (consumer and business) data across the many services we offer. By doing so, we have been able to power a more complete view of prospects’ profiles, enabling our clients with improved campaign reach and engagement across channels, better personalization and higher campaign ROI.

For many of our client campaigns we now link B2B attributes, such as email, firmographics and job title, to B2C attributes, such as the prospect's LinkedIn profile, demographics and residential address. This lets us target and engage prospects more effectively -- across both B2B and B2C channels. With that in mind, here are five ways we recommend using Universal Person contact data to elevate your marketing ROI:

1. Gain expanded marketing reach for B2B prospecting with added consumer attributes for your prospects, and the ability to reach them on new channels
2. Acquire ABM-level data elements on contacts and companies to power stronger ABM reach and results
3. Secure consumer profiles for existing B2B contacts to achieve a more complete profile to drive greater success in your omni-channel campaigns
4. Collect vital data elements to help construct your own in-house identity graph
5. Get increased matches to both LinkedIn and Meta to enable stronger results for social marketing programs

OMI B2B2C Data Linking: Social Media Use Case

Recently, insights from social media fueled our B2B2C/Universal Person data linking strategy when working with a leading global e-commerce platform provider. For the social portion of the omni-channel campaign, our match rate was 70% to LinkedIn and 42% to Meta, which is well above industry standards. To match the data, our team uploaded the custom audience file we built for the provider to both social platforms.

Our strategy enabled high-impact, omni-channel media activation at scale and gave us incredibly valuable insights into a greater number of prospects – including the ability to understand them better based on their social URLs and to reach them on the channels they use the most, whether B2B or B2C.

About OMI’s B2B2C Universal Person Services

• Our Universal Person Marketing (UPM) file contains 140 million business contact records with residential/consumer linkage on 80 million of those records.

• OMI has company and contact level social, MAIDS, mobile phone, and a range of LinkID

overlays available for client use. We use intent flags based on market keywords selected by client to zero in on the best matches for your campaigns.

• Appending UPM contacts is also a part of our service. We can append to an existing company and contact file first, then expand it with  incremental companies and contacts.

Connect with our team for a conversation on Universal Person marketing and the data services we can provide to elevate your marketing reach and ROI.

The research suggests these groups are complex and typically made up of six to 10 stakeholders. Whether they come from accounting, legal, IT, or another team, one thing they all have in common is Fear of Messing Up (FOMU), according to the study: They don’t want the decisions they make to cause their businesses harm or negatively impact their careers.

Understanding what drives group stakeholders and engaging them on their terms is critical for influencing their decisions. Here are four key consideration to keep in mind as you strive to connect with diverse buying groups:

1. Build Trust: Emphasizing “safety” is crucial when marketing to B2B brands, especially the larger companies, the study shows. They want to choose a brand that colleagues and peers trust, and building trust is a process that takes time. Your organization’s leaders, its reputation, and the quality and impact of its solutions as well as the customer experience it delivers all impact trust.                                                                             
2. Uncover “Hidden” Decision Makers: Forrester has stated that “the best buying signal you will ever get is the presence of multiple individuals from the same organization researching your solutions at the same time.”

One way to find the “hidden” buyers within these groups – the people who are not typically targeted in marketing campaigns – is through intent monitoring. It involves tracking digital buying signals based on online behavior, such as search engine queries, repeat website visits and content downloads. This data provides powerful insights into decision-makers’ top preferences and concerns, including the risks they face. It paves the way for you to not only reach the most relevant individuals across buying groups – the people most likely in-market for solutions just like yours – but to also target them with messages that are personalized to their interests and concerns.

Our approach to intent monitoring at OMI includes:

•  Monitoring more than 14 billion new B2B digital intent signals for our clients each week. Clients can make selections from these signals based on keywords and topics.

•  Grouping intent signals into buckets by industry and interest level, with additional insights added about the types of departments and contacts most likely to be associated with these buckets.

• Filtering with NLP and AI: All signals are filtered using natural language processing (NLP) and AI to enable tremendous speed and scale during the intent monitoring process.

• Linking a prospect’s web search history to company-level behavioral pathways, with signals that aren’t based on the websites that are being viewed but on the content that’s being consumed on those websites. This provides deeper insights into the prospect’s interests and preferences.

• Matching the intent data, using a variety of identifiers, to the company associated with the searches and to the potential buyer contacts across that company. This is performed using our Living File^® database of more than 18 million companies and 145+ million contacts – all manager-, director- and professional-level and above contacts with email addresses.

• Through an intent data program, you gain valuable intelligence about the individual decision-makers who make up buying groups, giving you a way to market with precision and speed up sales cycles. Go here to read more about our intent monitoring services. 

3. Create Agreement: When it comes to companies with less brand power in the market, LinkedIn  says marketers need to create a sense of agreement across the targeted buying group by delivering a cohesive digital buying experience. Since everyone in the buying group has some level of influence on the buying decision, it’s easy to understand why the experience should resonate with all of them. In 2021, Forrester said that solutions costing more than $5,000 involved a group of three or more making that decision 84% of the time. That percentage no doubt has grown.

Intent data can fuel your ability to identify and prepare automated sequences and triggers, using digital ads, email, and other channels to tell a brand story in a cohesive way that makes sense for the entire group.

4. Go All In on Self-Service: According to Forrester, the pendulum has swung from helping sellers sell to helping buyers buy. Regardless of their role, today’s buyers want to tap into self-service tools and information as they research solutions online. In fact, Gartner says 75% of buyers prefer a rep-free sales experience. Sellers need to keep pace, using everything from pre-recorded webinars to self-guided demos, product quotes and more to streamline the buying process. This is especially important when you consider that Millennials and GenZ decision-makers, who hold tremendous influence across buying groups today, adopt self-service at higher rates and are digitally savvy.

Reach out to our team for more information about these and other strategies for driving success with today’s all-important B2B buying groups.

According to the report, a large gap exists between the way brands and agencies view ROI today: 63% of agencies are confident in their ability to demonstrate ROI, but only 33% of brands are very pleased. This huge gap shows that agencies aren’t adequately addressing client needs.

Another gap exists around feelings about transparency, with 63% of agencies happy with it, and only 42% of brands.

So what do brands want? No matter the vertical market, the study says that brands want their agencies to perform, with agency evaluations based on these priorities: 

• Revenue growth—54%
• ROI—47% 
• Lead generation—40% 
• Engagement metrics—39% 
• Customer satisfaction scores—39%
• Conversion—36%
• Brand equity—28%

With revenue growth, ROI, customer acquisition and lead gen topping the charts on the list above, I couldn’t feel more confident in our direction at OMI. As a performance marketing agency, our aim is to deliver high-impact results. (Check out our case study on how we created SMB engagement at scale – and business growth – for a leading e-commerce platform provider.)

These are a few of the ways we eliminate ROI disconnects and deliver tangible business-building outcomes:

• Maintain Open Communication: As brands and agencies begin their engagements, and just as importantly--as they continue working together--open communication is essential. Being very specific and transparent about goals, measurement practices, and outcomes both up front and throughout the relationship, and holding each other accountable to them, is the only way to boost true ROI.

• Start with Good Data: The most important first step in meeting your campaign goals is to reach the right people with your messages. That requires high-quality data. We've built our business around high-quality third-party B2B data, viewing it as a Living File® that needs to be regularly maintained and updated. Our massive, award-winning B2B database, which includes 140 million contacts (all are manager-, professional, and director-level and above) with email addresses, fuels our campaigns and the many services we offer.

• Identify Serious Buyers: Potential customers actively search for solutions to their challenges every day—browsing online, reading articles, downloading white papers. This online behavior, which can be sourced as “intent data” to fuel your campaigns, is an ROI game-changer because it reveals your prospects' intentions to buy a product or service just like yours. A recent study by Forrester Research indicates that 85% of companies using intent data report achieving business benefits, such as increased response rates from outbound marketing and more successful sales prospecting.

• With intent data, up-to-date insights are critical. We ingest as many as 14 billion fresh digital intent signals each week. The intent signals aren’t based on the websites that are being viewed but on the content that’s being consumed on those websites. This provides deeper insights into the prospect’s interests and preferences to fuel more effective personalization, which in turn results in higher campaign ROI.

• Go here for our recent write-up on all the business benefits of intent data.

• Understand the “Universal Person:” When it comes to customer acquisition campaigns, whether using intent data or other marketing solutions, tracking the “universal person” has become increasingly important as the lines between our personal and business lives blur. Linking the interest paths of the individual as both a consumer and a professional can give you gain a more complete view of your prospects, which improves targeting, personalization, and ultimately, ROI.

• Demand Full Transparency: To gain clear insights into campaign outcomes every step of the way and to accurately inform future strategy, brands need to demand full transparency from their agencies. Our data-driven approach to all of our services, including media activation, is based on transparency—relative to fees, audiences, measurement, and outcomes. When agencies put clients in position to identify, engage and activate the most accurate, targeted omni-channel audiences, the result is campaigns that reach real people that matter to your business—not bots, not made for advertising sites, and not irrelevant audiences. This philosophy is core to our business and to driving ROI.

To eliminate the disconnects between brands and agencies and elevate ROI, it all comes down to data, accountability, and transparency. Please reach out to our team to discuss how we can get your marketing ROI where it needs to be.

Whether the target is a 25-year-old making their first big purchasing decision in a new role, a veteran manager, or a diverse buying group, meeting buyers where they are—on the channels they use the most—is essential.

Each generation brings unique expectations, communication styles and preferred engagement channels to the table. For example, new data shared by Martech Today indicates that live events and partner programs are becoming important again, but digital natives may not appreciate them as much and may prefer digital or virtual events instead. Understanding generational preferences and behaviors makes all the difference for effective customer acquisition campaigns.

Here are a few thoughts from our team around what each generation wants and how to best engage them:

Gen Z (1997-2012)

The group born in the late 1990s to early 2010s (~1997-2012), Generation Z is the youngest of B2B buyers and a growing segment. Forrester data indicates Millennials and Gen Z make up the majority of B2B buyers, at a combined 71%.

Gen Z prefers social media over other channels, according to studies, especially short, engaging video content that demonstrates value and can capture their attention. They also prioritize self-service options, with nearly half of all business purchases from younger buyers (GenZ and Millennials) being done this way.

Millennials (1981-1996)

Like Gen Z, Millennials are digital natives but they also value personal connections. They are established in their careers, and like Gen Z, they prefer a self-guided sales process. Gartner studies reveal 44% of millennials prefer no sales rep interaction at all in a B2B setting. They prefer convenience and immediacy. Social media and digital advertising also lead the way with this group and are the customer acquisition channels rated as most successful.

Generation X (1965-1980)

This group of experienced professionals can often be found in decision-making roles. Gen X values efficiency, practicality and straightforward communication. Personalized direct emails and LinkedIn messages can be effective with them as well as educational content that offers practical insights and actionable advice. Additionally, this group values learning and professional development, and may be more likely to emphasize in-person channels like live events.

Baby Boomers (1946-1964)

Baby Boomers often have extensive professional experience and deep industry knowledge, with many holding key decision-making roles in organizations. They appreciate direct and personal communication, often preferring face-to-face interactions or phone calls. Baby Boomers may respond well to personalized, well-crafted email campaigns that provide well-researched information.

Where to Start

Your journey to more effective engagement across your customer acquisition strategies starts with understanding who your prospects are – including their age groups and many other characteristics. We recommend creating an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) before you launch into an acquisition program. Your ICP will define the type of company or customer your business wants to target. From there, as you go about identifying prospects that map to your ICP, you’ll need contact data to fuel your campaigns.

In spite of what many people believe, no matter how much first-party contact data a business has, it’s never enough to make a significant impact on new customer acquisition. That’s why high-quality third-party data and the scale, depth, and accuracy it brings to the table is so valuable.

When sourcing third-party data to fuel your acquisition campaigns, look for a provider that will work with you to build custom audiences that align tightly with your ICP. Also make sure they offer licensed data so that they can update it for you on an ongoing basis. Fresh, high-quality contact data may be the most important driver of ROI for your campaigns.

At OMI, we license our B2B Living File® data – consisting of 144MM+ manager-, director-, and professional-level and above contacts with email/HEM, social URL, and other attributes.

B2B2C for Improved Personalization

Beyond generational characteristics, today more brands are incorporating both B2B and B2C attributes into their customer acquisition data sets to achieve a more complete view of the prospect's profile. This involves matching personal contact data to B2B data to power improved marketing resolution and more personalized campaigns. The B2B2C data remains anonymized at the execution interface, which is also ideal when building DIY identity graphs – another marketing trend.

OMI is advancing our data capabilities around B2B2C convergence. We have achieved a 61% match of our B2B contacts to B2C data, including residential addresses and personal emails. This is an exceptional match rate that our clients are already benefiting from (check out this recent case study).

One More Tip

When it comes to tailoring your approach by generation, being aware of differences is important but keep in mind that these are generalizations and won’t apply to every prospect. Ultimately, embracing a holistic approach that is mindful of the differences while remaining adaptable to the ever-changing landscape will set you up for success.

Reach out to our team for assistance with your customer acquisition strategies.

Intent data is one area where marketers see real value, especially for customer acquisition, which is our domain at OMI. Speaking from experience, I've seen how intent data can significantly impact lead gen, ABM, personalization, and other areas of sales and marketing – and Forrester agrees. A recent study from the research firm indicates that 85% of companies using intent data report achieving business benefits, and DemandGen Report says that as many as 65% of B2B companies in a recent poll plan to invest more in intent data.

What’s driving the increased interest and the results? These nine tips, best practices, and strategies for success will show you what intent data can do:

• How It Works: Potential customers actively search for solutions to their challenges every day—browsing online, reading articles, downloading white papers. This online behavior reveals your prospects' intentions to buy a product or service. Intent monitoring tools track the behavior, enabling you to find those potential customers even before they find you and your solution.

• Marketing Benefits: From a marketing perspective, intent data aids in identifying early opportunities and drives more effective lead scoring. It distinguishes serious buyers actively researching solutions from those just doing "window shopping” by identifying the prospects most ready and most likely to buy. This allows marketers to focus their efforts on high-potential leads. As a result, it enables more targeted marketing efforts and more efficient use of advertising budgets.

• How Our Clients Use It: At OMI, our intent data is used by clients for:

• Campaign analysis
• Programmatic ad campaigns, where our data is tied to IDs
• Social and email marketing, using HEMS
• Postal delivery and geolocation: All data is CASS (Coding Accuracy Support System) certified and verified with the NCOA (National Change of Address) database  

• Unification of B2B and B2C: When working with intent data, tracking the “universal person” is critical. This means knowing who they are from both a personal and a professional perspective. By linking the interest paths of the individual as both a consumer and business professional, you gain a more complete view of your prospect, which improves targeting and personalization. All intent signals are uncovered anonymously, based on web search behavior at the contact ID level.