Modern digital advertising can feel a lot like trying to speak to a stadium full of people from center field without a microphone. Your message is mostly drowned out by tons of noise from competitors. And without accurate targeting, it can be wasted on an audience that isn’t interested.
There’s one main reason for this — your current audience data isn’t good enough.
Here’s why your audience data might be falling short:
- It’s inaccurate
- It’s outdated
- It’s too heavily modeled
“No marketer wants to spend a single penny trying to reach somebody that’s never going to buy their product. Feeding targeted audiences at the top of your funnel is gold because they are cultivated from filters that are defined by your company’s ideal customer profile. So at the end of the day, the audience is your buyer,” says Jim Donovan, vice president of sales at ZoomInfo.
Many marketers have shifted their strategies toward programmatic advertising to improve their digital marketing performance.
As programmatic budgets grow, the demand for accurate data increases
As the market changes to accommodate improvements and optimizations, advertisers are starting to demand better, more trustworthy data to support their campaigns.
According to research from eMarketer, programmatic budgets have been growing steadily in the US every year since 2019.
However, with this increase, advertisers are also experiencing dissatisfaction with the data they rely on. According to eMarketer, 80 percent of advertisers admit that third-party data is unreliable.
To understand this problem, we start with the data landscape.
The data landscape
First-party data is collected directly on your website or through your digital channels. It’s considered the most reliable. Sources of first-party data include:
- Website or application actions that demonstrate an interest in your product, such as form fills or CTA clicks.
- Customer relationship management (CRM) platforms
- Subscription data
- Social media data
Second-party data is similar to first-party data but is acquired from another organization.
Third-party data is collected from various sources and sold as a package by data management platforms (DMPs).
Here’s how these three types of data compare based on accuracy, transparency, scale, and performance:
It’s never enough for advertisers to use just one type of data. Gaps consistently lead to struggles sourcing high-quality, complete, B2B audience data at scale. And off-the-shelf B2B audience files are often either incomplete, inaccurate, outdated — or all three.
The lack of quality control leads to low match rates, targeting the wrong audience, or the right audience at the wrong time.
The next chapter in targeted audience data
Realizing the gaps in each type of data led us to develop an innovative solution — ZoomInfo’s targeted audience data.
“ZoomInfo Targeted Audiences take what our customers are already identifying on our platform as good-fit contacts. It strips away all Personally Identifiable Information, and turns this data into a digitized asset in an S3 file format, which can then be utilized for advertising to any destination, whether it’s LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, or for a straightforward display media campaign,” Donovan says.
The improvements to the ZoomInfo database are driven by our acquisition of Clickagy — an AI-powered, behavioral, and intent audience data provider. The enhancements created by adding data from Clickagy have resulted in:
- 91 percent monthly coverage of accessible internet contacts in the US
- 1.5 billion unique, targetable monthly cookies in the US
- 30 billion page visits observed monthly
ZoomInfo Targeted Audiences offers advertisers accurate, transparent, scalable, and high-performing data. The ZoomInfo data cloud provides unprecedented reach to advertisers via the world’s most comprehensive B2B database, made up of:
- Over 500 million direct phones and email addresses
- Over 95 million company profiles
- Over 1.6 billion records, updated daily
- Better match rates compared to other data management platforms
- More than 300 custom attributes per record
ZoomInfo Targeted Audiences is the only solution that enables advertisers to tap into our best-in-class B2B data cloud, offering a 360-degree view of prospects and more flexibility for digital marketing than ever before.
A more accurate, scalable approach
Instead of shouting in a crowded stadium, ZoomInfo Targeted Audiences is designed to help you find the prospects you want to reach in their specific rows and seats, and invite them to your luxury box for a personalized conversation.
We offer industry-leading options for targeting, from company firmographics to intent to online behaviors. Our innovative solution is mindful of privacy regulations and future-proofs your data strategy so you don’t have to continuously rethink it and lose economies of scale.
Our audience applications range from B2B and B2C use cases with audiences that are based on behavioral device usage or corporate and contact information.
Behavioral
This is a set of devices identified by observing your audience’s online browsing and purchasing behaviors, allowing you to create relevant ads based on the users’ habits and interests.
Targeted
This is a set of devices identified based on demographic, firmographic, or technographic attributes such as company, job title, funding, or the use of a particular technology.
Retargeting
This is a set of devices identified by monitoring activity on your website. According to MailChimp, 97 percent of people who visit websites for the first time leave without buying anything. Retargeting data lets marketers capture the people who have become aware of them.
Privacy clusters, an innovative approach to targeting audiences
One of the most innovative aspects of ZoomInfo Audiences is our creation of privacy clusters. A privacy cluster is a micro-grouping of approximately three to eight devices bound together to act as a single, trackable, and targetable entity. They preserve individual privacy by tracking observed behaviors and activations across the entire cluster rather than on a single device.
As a result, privacy clusters allow advertisers to have better targeting accuracy than simply contextual data or other broader mediums can offer. Additionally, privacy clusters are GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, and COPPA compliant.
“The most powerful thing that sets ZoomInfo targeted audiences apart from others in the space is the sheer volume of data we have. We have a massive infrastructure that enables us to crawl the entire Internet, billions of web pages, and millions upon millions of social posts. We are the only ones able to observe audience behavior agnostic of their device type,” Donovan says.
See targeted audience data in action
Whether you are a digital marketing agency, running marketing and demand generation campaigns, or a digital publisher, solid audience data is the surest way of cutting through the noise in today’s crowded advertising space. Schedule a meeting with one of our experts to build your Targeted Audience today.