Inboxes are full, and attention spans are shrinking. Is your customer email going to break through the noise? 

Technology is always marching forward, and once again, a new leap is advancing consumer insights. Marketers are increasingly able to tie together fragmented data customer points across the digital footprint and execute highly targeted campaigns–and, without compromising privacy.

It’s called identity graphing and it’s a powerful tool for connecting the dots between all the different buckets of consumer data. To get a better sense of how it provides marketers with an integrated view of consumers’ digital identities, let’s look at some of its most impactful and practical applications. 

Why Identity Graphing Matters in Marketing

Today’s consumer interacts with brands through numerous touchpoints, both online and offline. They leave digital footprints across devices and channels, making it difficult for marketers to see the big picture of their interactions. Getting a unified view and making strategic choices comes down to the ability to create a cohesive picture from scattered identifiers like IP addresses, cookies, and device IDs.

B2E’s identity graph solution, MotusAudiences Connect, is powered by the comprehensive Experian database. It offers businesses access to information with incredible reach and scale, to the tune of more than 2.75 billion IDs across 250 million individuals and 126 million households. 

MotusAudiences Connect bridges the gaps marketers previously faced by “resolving” digital identities into a single picture, allowing brands to:

• Enhance targeting precision by crafting personalized campaigns that align with audience behaviors and preferences.
• Improve campaign efficiency by ensuring that marketing messages reach the right individuals, reducing wasted ad spend caused by broad, ineffective targeting.
• Strengthen measurement and attribution by tracking engagement more effectively, attributing conversions to the right campaigns. This helps marketers refine their strategies for even better future outcomes.

Balancing Personalization and Privacy

The data privacy landscape is growing more complicated for marketers who must balance consumers’ often contradictory feelings about data privacy and personalization—along with an evolving set of laws that can vary from state to state. To navigate identity graphing responsibly, a privacy-first approach incorporates several key practices. 

• Using hashed identifiers: Converting personally identifiable information (PII) into anonymized formats helps preserve both security and privacy while still enabling precise targeting.
• Complying with data protection frameworks: Adhering to frameworks such as SOC 2 standards and the California Consumer Protection Act helps maintain industry standard data practices and compliance. 
• Using trust-based principles. It’s important to use an identity graph partner that takes extensive measures to protect the confidentiality and security of consumer data. They should adhere to a values-based approach to data processing that upholds transparency, user consent, and the protection of personally identifiable information.

Using Identity Graphing in Marketing Strategies

It’s growing more difficult for marketers to track and understand customer behavior without an identity resolution strategy. There are so many dots to connect across consumer interactions such as email, social media, mobile apps, in-store visits, and connected devices—and consumers today expect brands to have a sophisticated picture of their behaviors and expectations.

With a more accurate and dynamic view of an audience, marketers can leverage it in a number of impactful ways: 

• Segmentation and customization. Create audience segments based on demographic and behavioral attributes and design more relevant messaging.
• Precise audience expansion. Enrich customer data sets with new IDs for increased reach and scale, while still targeting the appropriate audience members with precision.
• Omnichannel campaigns: Deliver a more seamless experience across email, social media, and digital advertising, improving both engagement and brand consistency.
• Data-driven decisions. Identity-linked campaigns provide more actionable insights enabling marketers to map the customer journey and gain a clearer understanding of what drives conversions.

Use Case: Marketing Agency Serving Multi-Location Companies

To help further illustrate the potential for identity graphing, let’s look at the example of a marketing agency with a heating and cooling business client with business locations across multiple states. The agency’s challenge is to deliver hyper-targeted digital ads for each business location, ensuring the ads reach local homeowners who are most likely to need home services. So, how can they laser target the appropriate targets in every market?

Anonymized customer data from the heating and cooling company can be run through MotusAudiences Connect to be augmented with additional details such as demographic profile, income level, and purchase habits and preferences. This builds a more complete and accurate picture of the home services company’s ideal customer segments.

This information can then be used to create location-specific “lookalike audiences,” to ensure ads target homeowners who fit the ideal profiles. For example, for target customers in older neighborhoods, ads may focus on urgent repair services. Middle-income areas and certain demographics might receive messages about affordable maintenance plans and seasonal promotions. Ads directed at target audiences with more disposable income might emphasize premium service offerings and energy-efficient upgrades.

Embracing Identity Graphing Techniques

The digital landscape is always expanding, but it still remains a largely disjointed arena. Identity graphing offers a way for businesses to synthesize all the different data points and stay more closely in tune with customers. It provides a major competitive advantage to any businesses interested in staying a step ahead. 

With an assist from identity graphing, it’s more obvious how to anticipate customer needs, deliver the right message at the perfect moment, and maximize the impact of every campaign. Could you do more with identity-driven insights? For more detailed information about B2E’s identity graphing solution MotusAudiences Connect, schedule a meeting with us! 

 

What’s one piece of information that will immediately improve audience engagement and conversion rates? 

Heard of intent signals?

Intent signals are information that helps marketers understand what potential customers are actively researching, comparing, or engaging with online. It goes beyond traditional targeting methods to focus on the prospects who are already demonstrating interest a company’s offerings. 

So, what are intent signals, and how can marketers use them?

Decoding Intent Signals

Intent signals are real-time, online data points that indicate a prospect’s interest in a particular product, service, or industry. These signals come from various sources, including:

• Website visits and content engagement
• Search queries and keyword activity
• Whitepaper downloads and webinar registrations
• Product comparisons and pricing page views
• Social media interactions and discussion trends

By aggregating and analyzing these signals, marketers can identify high-intent prospects. Then, through personalized digital ads, intent signals make it possible to engage buyers at just the right moment in their decision-making journey.

Intent Signals in Modern Marketing

Traditional marketing has relied on broad demographic data. While useful, static datasets don’t reveal real-time buying intent. Intent signals, on the other hand, can provide dynamic, behavior-based insights.  This means marketers can:

• Prioritize leads by identifying those who are actively researching relevant solutions.
• Refine targeting strategies by focusing on prospects who are already in-market.
• Improve personalization by tailoring messages based on what buyers are actually interested in.
• Increase conversion rates and performance metrics by engaging potential customers when they are closest to making a decision.

Enhancing Consumer Targeting with Intent Data

Precision targeting is key in consumer marketing, and intent data helps refine this approach by identifying individuals actively researching products or services. By analyzing which consumers are searching for specific items, reading reviews, or engaging with competitor brands, marketers can:

• Deliver highly relevant ads and content tailored to consumer interests.
• Personalize outreach through digital channels based on real-time behaviors.
• Optimize marketing spend by focusing on consumers showing strong buying intent.

For example, if an HVAC service company sees an increase in searches for "air conditioner repair near me" in a specific geographic area, they can use intent data to serve targeted ads offering service or seasonal maintenance discounts. By proactively addressing consumer needs with timely and relevant messaging, they can capture leads at a moment of high intent and drive more conversions.

Optimizing Digital Advertising Spend

Many marketers struggle with wasted ad spend due to broad, non-specific targeting. Intent signals address this challenge by helping direct ads to receptive audiences at the right time. By strategically integrating intent data into programmatic advertising, marketers can achieve more precise targeting and significantly improve their ROI.  Here's how:

• Strategic bidding.  Intent data identifies prospects demonstrating high engagement with relevant topics, products, or services. So, instead of spreading budget more thinly across a broad audience Marketers can bid more aggressively on these high-potential prospects and increase the chances of their ads being seen by the most qualified leads.
  
  
• Efficient budget allocation.  Intent data also allows marketers to identify and exclude low-intent audiences from their campaigns. This prevents ad resources from being spent on users who have shown little interest in the advertised offerings.  By filtering out irrelevant segments, marketers can free up resources for more effective targeting strategies.
  
  
• Personalized ad experiences. Intent data provides valuable insights into an audience’s recent online activity.  This information can be used to better customize ad creative, tailoring the messaging and visuals to resonate with specific segments. Personalization has been shown to increase engagement, click-through rates, and conversions. Research by McKinsey shows personalization increases marketing ROI by 10 to 30 percent.

To sum it up, intent signals empower marketers to move beyond guesswork and make data-driven decisions about their advertising spend.  

Best Practices for Leveraging Intent Data Effectively

Intent data stands out as a powerful tool for understanding and predicting consumer behavior. By analyzing the behavioral signals that point to actual interest in a product or service, businesses can refine their marketing strategies to dramatically improve engagement. The following best practices can help to maximize the impact of intent data:

• Integrate intent data with first-party insights. Combining intent signals with first-party data—such as customer records, email engagement, or past customer interactions—provides a more complete view of potential buyers. First-party data can help businesses tailor their marketing efforts based on both current behaviors and historical customer data.
  
  
• Combine AI-driven insights with human intelligence. While AI-powered analytics can identify patterns and trends within intent data, human judgment still plays an important role. Marketers should validate insights to make sure outreach and messaging are relevant and contextually appropriate.
  
  
• Segment for more targeted engagement. Not all intent signals indicate the same level of interest. Businesses can score behaviors and prioritize leads based on determined high-value signals to help allocate marketing resources even more effectively.
  
  
• Prioritize privacy and compliance. With evolving data privacy regulations and sentiments, businesses must always ensure proper data handling. Adhering to best practices for data protection, transparency, and ethical use of consumer information helps maintain trust while leveraging insights.

Working with a data marketing partner that understands how to use intent data effectively and safely, marketers can run more effective marketing campaigns and build customer relationships that grow stronger and more mutually beneficial.

Marketing With Intent

Intent data will continue grow more sophisticated, predictive, and actionable. Businesses that embrace intent insights will build their competitive edge by engaging with current and potential customers with new levels of relevance and precision.

If your company is ready to market with more intent, MotusIP Intent will help you embrace the power of personalization and timing. Schedule a meeting to learn more!