At a masquerade ball, the attendees wear masks to conceal their identity. The masks enhance the fun by allowing guests to freely act and speak without being recognized and avoid being judged by their status or appearance while mingling or dancing. Guests can choose to reveal their identity at any time to anyone if they feel it would add to the entertainment.

When the identity of a B2B buyer is concealed at the moment of a digital interaction, the results don’t come with the fun of a masquerade ball. Failing to recognize individuals who expect a degree of relevancy through various B2B contexts such as website visits, social media interactions, and web browsing can cause poor targeting, irrelevant messaging, and disjointed tactic sequences.

According to the Forrester Analytics Business Technographics® Marketing Survey, 2020, 76% of B2B marketers report that it takes five or more interactions for a lead or an opportunity to reach a sales-qualified status. Staying relevant across multiple touchpoints is a critical challenge in B2B marketing.

But as much as B2B buyers value relevant experiences, they also value security and privacy. Buyer attitudes toward respect and relevance may vary widely depending on digital context. Lack of understanding of people’s preferences across contexts can be frustrating for buyers and counterproductive to buyer enablement, as well as result in significant inefficiency and increased costs when paid delivery mechanisms (e.g., content syndication, advertising) are irrelevant or inappropriate and fail to develop the relationship.

Defining specific types of digital audiences allows marketers to plan and deliver more respectful and relevant digital experiences at scale using the available information at the moment of each interaction. B2B marketers can use digital audience types in the digital experience technology stack and program planning to align programs with their digital tactics and respective audiences. Digital audience types also must align to the target audiences previously established by portfolio marketing.

Our new report “Introducing The B2B Digital Audience Framework” identifies and defines five types of highly useful B2B digital audiences: provisional, algorithmic, account based, persona based, and buying group. Read the report and schedule an analyst inquiry to learn more!