One of the things that I've come to believe quite deeply over the past 18 months is that much of the marketing industry is built on voodoo And not just fringe advice. Like many of the globally accepted truths like:
Your segmentation should be really specific You should target ads based on buyer intent You should be able to measure your marketing activity directly While I've been talking about how these things must be wrong for a long time, I couldn't prove any of it without sounding like a conspiracy theorist But a new academic study (thanks for pointing it out to me Mariya) provides at least some reassurance that the people who have believed off the shelf segments like 'IT Decision Maker' are completely pointless aren't, in fact, unhinged The study took datasets from 5 of the 10 most popular data brokers in the US (although not named specifically, it's the Bombora, LiveRamp, DemandScience kind of companies). And here's what they found: In this paper we show that in our context, such ‘off-the-shelf’ segments perform no better at reaching the right person than random prospecting
YIIIIIIIIKES If you've based your campaigns on datasets that target IT Decision Makers – and this is extremely common practice in B2B SaaS in particular – then you may as well have thrown a dart at a dart board instead Literally. Not hyperbole You would have a better chance of success in reaching your target customer with your marketing by throwing a dart at a board of potential prospects than using third party targeting That's such a damning finding. And here's an even more quantifiable one: According to the study, "over 83.5% of respondents have no IT product or purchase responsibilities as indicated by our three measured questions." | 