Harnessing Intent Data: How to Drive Effective B2B Campaigns
Riaz Kanani, CEO and founder of Radiate B2B returns to the podcast to discuss the evolving landscape of B2B marketing. Mike and Riaz explore the shift in buyer behaviour, the rise of account-based marketing (ABM), and the importance of intent data in driving effective campaigns.
Riaz shares insights on common mistakes in ABM strategies and highlights the role of AI in shaping the future of marketing.
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About Radiate B2B
Radiate B2B is a B2B advertising and intent data platform that helps companies reach their prospects at the right time, in the right place and with the right message. Radiate B2B has been nominated for Emerging Martech Vendor and UK Martech vendor of the year by B2B Marketing.
About Riaz Kanani
Riaz is the founder and CEO of Radiate B2B. Riaz has a history of building and scaling successful businesses and has been nominated for Entrepreneur of the Year multiple times. He is listed as a Top 25 global account based marketing thought leader by B2B Marketing and one of the Top Asian Stars in UK Tech by Diversity UK.
He built one of the world’s largest video advertising networks and after exiting to Silverpop, scaled their presence internationally. Silverpop helped to set out the best practice for B2B marketing a decade ago and was a leader in B2B marketing automation and content marketing before exiting to IBM to create its marketing cloud platform.
He has sat on the DMA email marketing council helping to set best practice for the email marketing industry, judge its awards and help shape data privacy and the use of data in the UK and Europe. He regularly writes and speaks on the BBC and elsewhere on the intersection between marketing, business and technology, its best practice and future trends.
Time Stamps
00:00:18 – Guest Introduction: Riaz Kanani
00:01:50 – The Shift in B2B Buyer Behavior
00:03:09 – Evolution of Account-Based Marketing (ABM)
00:06:34 – Common Mistakes in ABM Campaigns
00:09:07 – The Role of Intent Data in Marketing
00:15:22 – Customer Success Stories with Radiate B2B
00:19:20 – Using Radiate B2B for Internal Marketing
00:20:42 – Future of MarTech and AI Integration
00:23:00 – Final Thoughts on ABM and Marketing Trends
00:23:19 – Best Marketing Advice Received
00:24:16 – Advice for Aspiring Marketers
00:25:23 – Conclusion and Invitation for Future Discussions
Quotes
“By the time they reach your website to convert, 70-80% of those companies have already shortlisted who they want to buy from.” Riaz Kanani, CEO and Founder at Radiate B2B.
“If you don’t have a level of insight which tells you whether they’re coming into market or they’re in market, then there’s a very high likelihood that project is going to fail.” Riaz Kanani, CEO and Founder at Radiate B2B.
“Intent data is merely a signal that attention is being given to a particular problem or area.” Riaz Kanani, CEO and Founder at Radiate B2B.
Follow Riaz:
Riaz Kanani on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/riazkanani/
Radiate B2B website: https://radiateb2b.com/
Radiate B2B on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/radiateb2b/
Follow Mike:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
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Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast – The Marketing Automation Moment: https://podcasts.apple.com/ua/podcast/the-marketing-automation-moment-podcast/id1659211547
Transcript: Interview with Riaz Kanani at Radiate B2B
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Riaz Kanani
Mike: Thanks for listening to Marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today.
Welcome to Marketing B2B Technology, the podcast from Napier. Today, I’m joined by Riaz Kanani. Riaz is actually a returning guest. He’s the CEO and founder of Radiate B2B, and this is his second appearance on the podcast. Welcome to the podcast again, Riaz.
Riaz: Hey, great to be here. Great to be here. Thanks for the invite.
Mike: It’s great to have you on the podcast again. I mean, we’ve talked before, but I think it’d be a really good idea if you could just refresh the listeners’ memories about your career and why you decided to found Radiate B2B.
Riaz: Yeah, so shocking, I think I’ve now spent 25 years in the Martech Strike Agency world, building various cutting-edge platforms, usually using data. And about seven years ago, we started Radiate with this idea that the way B2B buyers were buying was changing. There was a generational shift where more and more of the research was happening away from your website rather than on your website. And research last year suggested that actually even by the time they reach your website to convert and stick their hand up, 70-80% of those companies have already shortlisted who they want to buy from. And because of that, we started to develop and focus on what can we do outside of the website. And that’s our view on the world, is helping marketers get out in front of companies before they come to your website.
Mike: And that’s really interesting. I mean, you’re trying to actually, you know, raise awareness prior to the website. So, I mean, what you’re doing is a lot of effectively outbound marketing, going out and trying to reach prospects. Is that how you summarize it? And why do you feel it needed a different approach?
Riaz: Well, a lot of the B2B world back then, even a large amount of it today, when you’re thinking about outreach beyond the sort of direct response outreach of email, you’re predominantly talking about large-scale advertising, social media advertising, sponsorship, those sorts of things, and the challenge with that is it’s very broad. For most B2B companies, they don’t actually want that day one. They want to be able to target their particular niche, and they want to be able to know who they’ve targeted. And all the solutions I talked about just now don’t serve that at all. And the big growth area in B2B marketing in recent years has been account-based marketing, which is this very idea of identifying and nurturing specific companies through to close, not just one by one as it was traditionally, but going right the way up to hundreds or even low thousands today.
Mike: And, I mean, account-based marketing obviously is where a lot of B2B companies start when they’re really trying to focus down. But there’s been a lot of things happen in ABM in terms of new tools, new entrants. I mean, how do you see the whole ABM world changing over the last couple of years? Do you think it’s been dramatic? Or do you think there’s just a lot more people piling in with similar tools?
Riaz: Yeah, I think what we’ve seen is that classic product life cycle curve of very strong early adoption. I think in the last couple of years, 22, 24, we were basically crossing the chasm. And we’ve come out of that chasm now to a different type of market. What the big shift seems to be now within the ABM space, it’s twofold. And twofold in the sense of looking at two sides of the market, really. So on the one hand, we’re seeing the early adopters of ABM really integrated into their wider demand generation programs. And so the ABM techniques are now becoming a part of a much bigger, broader B2B market, which is great. It means that effectively ABM is now part of your standard set of tools that you go to market with. But the other big change is the expansion of ABM across the marketplace. So it’s no longer your larger enterprise companies who can afford the big all-in-one platforms going after enterprise. It’s now smaller point solutions whereby smaller mid-sized companies are able to just take what they want. and implement those parts of it piecemeal, if you like. And obviously that’s where we’re coming in as well with our focus on intent data and the company-targeted advertising piece of the puzzle.
Mike: That makes sense. And I want to drill down into what Radiate does in a minute. But, you know, I’m intrigued by the fact that ABM is still being adopted by that midsize company audience. I mean, what really do you think held people back? Was it just the cost of the tools? Or was it complexity, the time required, the expertise? What were the big barriers? So certainly the cost of the tools was one part, but you didn’t need
Riaz: tools to do ABM. The tools support the program rather than make the program, if that makes sense. And so the biggest couple of summing blocks is partly the definition of ABM. We dropped ABM as a phrase from our go-to-market activity a long time ago. and are much more focused on, well, actually, what are we doing to your target audience that’s helping you as a business, right? What does it do to your pipeline? What does it do to awareness? Those types of messaging. Because of the confusion around the definition of ABM, I think the market has got to a point whereby it doesn’t matter what the definition of ABM is now. The techniques that are sitting underneath it are well understood. And companies are coming at it from the perspective, well, I want to do X. And the fact that X happens to be inside ABM doesn’t matter anymore. And I think that’s why we’re seeing much bigger adoption.
Mike: That’s interesting. I mean, obviously, it’s difficult. And I think a lot of marketers are approaching ABM, and they are uncertain about what does ABM mean? Does it matter to them? I mean, what mistakes do marketers make when they say, we’re going to start an ABM campaign, or we’re going to run an ABM campaign? And how can they be doing it better? There’s a bunch of things, right?
Riaz: So first and foremost, understanding who you want to target. is the first big, big hurdle to get over. You have to remember that in any one moment in time, a small percentage of your market is in market. If you take the research, it’s 5%. Now, if that’s the case and you are taking, let’s say, 100 or 200 companies, which is often the number that gets settled on, sometimes it’s smaller, 50, sometimes it’s a bit bigger, but regardless, it’s a small percentage of your overall market. And the problem with that is if you don’t have a level of insight which tells you whether they’re coming into market or they’re in market, then there’s a very high likelihood, just from basic maths, that that project is going to fail. because the chances are those companies are not in market and they’re not going to react. Until they’re in market, all you’re doing is building brand awareness, which, let’s face it, if all we wanted to do was to build brand awareness, we’d just do a big, broad-scale brand campaign. No need for the ABM side. So that’s the first big, big thing. And then the second thing after that is really about caring about your data. Just like with AI, if you’re running an ABM program and the companies that you’re targeting have the wrong associated data with it, then you may think you’re targeting Coca-Cola but actually you’re targeting some random company elsewhere in the world. So knowing and being on top of your data is also key. And then the last one is relatively new and I think it reflects the maturity of the market as you get over those first two hurdles really. is actually understanding your market in the first place. So a lot of ICP, Ideal Customer Profiles, consist of very broad criteria like industry X, companies of certain size or certain revenue. in a certain industry type stuff and that is very broad and doesn’t really address actually the problems that you’re trying to solve within your marketplace and you want to be able to narrow it down to the problems that you’re solving and the solutions that you’re offering and then segment based on that.
Mike: That’s really good advice. I mean, I love the understanding the market, particularly, and solving problems rather than targeting a demographic. I think that’s really helpful. We’ve skirted around the issue of intent data. I mean, obviously, Radiate B2B is an intent platform. So people, again, have different views of what intent data is and how you use it. So do you want to give us the Radiate view of what intent data is and maybe talk about how people can use some of the data that you provide to them?
Riaz: Yeah, so our intent data powers advertising first and foremost, and there’s a reason why we started there. Intent data was seen as this silver bullet, this idea that you can identify this company that’s in market, and they’re definitively in market, and they’re going to be interested in talking to you. Neither of those statements is true. The reality is that intent data is merely a signal. that attention is being given to a particular problem or area. So that’s the first thing. They could be researching because something’s grabbed their attention, and they don’t know they have a problem, and they’re still at that very, very early phase. And then they may get to understanding that problem and think, well, that’s not a priority for us. Well, no matter what you do, you’re not going to get in front of those companies. But they will be identified as having intent. Likewise with wanting to talk to you, We’re data guys. We track and measure everything. And one of the things that we were able to do was to see a picture across market and see some companies’ pipelines across market. And we were watching to see how different companies engaged with potential buyers. One company’s got very good brand awareness, very good relationships. The other company has very minimal brand awareness, and in this particular case had very little relationships in this specific area. We were advertising to the intent data, same list, across two different companies. One company was getting a 3x increase in response rate. The other company was not getting very much at all. The reason for that was because When companies are going to be interested in talking to you, they need to have some context about who you are. They need to understand why they should talk to you versus why they should talk to somebody else. That may mean that you need to be spending, you know, in the case of the second company who wasn’t getting much responses, basically we got over that problem. by a much longer-term program of investing in greater brand awareness, basically introducing why they were a strong player in the market to be listened to. And once we did that, we started to see the metrics grow accordingly. Unsurprising, really. But it is that understanding of context and how to use intent data. The other thing that we do, which I gloss over, is we don’t rely on one source for intent data. We collect intent data from the most obvious ones, like browsing across the internet. also first party by looking at what activity is happening on your website. But then we also pull in advertising data from LinkedIn or from the display to look at which companies are engaging. If you think about display, display is a brand-led platform. You really don’t run display campaigns to do lead generation. You do it to build your brand as cheaply as you possibly can, really. So when companies do engage, with your display advertising, that’s a really big indicator that they are interested in this topic. And we found that was the earliest indicator of intent because we don’t need to process tons of data, third parties aren’t processing tons of data to get to the idea that they’re showing signal based on their browsing activity.
Mike: I mean, there’s a lot to unpack there. But I think the first thing to say is, it’s really interesting. Brand is cool again. It is, isn’t it? I mean, Google a few years ago released some data that said that businesses that did display brand advertising got better results on search ads. And everyone was like, wow. Oh, that’s unbelievable. And then moved on and just ran search ads. But now I think what you’re saying is really true. There’s no magic bullets here. You’ve got to build a combined campaign. And to me, that’s interesting, because what you’re saying is you have to go beyond just using that intent data, and you have to also build a platform. And is that something that you offer with Radiate B2B, or are you purely intent-driven? We absolutely do.
Riaz: So we really solve for ABM advertising programs, so taking your ABM list and targeting them specifically with advertising across display and LinkedIn. And then on the other side, powering those advertising campaigns with the intent data. as well, so that you don’t need to be worrying about manually, I mean if you think about it, if you’re taking a list of companies every single week and then having to manage that into an advertising campaign, that’s a bit of a nightmare, as well as the fact that companies will drop in and drop out of showing intent and we take away all of that. We basically enforce management of the campaign so that a company will see ads for a minimum period of time so you know they’ll have seen enough ads to be able to recall your brand basically.
Mike: And I’m interested, are there industries where the kind of intent data you generate is more effective? I mean, I know if you look at, some people generate intent from social, what’s being discussed on social. If you’re targeting defense technology companies, they don’t generally talk about what they’re developing on social media, mainly because anyone who’s done that has been locked up for breach of secrets act. So I’m intrigued, are there, with your method, because you’re monitoring engagement, Are there industries where you get better results, or is it pretty much equal across all industries?
Riaz: Yeah, so, I mean, generically, it’s companies that are selling to enterprise. That’s the first sort of tier, if you like. And generally speaking, that’s where we’re going to be adding the most value. Sure, if you’re a defence company, I’m not sure you’d buy advertising anyway. Your target market is quite small, and there isn’t a need for it. But the reality is that we as marketers cannot track every single individual on the planet, technically it’s possible. I’m pretty sure most of us will agree that’s not a good place for us to be where we’re tracking how people behave and act at an individual level. So everything we’re doing is at a company level and location. What that means is you have to have a targeted persona. So you need to know that your persona is definable as at least a function.
Mike: That makes sense. So you need, you know, fairly large organisations to reach but very specific targets. I mean, do you have some examples of how some of your customers have actually used the platform to run great campaigns?
Riaz: Yeah, it’s… So the intent-powered campaigns are my favourite because it’s so easy to show uplift in performance. We run campaigns with one particular company, it’s a mid-sized marketing agency, actually. In North America, they were targeting big enterprise, very big enterprise. Their A-list of companies, their ABM list of companies was doing well, in the sense that, and we’ll see this typically, it’s interesting how consistent this is, 20 to 30% of companies that you target, assuming you’re targeting at least 100 companies, will engage either directly or indirectly with your campaign each quarter, so over three months. With an intent-driven campaign, it’s 3x the performance. So you’ll typically see 20 to 30% of companies engage within a month. So three times faster. Overall, I’d normally say two to three times faster, but for this example, it was three times faster. And also, they’re more likely to click. So whereas a campaign that’s targeting an ABM list, what we’ll see is companies come in directly to the website. 60, 40, 70, 30 in favor of coming in directly. With an intent campaign, we’ll see two, two and a half X uplift in click rates. So dramatic changes. Another one, actually this builds on your point about Google and showing search uplift. We had one of those amazing clients that tracks everything, every channel, impact by us across all those channels, and so we were able to watch and see Uplift at every stage of the pipeline. and how their email marketing saw an uplift. Their search advertising saw a 20-something, 28 I think it was, percent uplift post our campaign or during our campaign running for them. And anyone who knows about advertising knows that when you run advertising campaigns, it has a knock-on effect on every other channel, just because you have a couple of factors. Recency, recall, right? So if you recognize a brand, you’ll pay it slightly more attention. Because you’re giving it slightly more attention, you are slightly more likely to click through because it’s of interest to you. And so there’s that knock-on effect right the way through. So yeah, so there’s those sorts of things that just help with driving pipelines.
Mike: That’s really interesting. And I mean, I guess you use the platform to market Radiate as well. So are there some stories of how you’ve used it and seen benefits from the platform?
Riaz: Yeah. I mean, we use it, obviously, daily. It is actually really difficult for us to use it, because our target market is small to medium-sized companies. So the top end of our target market fits into this idea of selling to larger companies. But we build the platform for companies who sell primarily to large companies, not companies like ourselves. But it does work for even that small slice of our target market. And so we do display advertising. It’s automatically targeting companies showing intent. We push the data into LinkedIn to target within LinkedIn. And we use the, I use the intent data that we generate. We sync it into HubSpot. So HubSpot’s our sort of center of all data. And we push the data into there, and then I use that to then take action. We’re primarily a social selling house. We don’t do very much outbound email at all, so not cold anyway.
Mike: That’s fascinating. I’d like to pivot a bit and look at the future. I mean, we’ve talked a bit about, you know, what’s changed and what people are doing today and what works today. But, I mean, technology is changing all the time, particularly in marketing. I mean, what do you think is going to be the biggest changes in MarTech over the next, you know, five years? And what are you doing at Radi8 to prepare for it?
Riaz: So I’m hoping, I’m going to put my head on the chopping block and say that by the time this podcast goes live, we will have announced our first piece of technology, which I think is an indicator of where the world is going to go with AI. AI is obviously going to change everything in marketing. Marketing, fundamentally, is about putting the right message in the right place at the right time. All the marketing boils down to that, really. There’s a lot of stuff outside of it, but it’s what it boils down to. And AI is going to change the way where people are. It’s going to change the types of messaging they want to receive. And timing is an interesting one. But we are building an interface that’s going to allow you to take your AI, not our AI, your AI, and use it to advise on, in our case, the intent data. and also the advertising campaigns that you’re doing. And so with our clients, each week I sit down and review our clients’ campaigns and feedback to our clients as to what we should be thinking about next. strategically, and that could be new tests, it could be gaps that we’ve got in the campaigns, it could be the entire framework, upgrading the entire framework. The AI can advise on all of that already. Fundamentally all I’m doing is taking the data, analyzing the data, and then pointing out what the data shows, and AI is very good at doing that. So that’s going to change from a marketer standpoint. From the person being marketed to standpoint, I mean, I think we end up with AI on our phones. I’m not sure I’m particularly keen on the idea, but I suppose it’s not that different to everybody being glued to their phones with their heads down while walking, but I suspect we’ll end up with earpieces. constantly in our head with the ability to talk back and forth to an AI and that’s both amazing and terrifying at the same time.
Mike: I think we have to leave the discussion about ABM and the future on that amazing but terrifying point. Before you go, Riaz, we always like to ask a couple of general questions. So the first one is, what’s the best piece of marketing advice someone else has given you?
Riaz: You know, I come back to this over and over again because I love it. I think it’s illustrative of everything we have to do in marketing. And it’s Ogilvy’s quote about you never know which 50% of your spend is actually performing. I love that because at the end of the day, we will never have enough information to know. Attribution was always a farce. We all knew it. It just gave us a little bit of a glimpse into what’s working. And it’s only going to get harder. I don’t see that getting any better in the sense of giving marketers insight. We’re going to always be playing. in the dark a little bit, and we’re having to test and try things and be bold. And yeah, that’s the point.
Mike: I love that. It’s amazing. Second question we ask is, if you’re talking to someone who’s about to start their career in marketing, what advice would you give them?
Riaz: I think there’s never been a more exciting time to become a marketer. It’s also potentially the easiest time to be a marketer. You can create a blog, you can create a fan page, create a YouTube channel, any number of things that you couldn’t do 20 years ago at all. And so you can hone and practice your marketing before you even graduate from high school. So there’s that element of it. You can play in the world of marketing without ever going and applying to be a marketer for somebody else sort of thing, which is great and allows you to understand whether you want to be a marketer in the first place I think. But the second thing I’d say is the last 10, 20 years, change has been constant. Change will continue to happen all the time. And I think if anything, there’s greater opportunity as a marketer in the next 10 years to do something amazing for your company than there was in the last 10 years.
Mike: That’s such a positive way to end up. I love that. Riaz, I mean, you’ve proven that you’ve got so many interesting insights, you know, second time on the podcast. And still it’s brilliant. I think I got maybe a third of the way through my questions. So we’ll have to look for a third, another return to the podcast. Riaz, it’s been really good. Thank you very much for being on the podcast. Really great to be here. Enjoyed the conversation. And yeah, always happy to come back again. Thanks so much for listening to Marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes or on your favorite podcast application. If you’d like to know more, please visit our website at napierb2b.com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
