For B-to-B marketers, a frequent barrier to unlocking the value of data is the divide between B-to-B and B2C data dimensions. The disconnect between these two halves of a person’s life makes it difficult for even the most data savvy brands to bring to life the full promise of personalized addressable marketing.

“Almost” Doesn’t Count

Though both business and consumer dimensions are tied to a real-world person, in practice, each exists in distinctly separate siloes that are not easily unified. The root cause of this disconnect is easy to understand; the B-to-B identity paradigm is tied to company names, company terrestrial addresses, and company emails. Conversely, the B-to-C identity paradigm is linked to household terrestrial addresses and personal email addresses. In real-life terms, the information I use to register for a webinar or download a white paper from LinkedIn is different from that which I use to buy household products on Amazon.com, call an Uber, or log-in to Netflix.

What’s Wrong with Vanilla?

Unable to effectively pair existing B-to-B data with B-to-C attributes, B-to-B marketers are left to segment and decision using professional or firmographic data attributes. Traditional business data is confined to the basics — title, job function, industry, company size, and similar B-to-B staples. Acknowledging that quality professional and firmographic data is an absolute prerequisite, it is disconnected from the personal life that describes so much of who a person is. This leaves marketers with a relatively vanilla picture of their target segments, and what differentiates them from one another. But, the marketing industry has overcome similar challenges once before.

For many years, B-to-C Marketers treated individual households within a neighborhood block as one homogenous segment. As marketing evolved, so too did B-to-C data assets which became richer and more granular to keep pace with the rise of addressability. As the availability and selection of data improved, so too did marketing effectiveness. With history as our guide, it’s not hard to imagine the impact of injecting up to a few thousand consumer-centric attributes into a data array.

All that stands between B-to-B marketers and the same evolution is linkage. What if there were a way to connect professionals to a B-to-C identity, enabling a powerful connection to highly descriptive consumer attributes such as preferences, purchases, demographics, and financials?

The Solution

By merging B-to-B and B-to-C identities, you can create one unified view of a person across both the professional and personal facets of their lives. With this connection, you can unlock thousands of incremental data attributes for richer segmentation, empowering more personalized customer engagements. Moreover, you can amplify improvement in digital “onboarding” match rates that are often orders of magnitude greater than industry norms. This will result in game-changing increases to marketable universes across publishers, platforms, and media conglomerates.

Want to learn more? Check out Merkle’s proprietary B2B Connect, a next-generation identity capability that merges B-to-B and B-to-C identities, Send me an email at MjMiller@Merkleinc.com to talk about if this is the right solution for you.