Should B2B Marketers Be Scared Of Being Too Targeted

In my role resourcing marketing talent for the Trade media space both clients and candidates are increasingly focused on how they can further target their marketing.

This isn’t surprising, marketing has never been more sophisticated. Gone are the days of spamming out events brochures in the post (or fax, yes that was a thing) and sending out a million generic dreaded email invites.

Marketers are now not only able to target and segment their audience by age, gender, location, role and sector etc. but also by complex analysis of online habits interpreted by increasingly intelligent algorithms.
However recent analysis of large consumer brands suggests this incresed focus on targeting could in fact be having a negative effect with regards to the presence of brands in the wider audience.

This begs the question, should marketers of niche B2B media products and events also be cautious with being too targeted?

In my opinion the answer is NO:

• The market for niche Business Intelligence products and B2B events is entirely different to the market for McDonalds or Fairy Liquid-and your marketing strategy should reflect this
• Targeted relevant marketing is key to standing out here, moving away from the generic marketing emails that used to be the norm for the industry, and arguably did more brand damage than good...