In the eighth episode of AdTech | AlikeAudience, ex-Meta Research Lead and current Growth Marketing Manager at Coalition Inc., Jonny Chan, Co-founder of AlikeAudience, Bosco Lam, and the Director of The Brand Creatives, Jessica Lam, discusses AdTech Growth Marketing in both B2B and B2C landscapes.
Tune in to find insights on:
• What growth marketing is and why it matters
• How B2B and B2C marketing overlaps
• Why building strong communities is key to advertising success
• Strategies to attract B2B and B2C customers, such as demand generation and product-led growth
• Current privacy issues around data collection in the AdTech industry
• How web 3 fits into digital marketing
Meet your host: Jessica Lam Hill Young
Jessica Lam: This podcast is brought to you by AlikeAudience, the premier audience-targeting company with high-performing mobile audience segments. And every month, we spotlight leading executives, CEOs and marketers from industry-leading companies. I’m your host today, Jessica from The Brand Creatives, a marketer and copywriter who helps tech companies grow with authority content. If you enjoy the podcast, subscribe and visit our website.
Guests for the Episode: Jonny Chan and Bosco Lam
Jessica Lam: You are hearing from Jonny Chan, an ex-Meta Research Lead, on reaching B2B and B2C audiences today and our CEO Bosco Lam today. Is the old model of MQL dead? And is it time all marketers need to think about demand generation marketing? Or is this just hype? With the convergence of work and personal life in the remote working era, how can we crossover marketing and AdTech solutions in both segments? Find out all this and more on episode eight of the AlikeAudience AdTech podcasts. Today I’m super excited to have Jonny Chan, the Growth Marketing Manager at Coalition, Inc. It’s the leading provider of cyber insurance and security based in San Francisco. Jonny is an ex-Meta Research Lead, and he has a wealth of experience across B2C and B2B digital marketing. And with him today is our co-founder of AlikeAudience, Bosco Lam. He’s an expert in AdTech solutions and data privacy.
How the two industry experts met
Jessica Lam: So let’s jump in. And today, we’ll be talking about B2B and B2C growth marketing. So Jonny and Bosco, how did you guys meet?
Jonny Chan: I remember I met Bosco at a networking event in Hong Kong. I was visiting there for fun. I was trying to network with other Hong Kong marketers, and I went to this event. I remember I was so hungry; I really wanted the event to be over with. And then I met Bosco, and we got connected because I think we live in the same area, and then Bosco went to undergrad near where I live. Is that the correct version, Bosco?
Bosco Lam: Yeah, I think that was a growth marketing event, and we were both audiences of that. We’re waiting for food, and we chitchatted a bit with our backgrounds in San Francisco. We talked a lot about the comparison on how the industry evolves in the two regions, and as he said, we also met when we were back in San Francisco. I don’t think we have ever come across the path in any companies in the past, but we took this relationship very well to share ideas. So this is fun to have you today on our podcast.
Currents trends in the B2B & B2C industries
Jessica Lam: So that’s interesting because obviously, both of you have a lot of background in marketing. And you have been in the same kind of industry. So as B2B and B2C growth marketers, what is the state of the industry right now? And what are some trends you’re seeing?
Jonny Chan: Yeah, absolutely. So for B2C, I often think of it as a direct-to-consumer, which means there’s no middleman. You try to sell directly to consumers. Right now, I think people are changing the way they consume media. It used to be Facebook, but right now, people are changing to Instagram and Tiktok. I think those are kind of popular. Also, people are leveraging influencers. Marketers and Advertisers are leveraging influencers because they don’t want to sell their stuff using their brand. They want to leverage other distribution channels, like macro influencers, because It’s more authentic that way to promote their product.
And as you know, the economy isn’t doing that well right now, the global economy. I think a lot of advertisers are not spending as much. I think CPMs might be dropping, which is good or bad, right? Like if it’s dropping, all other advertisers could come in and piggyback on the low CPM. But for people who are not profitable, yeah, like for marketers, they might need to explore other channels that are not that expensive. So that’s B2C.
B2B is more like targeting individuals. But there are still people behind it, right? But there are individuals who have a business domain and work at a company. So essentially the same thing. But you know, a lot of B2B right now, the industry is talking about demand creation, which is sort of like, how do you spread your message out there. So you’re the number one thought leader in the industry, or if the market is kind of saturated, you create a new category for your own company. So that is what I see a lot of people are changing from MQL, which is marketing qualified lead model, to more like demand creation. Because you can capture the market or do something that when people need it, they can come find you. So I think that is what the new motto is.
A lot of people say that gated content doesn’t work anymore because people don’t like to submit their email, download PDF and read it and buy it. So it’s totally different because it relies on other people like your peers, your Slack community, and, you know, they do a lot back channelling stuff. So I think it’s just different from the way we used to do B2B. Do you have anything to add, Bosco?
How B2B marketing is overlapping with B2C
Bosco Lam: Yeah. Interesting, Jonny, you mentioned about a channel. So actually, there’s a lot of saying that B2B and B2C are kind of converging in terms of the channel. For example, in the past, especially before COVID, B2B, you got a lot of channels, not necessarily online media, right? You have conferences, you have on-site sales, a lot of these regional Account Based Marketing, you get emails from your leads. And suddenly, all these things kind of vanish when everyone is working from home, right? No longer 9-to-5, on-site visits, not even conferences, and the only channel that you can reach out to your leads, basically online, right? Either, you know, paid ads, YouTube ads, at the end of the day, the decision-makers in a company are humans, they are the consumers, right?
So it is getting interesting how B2B marketing would overlap with B2C. And you do not have specific work hours when everyone is working from home, right? So imagine you as a decision maker in a company; I may see work-related ads on YouTube from time to time. And also, there are some other CPG brands that want to impress me. So this is where the convergence becomes interesting.
Resident IPs versus Business IPs
Jonny Chan: I think that’s an interesting idea. So you know how people are working from home, right? I’m sure people spend more time on social media when they’re working from home. So maybe it’s good for advertisers to start targeting them on Tik Tok, Facebook, or social media, not like LinkedIn. So I think it’s interesting. And one fun fact is that because I’m using my home IP address to do work, right? So if I put in my home IP address, it becomes the company’s IP. People know that this IP belongs to my company, not my house. So that is something interesting to know, maybe some of the resident IPs now become business IPs. So you can target them.
Bosco Lam: So does your family see the same ads?
Jonny Chan: I don’t know. Probably not. Hopefully not. Yeah. That is scary, you know. Privacy still matters, I guess, if the advertisers are doing a good job or if the publishers are doing a good job.
How should marketers develop strategies for B2B and B2C industries?
Jessica Lam: So these are all very interesting trends, right? So we get all these talks of like demand marketing and B2B. And then we’re seeing the convergence of B2B and B2C as well when people work more from home. So for marketers today, how should they leverage their strategies, let’s say for marketing, or even should they have a clear definition between these B2B and B2C segments? And do we still employ different strategies for both?
Jonny Chan: Yeah, I think that’s a good question. So fundamentally, I think it is still really generic. I would like to call it just general marketing. You know, there’s a lot of prefix in front of marketing, right? So I think just to be more generic, like, just go back to the old ways of people doing marketing, like good messaging, good creative, a good offer.
The term growth marketing, I think it was first adopted by the Facebook growth team, and it has been heavily used by others like hyper-growth startups, but that word is hyped. I think it’s general marketing, or digital marketing. Because in the end, I think it’s everyone’s job to grow their company, doesn’t matter if it’s finance, ops, or marketing, or, you know, partnerships, right? So it’s your job to grow the company. So it’s a little bit loosely defined, but I think it should just be like regular marketing.
If you talk about defining the features, or specific attributes for B2B and B2C, B2C is more like leveraging channels, where people spend the most time on, especially on social. So I think what works for B2C, it could be like an organic channel, which is getting a lot hotter, going viral, which is like creating a Tik Tok video, and it goes viral because of the distribution. I think they have an interesting algorithm, which is different from Instagram. And leveraging media, right? So because people are spending time more online and creating content for their own niche, like product. Like if you’re selling a zero-waste product, you want to build more content that tailors to that audience.
The B2C cycle is usually shorter because, you know, the price isn’t as high. You don’t have to pay a yearly contract. As for a B2B, you have to sign up for one year usually, like enterprise field, because they want to lock you in. And you know, it looks good on their finance if they do a monthly or a yearly contract. The sales cycle is usually longer and involves hiring salespeople and sales team inside sales team. And the attribution is a little bit harder because you’re working with another team. So you first get more people, get leads, email capture in Contact Us form or ebook. Then you have to pass them to the sales team. So you don’t really own the entire funnel from end to end, not like B2C, right? For B2C, you can just run ads, do email targeting, get them to the website, add them to the cart and buy something so you can really own the funnel.
Winning different stakeholders in the B2C realm
Jonny Chan: But B2C, for the purchase, actually there are different layers. There’s like decision-makers, and there’s also finance, CFO or upper management that has to approve the budget. So there’s a lot of stakeholders involved, so it’s going to take a longer time to convert.
What I see in terms of the new trend, or what people talk about in B2B, is the Product Led Growth, which is PLG, is having a freemium model for people to try out first, then they recommend their colleagues to sign up. So it’s more like a bottoms-up approach. It’s not really like one man or one person at top to tell other people what to do. You have a fan base of people at your company who use them, like, for example, Slack or Notion. As more teammates join, it becomes more valuable. So it becomes like a utility for the company to use more so that, you know, it helps the buying process or has more bargaining power for management to purchase a license for your company.
Can you use B2B audience data to target B2C customers?
Jessica Lam: I think that’s a really good analysis and breakdown of B2B and B2C. And it sounds as though like, in general, the trend is going back more to what users want and what they’re looking for, for both segments. So Bosco, what about from your perspective because you’re an AdTech solution expert? So like, how do some of the things that Jonny talks about change when it comes to developing Adtech solutions for B2B and B2C brands?
Bosco Lam: Yeah, I want to add on top of that. The metrics that you will utilize to measure the growth, right, obviously, you always want to optimize it on your strategy, no matter if it is from a media standpoint, a channel standpoint, a data standpoint, or the creative standpoint. You always want to have a measure and a KPI right, so that you can optimize towards it. I think this is the key to the whole idea of growth marketing. This is how you can keep optimizing and improve. And also one thing for B2B is that we see some clients are utilizing B2B data for B2C brands.
This is very interesting, say for example, a beverage company, they may want to target workers who used to work outdoors, right? So you have B2B data sets, like the job title, job position and company nature. But at the same time, you’re promoting some, like CPG brands, or vice versa, right? At the end of the day, I onboard an employee, and so I onboard a consumer. So this is where the data would come into overlap. And channel as well, as I said, the convergence.
Jonny Chan: That’s very interesting. Just for my curiosity, how does it actually work? Like, you find the job titles, like how do you match it to their to the ad database so that you can target them on social media or, you know, DSP?
Bosco Lam: Yeah, I actually want to bring that up. Because, you know, nowadays, there’s a deprecation of cookies, and as far as we know, mobile IDs are going to be harder to track under the new Apple ADT framework. So a lot has been happening with hashed emails or some other alternative IDs that companies would be able to match with thermal graphics data, you know, job title, company information, and as well as the personal emails that come with demographic information. So it is interesting to see how the AdTech and market solution come to overlap by utilizing all these emails as an identifier, and also the attributes that tag along; be a B2B attributes or B2C attributes. So yeah, that’s why we’re seeing beverage companies targeting B2B attributes. And also we have seen the audience, they want to target outdoor workers who may utilize these products.
How communities are key to advertising success
Jessica Lam: So it seems like work and personal life is blurring. And that even when it comes to marketers, and thinking about how strategies crossover, we have to account for both the segments and how the lines blur. So we did talk about some of the similarities between digital marketing tactics. What about some differences, or things that marketers should keep in mind when they cross over these B2B and B2C strategies?
Bosco Lam: Well, I think Jonny has mentioned briefly just now about the community, right? People may get referrals, or word of mouth. I think it works the same for a lot of business products. Like how we run startups, right? We used to compare products like Slack versus other messengers, Zoom versus Microsoft Teams. We got a lot of these Product Led Growth as Jonny defines, right, we test out the products we discuss among the teams, not necessarily from founders to make a decision, but you know, the engineers who want to contribute different features.
So a lot of this community happens to be the driving force on how we should decide, how we should make a decision on which product we want to adopt. So I think the community is key for marketers to adopt this strategy. So it works similarly for consumer products. You have a lot of samples, and test products. You will have some of what we call a KOL, opinion leaders within a community that try for this adoption. So yeah, I think the community is some interesting factor and the driving force for people to be convinced.
Jonny Chan: Yeah, I think Bosco is right. Like building a community, you know, is like a moat, right? Because they become your ambassadors. You don’t have to invest a lot on conveying people like hey, you’re number one, right? Because people already doing it. So it’s like word of mouth at scale, right? Back in old days, they have like TV and newspaper, like you just talk to your neighbour. But nowadays, people have mobile phones and they have different communities like discord or slack. You know, that’s why Facebook is also pushing to community, right, like their Facebook group. And it’s more like, I won’t say it’s like a decentralized network, but it is like a micro mini network, especially like chat base community like telegram and WhatsApp. So I think those are the similarities between B2B and B2C.
The main difference between B2B and B2C marketing
Jonny Chan: You mentioned about the differences I will say it is less of marketing, and I think it’s more on the org structure. Like for B2C, you don’t really need a sales team. For B2B, you need it because the product is more complex. So, in B2B, I’m talking more about like SaaS, if a complicated product, you need to onboard your team, your company, because there are a lot more people, and sometimes it gets technical. So you need to onboard like a solutions engineer to help integrate with your stack. So I think an inside sales team is important for your sales team because it serves as a filter of what the needs of the buyers are. So I think that’s more like an org structure. And, yeah, I think that will be the major difference.
Data collection while targeting B2B & B2C consumers
Jessica Lam Hill Young: These are all very excellent points. And to change the topic a little bit, something I think a lot of marketers would be concerned about today would be the topic of data collection when targeting B2B and B2C. So all these strategies are great. But then, you know, when it comes to data collection, there are some concerns. Do you both have any expertise to share with our listeners?
Jonny Chan: Yeah, so data collection, like most of the data on the web, they are out there, right? So basically, they’re like databases where you can find emails, for example, like B2B, there’s zoom info, which is kind of popular, right, for B2B. So you can actually, like Google, you can search your people’s title, and your company, and then it will spit out a bunch of emails, and then you can send them a cold email. So that will be like data. They’re not public, like the emails are not public, but they are able to get it and then you can purchase a license to find those emails for your B2B. Besides that, it’s really hard to target them without email, or you can use B2B cookies or something.
Bosco Lam: Jonny, you mentioned a good point about how this B2B data is being collected. It is not only email, but the lack of corporate IP addresses, right? Just we can refer to the example earlier in this podcast, how the B2B advertisers will target a corporate person based on a company’s or corporate IP addresses. This is one thing and the other is actually with the demographics that people, or the location that people spend the day time in office, so they will geofence.
I remember, there’s an interesting example, you know, company A, they want to hire people out from company B. And they post these job ads and targeting geolocation on headquarters of company B. So this is how they get to, you know, reach out to those talents. So, there are some interesting way by utilizing what we call the alternative data, right, you know, the mobile app data, location signals. And as well, we have seen a lot of opt-out emails, corporate emails that they do not want to receive cold emails. So this is when B2B advertisers, they find alternative channels, either on the banner ads or LinkedIn ads, trying to approach a similar person in an alternative way. Instead of an account base or direct emails.
How data aggregation protects privacy
Jonny Chan: Yeah, some people are not happy with direct emails, like cold emails, because they feel like how did you find my email? Sometimes people get used to it because, you know, your data is everywhere, right? The other thing that Bosco mentioned is, you can target them, or you can find them on LinkedIn. In LinkedIn, there’s a tool called Sales Navigator that is for enterprise. Basically, you can find their profile and send them a LinkedIn version of email. It’s called Inmail. But you cannot extract the email, you can only send them. So this is sort of smart work that LinkedIn does. You cannot find the exact email, you can only use their product to contact them. So that’s like the data collection on the B2B side. For B2C, it’s really hard to find consumer emails.
I guess you can, I mean, there are some ways to do it. But data provider companies aggregate so that you don’t really see like individual level. Social media companies like Facebook or Google let you target based on whatever demographics or household income, but they do in aggregate. So you cannot really micro-target them or pinpoint them. You want to target Bosco, for example. You cannot really do that. So, it is harder to find individual people for a B2C company. But for B2B, you can, because you have their phone number and you have their contact information.
Bosco Lam: But I think it also breaks down to the stages, or the types of companies that B2C would like to reach out to consumers. Imagine you are e-commerce. It is obvious that you have this contact, you can reach them up via email newsletter, or you can map the email with other publishers. Say, for example, if I sign up for Economist, then Economist would have my email so they can match with this, like e-commerce, and target the same person across these news websites. So this could be done. However, there will be some other B2C brands like CPG, they do not necessarily own that direct consumer relationship. Or the data may sit in a loyalty programs or in a retail outlet.
So most of the time, they have to partner with the supermarket, or the retail outlets in order to promote their plans. So obviously, the data sits in different silos. That’s why we have heard about some other solutions like clean rooms, CDP’s, that handle this consumer data. I think that is a comparison to what B2B companies who use a lot of the internal sales tools or CRM tools to host the business leads. And of course, the focus is more on like SaaS product, which the decision could be made fairly easy, versus the long, advanced products, which require a lot of testing or internal sales, that will be a lot more complicated.
Future of B2B during the rise of web3 technologies
Jessica Lam: I was just going to say just now that hearing both of you share, and knowing the trends in the industry, regardless of what methods marketers find, data collection will always be a challenge with more and more regulations over the use of privacy concerns. When I was chatting to Jonny last, he mentioned, even just now, in the podcast, he talked about building a community of fans, especially for B2B, right? But to kind of wrap up this podcast as well, you know, what is the future of B2B in a world where we have more and more decentralized organizations and the rise of web3 technologies? And how does this play in as well?
Bosco Lam: I think a web3 is a fairly new landscape with a lot of stakeholders here and there. You have investors, you have developers, you have validators. And to speak about specific B2B, you will have to think about what the future of an enterprise is, right? People talk about DAOs, you will have different stakeholders behind the DAOs, right? You have pure users, and you have developers. How would you go into influencing one of them? I think we can replicate some of the success in web2, like community building. You have a lot of discord, or like Twitter, conversations over there. You can actually check out all these DAOs activities, because all the tokens are recorded publicly on ledger. You will see which address have certain thoughts, right, then you may potentially build a proxy meant to reach them out. So these are all very hypothetical situations, to be honest. And yeah, I think I would focus less on web3 as the ecosystem but more on how the enterprise would evolve given the web3 technologies. I think that will be the key to answering questions of the future B2B advertising. Jonny, you have some other interesting thoughts?
Does web3 matter in digital marketing?
Jonny Chan: Yeah, I’m kind of behind on the web3 blockchain stuff. So I need to catch up as a marketer. I got to figure out what’s going on. Fundamentally, I think if you’re a solid marketer, like, again, you know your buyer, like qualitative and quantitatively, I think you’re in better shape than any marketers, right? Because, you know, at the end, it is the person behind it, behind whatever, web4, web5, we may be going towards. Web1, I know, is like just a TV printout and the beginning of SEO when search engines started to appear, and web2 is like social media, right? Because people have access to mobile phones and connectivity. So media becomes everywhere.
Web3 is a little bit different. It talks about like NFT, decentralization, and you’re creating values using tokens. And I’m not sure about the tracking and attribution. But I know there’s a new term community marketer. If you search on LinkedIn, I think you’ll begin to see more job titles like growth marketer, right? People are now changing from growth marketers to like community marketers, but in the end, it’s the same because you’re trying to get people together.
I think that’s why community is the new thing because you are trying to influence other people and create a moat around it by creating a diehard fan base like Apple products, right? People are really loyal to your product, if they really enjoy using it.
Bosco Lam: And one point to add. So imagine how these DAOs would work. They don’t necessarily have one centralised decision maker, right, like a CTO who decides what test stack to adopt within a company. But for DAOs, they will have a proposal, and anyone with a governance token could vote or make proposal to the organization, and people who can vote for what solution to adopt, right, for the future developments. So you can say, the future of B2B, probably, the marketer could be one of the community builders within the application so that they can create an internal proposal for the community to vote. Again, this is still brand new to me. I’m not an expert. I’m just trying to be hypothetical and trying to imagine what this would look like in the future.
Data portability is important
Jonny Chan: Yeah, if I were to build the whole internet, again, I would do like, no centralized email. You know, we have Outlook, we have Gmail, we have Hotmail, like, if there’s no brand name, it will just be a utility where you can send and receive an email. That will be great, right? Because you don’t have to rely on one platform. Think about when you have to migrate or back up your email and move it from Outlook to Google, right? You just have to do a lot. It will be great to have just one email that is agnostic to whichever platform, whichever domain, you just send and receive. That’s it. So I think that is something that I am looking forward to having, like don’t lock myself in one platform. Because, you know, portability of data is important. I want to move my data from Facebook to LinkedIn, LinkedIn to Instagram, you know, I think that would be something I’m looking forward to.
Jessica Lam: Yeah, I was just reading this morning, there was a very good thought leadership coming from SparkToro. They’re saying platforms today are designed to keep you on that platform by penalizing any links so that if you click on a link, then automatically, that post wouldn’t get seen. So I hope one day maybe that will happen as well.
Subscribe and stay tuned!
Jessica Lam: That was a very great discussion. Thank you very much, Jonny and Bosco for coming on and sharing all your thoughts about B2B, B2C marketing strategies. I think there were a lot of great insights on how to target them and how to crossover the strategies, as well as some industry trends and how marketers can meet them.
Thank you so much for listening. To find the show notes, transcripts and more information about our audience segment offerings, log on to our website www.alikeaudience.com. If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to hit subscribe and leave us a review. We’ll catch you in the next session.
