Pacific Data Partners CEO Pieter De Temmerman will speak at AdExchanger's upcoming PROGRAMMATIC I/O New York conference on Oct. 25-26.

Account-based marketing (ABM) may be the all the rage among B2B marketers, but technographic marketing is emerging as a complementary targeting tactic.

Marketers use ABM to target specific roles at a company or companies, while technographic marketing targets based on the technology stacks a company owns.

For instance, if an Amazon Web Services account rep wants to run a conquesting campaign, she can use technographic data to improve segmentation by factoring in the length of a prospect’s license or services agreement or which cloud software version they're using.

Pieter De Temmerman, CEO of Pacific Data Partners and former SVP of data marketplaces for Oracle’s BlueKai, spoke with AdExchanger about the benefits of technographic data for B2B marketers – and where gaps still remain in the B2B data market.

AdExchanger: How is technographic marketing different from account-based marketing?

PIETER DE TEMMERMAN: You do see some prospecting use cases in ABM, but generally speaking, it’s a retargeting use case. For instance, there could be someone in-market for a software product, and they’ve gone to a vendor’s website, filled out a lead form or maybe they’ve downloaded a white paper. 

They may already be a current customer of that company, so if I’m a vendor, I may build an account-based marketing segment to resell to or upsell my existing clients.

When you think about technology-based or technographic marketing, you’re saying you want to target a group of companies based on their technographic description, which could be a hardware, software or cloud-based solution.

You’re able to move pretty quickly from retargeting, which is pretty limited in terms of companies you’re able to reach, to doing very targeted prospecting from a B2B standpoint.

How is technographic data useful?

When you look at this data over time, you can actually see companies going through their cloud journey. As they’re transitioning from hardware to using cloud solutions, we can use that historical data to build things like propensity scores to determine which companies are most likely to make a cloud purchase in the next six to 12 months.

Which data sets are most compatible with technographic data?

You can use this data together with more typical “firmographic” data, like what industry is this company in, how many employees does it have, is it VC funded. And all of these can be used as additional filters on top of the technographic audience you’re building that can complement your account-based marketing strategy.

Can you provide an example?

If I’m trying to target Oracle, I don’t want to talk to all of 135,000 employees of Oracle. Maybe I want to talk to VPs of engineering who hold the budget for whatever it is I’m trying to sell.

So ABM and technographic marketing can be used to help you to find the right audiences [who are in-market for your particular product]. Obviously, the counterbalance to this is, do you have enough reach? Do you have enough people or cookies or mobile ad IDs to create an audience segment to deliver a message to those companies you’re looking to target?

When is technographic marketing most effective?

Technology companies are a given – think of all the companies like Amazon, IBM Google and Microsoft who might want to attract new clients to their cloud offerings. But you start to see how this branches out into other industries like health care, where if you’re Phillips and you want to sell a really advanced MRI machine, you might want to find all hospitals running an [older or outdated] MRI machine.

How do clients typically begin using technographic marketing?

I would say it’s not uncommon for us to start with an analytics use case and then end up educating the B2B enterprise into targeting those segments and using those insights for marketing and sales with either account or technology-based marketing.

What’s hindered B2B marketing’s embrace of data?

It has a lot to do with the types of data available to them and at what scale. One of the challenges I faced at BlueKai, and one of the things I focused on at the Oracle Data Cloud, is how to build out these data solutions globally.

If you talk to Starbucks from a CPG standpoint, you’ll probably be running a lot of US-based campaigns. But when you talk to Microsoft, they have a list of 25 countries where they want to take their marketing strategy live at scale.

To date, there hasn’t been a huge amount of B2B data available, and that started to change about two years ago after LinkedIn bought Bizo.

Interview edited for clarity and length.