M2X Q&A with Ben, Founder & CEO at IPInfo

How IP data can be used for B2B marketing, lead generation and third party cookie replacement

Ben Dowling, Founder & CEO of IPinfo.io, joined the M2X: Tech Marketer podcast, hosted by Adam Forziati for Episode 4: Customer Experience. The episode focuses on what technology buyers expect from manufacturers and how to differentiate your own company’s customer experience from customer service.

As part of the conversation, Ben joined Adam to discuss the future of cookies and various strategies B2B marketers can explore, including IP address info and first-party data, to continue innovating in their campaigns. Find an adapted version of the conversation below.

Q: Could you catch us up on the changes with cookies and how these new initiatives are affecting marketers?

Cookies have been around for a long time, but there now seems to be a general push towards phasing them out in marketing and advertising. They’ve been a great tool for online advertising, but it’s looking like they will probably be completely unavailable for any ad targeting in the future.

It’s not just cookies that are going away, either. On mobile phones, we’re seeing ad identifiers going away, too. There’s this general trend towards privacy protection and less user device-specific targeting, which is consumer friendly.

Q: What are some other ways that marketers can collect data without cookies?

We’re looking at a bunch of future alternatives: some that are still available, some that are already in use, and some that are going to become more prominent as these device-specific technologies become less effective or even phased out completely.

One of those things is first-party data. If you’re marketing for a company, you have data you’ve collected on your own users through their logins and through their own activities and behaviors within your products. With first-party data, you’re not looking at behaviors of users on different platforms and services and insights; it’s your data collected from your own platform.

Other options include things like your email insights, your partnership data, and then obviously, the one that I can talk about most is IP address data.

Q: How can B2B marketers leverage first-party data for effective marketing campaigns?

It depends on a few factors: the specific type of first-party data you have, the type of audience you want to reach, the type of things you want to do, etc. How much of that could be a replacement for cookies will depend on the type of marketing campaign you want to do.

You can start by looking at the usage of your platform or website, which doesn’t rely on third-party cookies. Say that Company X has created five accounts in the past week; there’s clearly strong intent for company X to have a group package of your service, or you can sell additional services to them.

If you see an influx of users from a company or a spike in usage from that company, you can then go and directly market to them. Or, you could market to the users that are already on that platform.

Q: Moving on to your specialty, IP address data. Why is IP address data valuable and how can marketers use it effectively?

One of the nice things about IP address data is that it’s always available. If someone is connecting to your website or your service, there’s going to be an IP address there. Even if they’re using a VPN, there’s still attributes and information that can be used. We help with that at IPinfo.

It’s possible to infer a lot from IP address data - and marketers aren’t always aware. The pieces we help with include:

• Geolocation - where a user is coming from?
• Is the user on a mobile carrier or landline?
• Is the user logging on from a specific company?

Another great thing is that IP address data is privacy protecting. It’s not personal cookies or looking at specific device behaviors, and oftentimes isn’t even tied to a specific user. It allows marketers to achieve some useful attributes that help them do their jobs without being too privacy invasive, which is obviously the pushback against these cookies and device identifiers.

Q: How can lead generation efforts be bolstered with IP Address data?

There are a couple of ways, mainly. On the one hand, if you‘re looking into anonymous traffic to your website or enriching the behaviour that you’re seeing, you can segment that by geography or by company and build up a campaign around that.

You could also do the opposite to filter out data that might be low value or what we like to call “noise.” Maybe you only care about the U.S market, and you can filter out international users to get better ROI on the campaigns you are going to run.

Q: What’s one piece of advice you would give to B2B marketers right now?

Get familiar with all different types of enrichment and data that are available for marketers.

There’s a lot of change happening in the marketing world, with the phasing out of cookies and device identifiers. This could perhaps just be the start of the way this whole ecosystem changing with regards to different privacy controls, how ads should be online, and consumers showing concern for their data.

It’s all rapidly changing, but it’s also a time of opportunity for people to find new, effective methods in marketing and advertising. We can find lots of different data to make sure campaigns are still effective, whether that’s first-party data or IP address data, or anything else.

Hopefully it’s a time for lots of innovation in this space and lots of great and effective campaigns.

With IPInfo, you can pinpoint your users’ locations, customize their experiences, prevent fraud, ensure compliance and so much more. Sign up for free to join the 100,000+ businesses and developers using IPInfo as their trusted source for IP address data.