How advertising agencies can improve targeting to maximize B2B spend in 2025
In a recent Bombora survey of B2B brands and advertising agencies, the most common struggles were the inability to spend ad dollars effectively, correctly measure performance, and consistently reach their ICPs. Engaging prospects before they convert, targeting personas within accounts, scaling efforts across channels and platforms, and navigating an expanding ad tech ecosystem are all tough hurdles to overcome.
Not surprisingly, channels that work well for B2C brands are notably less effective in the B2B arena. Phil Parrish, Co-founder and President of PrograMetrix (a Bombora customer), told us, “Eight out of ten [B2B] brands that come to us say there’s only so much they can do in Google search and LinkedIn to meet their cost-per-lead objectives. They are looking for better ways to reach their target accounts.”
Additionally, many B2B brands are still clinging to yesterday’s inefficient media buys, with a recent report stating that digital ad spend accounted for less than 50% of B2B advertising budgets in 2024.1 For those advertisers who’ve entered the digital advertising space, many struggle to leverage audience data in a scalable way.
In 2025, B2B advertisers will need to level up in the following areas if they want to make the most of their 2025 budgets:
Measuring performance
Advertisers using traditional DSPs have historically struggled to connect performance metrics to specific accounts—a challenge compounded when multiple channels and platforms are in play.
Creating an optimal targeting mix
As B2B advertisers set their sights on expanding their targeting mix, the need for reliable, granular audience data within omnichannel ecosystems—and accurate performance solutions—is critical.
Navigating budget realities
According to Forrester’s 2024 Budget Planning Survey, only 35% of B2B marketing leaders expect budget increases of 5% or higher2. Now that 2025 budgets are set, pressure to justify and potentially scale back on investments is already mounting. The need to both precisely target high-quality audiences and showcase the effectiveness of these audience investments is essential.
Choosing the right B2B audience partner
For advertisers, selecting the right audience partner—someone who can deliver actionable insights, inform effective strategies and generate measurable outcomes for their clients – is key. With Bombora as their audience partner, B2B advertisers benefit from expansive audience attributes including demographic, firmographic and interest segments—while also making it possible to curate custom-built audiences. Bombora supplements brands’ 1st-party data with high-quality 3rd-party data that scales and optimizes audience targeting across every stage of the buying journey.
Phil Parrish noted, “Only five percent of our clients’ total addressable market is ready to buy. With Bombora, we can help clients reach and engage these high value accounts and decision makers across the open web and within all their connected devices. We’re evolving and growing our clients’ strategy, so they aren’t just dependent on paid search, LinkedIn, and retargeting.”
Phil relies on Bombora because “Bombora has always been B2B and focused on Intent data. The portability of that data gives the advertiser or agency the ability to create custom audiences and deploy them on whatever platform we choose.” He added that, “We found that a Bombora custom audience outperforms the competitors.” Phil takes that powerful Bombora data, combines it with additional data sources and leverages it to execute omnichannel strategies within The Trade Desk platform.
Performance plus scale, the future of digital targeting
Bombora’s latest solution, iABM, offered exclusively on The Trade Desk in partnership with Chalice AI, addresses traditional campaign measurement challenges. iABM unlocks visibility into campaign effectiveness with account-level reporting on 95+% of impressions—fueling intelligent, data-driven ABM strategies.
To scale digital targeting and build relevant audiences with reduced reliance on third-party cookies, advertisers must employ alternative identifiers as part of their targeting efforts. By combining MAIDS (Mobile Ad IDs), cookies and TTD’s proprietary UID2.0 identifier, Bombora delivers an expansive list of high quality audiences to power full-funnel targeting and unprecedented reach.
2025 promises a bright future for B2B agencies and advertisers who invest in digital advertising solutions that improve campaign performance, provide visibility into B2B specific metrics and are built on a foundation of delivering scalable audiences that enable omnichannel success.
1 https://www.emarketer.com/content/b2b-digital-ad-spend-grows-mobile-increases-share
2 B2B Go-To-Market Budgets Will Continue To Be Tight in 2025: Here’s What Marketing and Sales Operations Leaders Need To Do About It, Forrester, October 2024