From insight to activation: Leveraging HG Insights and Bombora data for B2B advertising success
B2B data is more vast and accessible than ever before. Between web analytics, marketing automation platforms, CRM systems, and third-party sources, marketers are practically swimming in information.
However, GTM teams can’t easily turn predictive insights into active, multichannel media execution at the account level—the challenge of activating signals that are otherwise locked in silos.
In a recent webinar, Satish Grandhi, Chief Technology Officer at HG Insights, joined Bombora Co-Founder Mike Burton to break down how revenue teams can more effectively use B2B data across their advertising campaigns.
By combining HG Insights’ technology intelligence with Bombora’s Curated Ecosystem Audiences, B2B brands, advertisers, and agencies can liberate siloed data and scale precision ad targeting across the B2B web.
Unlocking account-level technology intelligence with HG Insights
HG Insights has long been recognized as a leading source of go-to-market account-level data. However, their intelligence goes far deeper than basic install lists, technographic data, and the ability to track technology installs across more than 250 product categories.
Through operational hierarchies they’ve developed, HG Insights provides visibility into enterprise parent companies and their subsidiaries, allowing B2B marketers to map out distinct buying groups by department and location.
“At a given company,” Satish Grandhi explains, “which product is being used in which departments of that company, and in what locations of those departments of that company…is what we call buying center intelligence, so you know who are the buyers or the influencers of a given product decision-making process…”
HG Insights can also produce 12-month forecasted spend models across 140+ market categories, including hardware, software, and professional services. By incorporating mid-to-bottom funnel intent data, they can contextualize whether an account represents a white space opportunity, an expansion signal, or a potential churn risk.
Targeting addressable digital audiences for advertising campaigns
While account-level data can often be used for territory planning, lead scoring, and sales outreach, activating those lists across display and programmatic channels has historically required cumbersome manual processes.
Aside from platforms like LinkedIn, most of the activation points in the broader digital advertising ecosystem don’t natively deal in account lists.
And the open web is where most of the brand opportunity and scale exists; it’s where buyers are spending their time researching and engaging with content relevant to their business needs.
Bombora addresses this issue by unlocking signals from HG Insights and other specialty providers for audience targeting across the digital advertising ecosystem with our Curated Ecosystem Audiences.
Bombora’s Curated Ecosystem Audiences are addressable, ready-to-activate advertising segments built by transforming proprietary data signals from premium B2B data (from partners such as G2, Crunchbase, and HG Insights) into targeted digital audiences that can be deployed everywhere you want to use them.
With our advanced and proprietary identity graph, we transform curated account lists from partners into addressable digital audiences, matching them to anonymous advertising IDs like hashed emails, mobile advertising IDs, and cookies.
With Curated Ecosystem Audiences, advertisers can now reach account-based audiences based on HG Insights data, and even layer on Bombora’s additional B2B attributes (such as job function, seniority, and decision-maker status) for even more precise targeting.
The partnership between HG Insights and Bombora allows for automation in the sense that it’s seamless for the advertiser: a curated audience can be created on demand, delivered to the end platform, and targeted—as opposed to taking a spreadsheet and sending that to an agency who sends it to someone else who activates it on a demand-side platform.
Mike Burton observed, “These data sets that historically might have been amazing for a sales prioritization or a lead scoring or a market planning use case could be pulled up the funnel into a digital advertising use case. This is great, not just because it’s awesome data, but because many of your organizations are already using that data in other parts of your business.”
Turn high-value B2B signals into effective ad campaigns
By activating granular account-level intelligence from HG Insights through Bombora’s Curated Ecosystem Audiences (off-the-shelf or custom), B2B advertisers can execute sophisticated, multi-channel campaigns.
How to activate data signals that matter most in
B2B advertising:
1. Start with HG Insights’s account-level technology intelligence
Combine firmographic and technographic signals—such as what technology a company has installed, how much they are spending on it, and what the usage intensity is—pinpointing the accounts worth targeting. These signals can be found off-the-shelf in various major advertising platforms.
To get more granular, leverage customized HG Insights’ data. For example, activate a competitive takeout campaign by using HG data to pinpoint what accounts have your competitor’s technology installed. For a renewal timing campaign, use HG Insights’ first/last-verified technographic dates to identify accounts that are approaching the end of a typical renewal cycle.
Through our proprietary digital audience infrastructure, Bombora then matches those accounts against the anonymous advertising identifiers in our identity graph to build an addressable digital audience, closing the gap between account-level insights and actual media activation.
2. Narrow down to the right buying group
With visibility into organizational and operational hierarchies, HG Insights’ data already helps narrow down the appropriate buying group across corporate/subsidiary levels.
To ensure you reach all the right buyers and influencers impacting the purchasing decision, choose from thousands of additional Bombora B2B attributes—across categories such as job function, seniority, and decision-maker status—to layer into your custom digital audience.
3. Activate programmatically across channels without new data licensing
Activate off-the-shelf HG Insights audience segments directly within major advertising platforms—or use the HG Insights data you already license to build a custom audience and have it delivered to your preferred activation platform, including The Trade Desk, DV360, Reddit, and StackAdapt.
By combining leading technology intelligence from HG Insights with Bombora’s addressable digital audience infrastructure for campaign targeting, B2B advertisers can finally activate the same intelligence they use for account planning directly within their digital ad campaigns—unifying their go-to-market strategy.
Whether running a competitive takeout campaign or timing ads to upcoming renewal cycles, this strategic partnership provides the speed, automation, and alignment needed to turn high-value B2B signals into significant go-to-market success.
