First-party data is information customers knowingly share with you: email signups, form fills, CRM records, website behavior, purchase history, support tickets. It’s your data, not third-party vendors’. Zero-party data (explicit preference sharing) is the premium version.
Firmographic data describes a company’s foundational business characteristics: annual revenue, employee headcount, industry, geography, funding stage, and legal structure. It’s the demographic equivalent for B2B-the baseline facts you use to identify which companies even belong in your target account list.
Demand capture is reaching prospects who are actively searching for solutions. You’re not creating demand; you’re capturing existing demand when it matters most.
Dark social is traffic and influence that happens outside your tracking-copy-pasted URLs in Slack, forwarded emails, shared PDFs, WhatsApp messages, phone calls referencing your content. A sales rep shares a blog post with a prospect by email, they discuss it over lunch, and the prospect’s colleague tries to find it weeks later but can’t remember the URL. You lost attribution credit for a massive deal influence.
B2B retargeting is showing ads to companies (not just individuals) who have visited your website. When an employee from Acme Corp visits your site, their company gets added to a retargeting list, and ads follow across LinkedIn, Google, and display networks. By the time multiple people from Acme see your ads, momentum builds.
A buying committee is the group of people inside a customer organization who evaluate, approve, and execute a purchase. In B2B, it’s rarely one person. A typical mid-market SaaS deal involves a VP of Sales (champion), Director of Ops (evaluator), CFO (budget holder), IT Security (gatekeeper), and CRO (executive sponsor). Each has veto power.
Most website traffic is anonymous. Someone visits your website, reads a few pages, and leaves. Without identification, you have no way to know who visited, what company they’re from, or whether they’re a sales opportunity.
Programmatic advertising is automated, data-driven ad buying and placement. Instead of manually negotiating ad placements with publishers, programmatic platforms use algorithms and real-time bidding to automatically purchase ad inventory that matches your targeting criteria.
Account-based marketing started as a single-channel activity. You built a target account list, ran a direct mail campaign or an email sequence, and hoped it worked.
Intent signals are the behavioral indicators that a company or individual buyer is actively researching, evaluating, or considering a purchase in your category. They answer one of B2B marketing’s most persistent questions: who is actually in market right now?
An ICP is your Ideal Customer Profile. It’s a detailed description of the type of company that gets the most value from your solution and is the best fit for your business.
Technographic data is information about the technologies and software a company uses in their operations, from marketing automation platforms to cloud infrastructure to security tools. It tells you what tech stack a prospect already owns-and critically, what gaps exist where your solution fits.