Influ2 launches what it calls the first person-based marketing B2B ad platform

Dmitri Lisitski is not a fan of account-based marketing (ABM). The chief executive officer of enterprise-level B2B influencer advertising platform Influ2 says the popular marketing trend simply does not allow advertisers to reach the right person.

“Account-based marketing is not very efficient because it targets a lot of people inside one company, but you can’t really target specific people,” Lisitski told me in advance of Influ2’s official launch on Tuesday. The platform uses machine-learning-powered person-based marketing (PBM) to give advertisers a way to engage with specific individuals, which is more effective, Lisitski said.

“Our idea [for Influ2] was actually inspired by account-based marketing,” Lisitski said. “We liked the idea of targeting specific accounts and thinking of every account as a target market, but we quickly discovered that it has many flaws and there’s no way you can actually optimize it.”

Influ2 solves this problem by tracking user interactions and then allowing advertisers to re-contact specific people. Lisitki told me that Influ2 is the first PBM-based B2B ad platform in the market.

Segment of one

Marketers create their campaigns from within the Influ2 platform and choose a list of individuals from their own CRM. The platform then shows who clicked on what content, how many times they interacted with the content and the time of day that they engaged. The company calls this individual target market a “segment of one.”

“When somebody reads an article, you can follow up and send them a white paper,” Lisitski said. “It’s going to be much more relevant than just cold calling.”

I asked Lisitski if the company was preparing for the upcoming deadline for enforcement of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which includes new rules for handling the personal data of European Union members. He said that the company is ready to comply with individuals’ data privacy requests, but that as a data processor rather than a data controller, it would not be required to obtain consent.

“We need to be compliant in terms of making sure that our target audience has access to their data, that they can see the data [on request], [that they can exercise their] right to be forgotten. But consent is handled on the client side,” Lisitski said.