Launching a brand-first demand generation engine for a pioneering programmatic audience targeting, insights, and data enrichment leader

Datonics pioneered the audience data game over a decade ago, quickly becoming one of the top go-tos for marketers and publishers looking to reach precise audiences across programmatic, CTV, mobile, social, digital audio, and even OOH.

But, despite being experts at fueling other marketers’ success globally, Datonics found themselves treading water when trying to scale and measure their own advertising efforts. They had a solid sales track record, but hadn’t quite cracked the code on ramping up lead generation—especially in reliably tracking results.

The catch? They had few internal resources, minimal budget, and needed to drive adoption fast (from scratch), in an industry notorious for its complexity and fickle shiny object syndrome. The goal? Engaging and converting all stripes of media buyer — from big holding companies to scrappy indie agencies (like us!).

B2B buyers don’t search for your brand, they’re looking to solve their problem. Datonics needed to meet their prospects where they already were, rather than relying heavily on sales outreach and limited paid search, expecting new customers to come to them. 

Their audience — media buyers and planners — spend most of their digital time on social networks. Datonics needed to show up proactively in those spaces, creating genuine connections, instead of being stuck hamster-wheeling with a reactive sales and marketing approach.

We flipped the script, shifting Datonics to a proactive, measurable, multi-channel demand generation strategy that would not only increase awareness and lead volume (e.g., content downloads, meeting requests), but lead quality, too. This media plan acknowledged the self-serve nature of a portion of Datonics’ business while building a more direct lead generation pipeline for deeper engagements and potential upselling of their more complex solutions.

They’d previously been reliant on paid search, alone, which didn’t pass muster after our deep-dive analysis revealed waning performance due to low search volume around critical high-intent keywords. Instead, we prioritized paid social (particularly LinkedIn) to proactively engage media buyers and planners, educate them, and drive them towards conversion, complemented by a more focused, efficient paid search strategy rebuilt to specifically capture existing high-intent demand.

Key campaign elements included:

• Strategic Audience Segmentation: Targeted nuanced segments based on roles, job title, skills, seniority, and organization type (holding companies vs. indie agencies) to ensure that messaging was as relevant as possible.
• Fresh Ad Creative: New ad creative was tailored to our segments and had a fresh new take on Datonics’ visual brand and offering. Messaging was pain-point-focused to be more relevant, differentiated, and compelling — skipping the jargon, buzzwords, and the hard sell.
• Value-Driven Campaigns: Iteratively promoted whitepapers and thought leadership materials to provide prospects with content that had genuine value to them to help build credibility. We also ungated most key insights and resources while gating longer-form whitepapers as lead generation assets.
• Multi-Format Ad Testing: Utilized a variety of ad formats (images, carousels, videos) to test and learn our way to what would best grab attention and most effectively communicate Datonics’ expertise and solutions.
• HubSpot Landing Page Creation + CRO: Designed and developed highly optimized landing pages that would be closely aligned with our campaigns, user intent, and maximizing conversion opportunities on-page.

In just a couple months, we built a robust demand generation engine for Datonics from the ground up. And we’d not only successfully delivered exponential growth in lead volume, we improved lead quality across the board. Because sending tons of leads is worthless if they’re a poor fit, when your goal is repeatable bottom-line growth.