The B2B SaaS Marketing Blog

How to Navigate Cookieless Tracking in B2B SaaS Marketing

by 

Andrew Cabrelli

Last updated: April 17th, 2024

As cookieless tracking becomes the norm, many SaaS marketers are facing higher customer acquisition costs as they can’t use cookies to track and remarket to customers.

As a result, you might get your message in front of the right audience, but capturing and moving them through your marketing funnel is much trickier.

So, how can you effectively remarket to prospects and nurture them through your marketing funnel to reduce customer acquisition costs without using cookies?

We’ve tested various alternative remarketing methods on dozens of SaaS companies, and below we’ll discuss the solutions we’ve found most effective, as well as the top mistakes that cause prospects to drop out of your marketing funnel.

Reach out to us for a Free Marketing Plan today, and we can address how your brand can remain competitive in a cookieless marketing landscape.

How To Approach A World Of Cookieless Marketing

Cookies helped marketers because they made it easy to follow customers anywhere online.

Therefore, marketers didn’t necessarily need to understand the full customer journey to remarket to prospects. Yet understanding the customer journey, including the stakeholders involved, the pain points they experience at each step, and the channels they frequently use is essential to maximizing your marketing funnel’s efficiency.

The good news is that if you fully understand your buyer and the customer journey, you’ll soon discover plenty of remarketing options that are often even more effective than cookies.

So how do you map out the customer journey?

At Powered By Search, we begin every client engagement by creating a detailed buyer persona that identifies not only the person who signs the check, but also all of the other stakeholders involved in the product discovery and purchase decision process.

Then, through detailed customer research, we identify how each of those people experience the buyer journey and each person’s pain points at each step of the journey.

With detailed information on the customer journey and their pain points at each step, you can create lead magnets and content to capture your prospect’s email address and nurture them through the funnel.

Your marketing program will also be more effective as you can create a holistic marketing strategy where each marketing campaign is a building block that feeds into your broader marketing funnel to answer objections and move the buyer to the point of sale.

This is the core philosophy behind our predictable growth methodology, and it’s a key reason we can help SaaS companies profitably acquire customers.

Rather than running a collection of random marketing campaigns and hoping some perform well, each campaign serves a specific purpose within the buyer journey.

How To Remarket Without Relying On Cookies

Remarketing is a critical component of a holistic marketing strategy, so here are a few ways you can still get your message in front of prospects at each stage of the customer journey without using cookies.

Using The Boomerang Method

If you can’t follow people with cookies, you can still ask for permission to remarket to them by collecting first-party data, like an email address. We create lead magnets, like calculators, templates, and checklists, and offer them to prospects in exchange for first-party data.

You can then upload your prospect list to an ad platform, like Google or LinkedIn, and run remarketing ads.

We also send prospects email nurture sequences relevant to the lead magnet.

For example, if prospects downloaded a lead magnet on content marketing ideas for enterprise SaaS, we might send them a nurture sequence on building a full content marketing program, including keyword research, content writing, content refreshing, and analytics.

Account Based Marketing

Cookies helped marketers by giving them information on their target audience. However, account based marketing is an effective replacement because you can still pinpoint who you target (i.e., the company and the specific titles within that company) and send them appropriate messages at each step of the buying journey.

Collaborate With Industry Partners

One of the first things we do when we begin a new engagement with a client is a full audit of their data tracking. During this audit, we first ensure the client is using the right tech and then use a scorecard to audit data accuracy and comprehensiveness.

Once you have accurate tracking in place, we can attribute closed won revenue to specific marketing activities, which helps us better understand which campaigns are most effective at each step of the buyer journey. This is arguably more valuable than data from cookies because it helps us understand what messaging resonates with particular prospects at each step of the buyer journey.

As a result, we can improve the efficiency of future marketing campaigns by improving messaging and targeting.

Key Remarketing Mistakes To Avoid

If you’re already investing in remarketing efforts and aren’t seeing a great ROI, you might be making one of these mistakes.

Focusing Exclusively on The Bottom of The Funnel

Bottom of the funnel marketing campaigns, such as targeting high purchase intent keywords with Google ads, are becoming more competitive and less profitable.

Therefore, the solution is to refocus your efforts higher in the marketing funnel and then use lead magnets and other permission based remarketing methods to nurture them through the buyer journey.

Assuming How Prospects Experience the Buyer Journey

Many SaaS companies map out a buyer journey, but it’s usually based on assumptions rather than real data. Unfortunately, if your assumptions are incorrect and the buyer journey you map out does not align with how prospects experience the buyer journey, you’ll likely lose prospects along the way.

This is because prospects won’t conform to the buyer journey you’ve laid out. If you don’t offer the next piece of information prospects need, they’ll simply go to a competitor for that information.

An example of this mistake that we frequently see is when SaaS companies include a call to action to schedule a demo in a blog post targeting a keyword that attracts a reader who is still at the very beginning of the buyer journey.

For example, someone researching “is cybersecurity important for my business,” isn’t ready to schedule a demo for an enterprise cybersecurity product.

A more appropriate CTA might be a lead magnet about implementing a cybersecurity strategy.

Therefore, the key to an effective remarketing strategy is to understand how your prospects choose to move through the buyer journey and then format your marketing strategy to meet them – not the other way around.

Therefore, talk to your customers and use data from Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) and Data Management Platforms (DMPs) to uncover these insights.

Inaccurate Data

While we established that having data from CDPs and DMPs is essential, many companies using this data still run into problems with remarketing for one of two reasons.

First, some companies capture a lot of data but lack a single source of truth. If you’re dealing with various disparate data points, extracting actionable insights to improve your marketing strategy is difficult. As a result, the data is essentially useless to your team.

The other problem we often find is that companies don’t realize that the data they’re collecting is inaccurate, which also makes the data useless (or even hurts their strategy).

That’s why we always begin each client engagement with a full audit of the SaaS company’s tracking to ensure the data is clean and accurate.

Get More Help Navigating A Cookieless Marketing Landscape

Even though a cookieless world makes data collection harder, consider it an opportunity to get to know your customers, their pain points, and the buyer journey on a deeper level.

Of course, the tricky part is learning how to understand your customers and the buyer journey better to ensure you send the right messaging at the right time.

This process has a lot of nuance, so that’s where we can help. At Powered By Search, we’ve helped dozens of enterprise SaaS companies navigate this challenge, and we can help you achieve the same success.

Reach out to us for a Free Marketing Plan today, and we can address how your brand can remain competitive in a cookieless marketing landscape.