In B2B marketing, Account-Based Marketing (ABM) has long been king – targeting companies as a whole rather than the actual people buying. But ABM often leaves marketers “in the dark,” since only the biggest accounts get any attention and most individual buyers stay anonymous. Contact-Based Marketing (CBM) is the emerging solution: it focuses on people, not just firms. As Vector’s blog explains, CBM “identifies and engages individual contacts based on their actual buying intent, rather than just their company affiliation”​. In practice, CBM lets you:

• Identify and engage real people (not just companies) – e.g. target “Sarah, the IT Director researching cloud security,” instead of blasting everyone at Company X
• Create hyper-targeted campaigns based on each buyer’s behavior.
• Track individual journeys across your funnel.
• Deliver personalized experiences that boost conversion rates.

In short, CBM fills the blind spots of traditional marketing. For example, Vector notes that roughly 80% of B2B buyers never visit your website, meaning conventional tools miss most demand. With contact-based methods, you can see who’s researching solutions off your site as well as on it, reaching prospects earlier in their journey.

Meet Vector: A Contact-Level Marketing Platform

Vector is a startup platform built from the ground up for CBM. Backed by Y Combinator and used by 1,000+ teams, it combines patented “digital fingerprinting” with a publisher network to reveal individual visitors on your site. In practical terms, a simple five-line JavaScript tag on your website lets Vector identify anonymous visitors, then notify your team in real time (for example via Slack) when a known prospect arrives. Even better, Vector’s system tracks “billions of intent signals across 20k+ topics”​, so it can flag contacts researching your market on other sites as well. As one Vector blog summarizes: “Vector is a contact-based marketing tool that delivers both account-level and contact-level intent data”, letting you see exactly which person in a target account is active in the funnel.

Put simply, Vector turns your website and marketing channels into a lead magnet. It builds contact profiles for visitors and interested buyers (e.g. by matching fingerprints, email hashes, etc.), surfaces high-value contacts, and pushes them into your workflow. For example, Vector boasts a roughly 15–30% match rate on US site traffic – meaning one in four or more visitors can be identified as a real person, not just an IP address. Once identified, these contacts can be fed into sales and marketing automation (Slack alerts, CRM records, ad audiences, email sequences, etc.) with no manual data wrangling.

Key Features of Vector

Vector’s platform centers on three core capabilities – de-anonymizing visitors, capturing intent, and activating contact audiences. These work together to let you personalize, optimize, and scale your campaigns:

• Contact-Level Website Identification (De-anonymization): By adding Vector’s tag, you reveal exactly who’s on your site. The platform “combines digital fingerprinting technology with a proprietary publisher network to reveal the hottest prospects on your site”. In practice, Vector will send real-time alerts (e.g. Slack messages) when a qualified contact lands on key pages. (Notably, even Vector’s free tier lets you “push site visitors directly into Slack” for immediate visibility.) As the site promises, you can “get real-time notifications of high-intent visitors” with just a few minutes of setup.
• Contact-Level Intent Data: Most buying research happens off your site – on forums, review sites, competitor blogs, etc. Vector tracks all that. It monitors buyer interest across thousands of topics (from “Web Hosting” to “Voice Recognition”). In fact, Vector advertises that it “tracks billions of signals across 20k+ topics so you can aim your marketing & sales campaigns at buyers who matter”​. This means you can see which specific people are researching your solutions (or competitors’), even if they haven’t visited your site. As the product team puts it: Vector lets you “detect off-site intent so you can see who is conducting market research — even if they’ve never been to your website before.”​
• Hyper-Targeted Ad Audiences: Armed with contact-level data, you can build pin‑pointed ad campaigns. Vector lets you push known contacts into Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, and other B2C ad networks as custom audiences. The advantage is huge: instead of blasting ads to everyone at a company, you only reach the actual decision-makers and stakeholders who’ve shown interest. In Vector’s words, this “dramatically increases match rates” and improves ROAS by “eliminating wasteful broad targeting”​. For example, rather than targeting an entire firm for your enterprise security product, you could create an ad list of the specific cybersecurity team members who recently researched security topics​. The result: higher click-through and lower cost. In short, Vector’s contact-based ad audiences help you focus ad spend only on in-market buyers​.
• Integrations & Playbooks (Automation): Vector plugs into your existing stack to scale CBM. It offers 50+ built-in integrations with tools like Slack, Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo, LinkedIn Ads, Google Ads, Meta Ads, and more​. There are also 100+ one-click “playbooks” (pre-made workflows) so that actions happen automatically. For example, Vector can push new contacts into HubSpot or Salesforce, enroll them in sales cadences (Apollo, Outreach, etc.), and update your marketing segments without any manual steps​. (On the free plan you get Slack alerts; on paid plans you get full CRM sync.) By integrating into your CRM, email system, ad platforms and chat tools, Vector ensures no lead slips through the cracks and lets you operate at scale.

These features work together to personalize and optimize every campaign. For instance, instead of lumping leads by company, you can create dynamic segments of individuals based on behavior: one segment of contacts browsing pricing pages, another of people downloading whitepapers, etc. Then you message each segment with content tailored to their interests. As Vector’s blog notes, “contact-based marketing allows you to build dynamic segments based on actual buyer behavior, intent signals, and engagement patterns — not just their employer.”​ In practice, when “Sarah, a Director of Marketing, clicks on your ROI calculator and downloads a case study,” Vector can automatically put her into a “High-Intent Marketing Leaders” segment for customized follow-up. This level of personalization drives higher engagement: you’re talking to people about exactly what they care about.

Personalizing and Optimizing Campaigns

With Vector, personalization is built into every campaign. By knowing who is showing interest and what they did, your team can craft messages that resonate. For example, instead of a generic pitch to everyone at an account, you might reach out to “Jennifer, a CFO at a mid-sized manufacturer” who’s been researching financial software on multiple industry sites – before she ever even visits your own site​. Because you know Jennifer’s role and needs, you can send her relevant whitepapers or a personalized demo invite. This precision targeting turns marketing spend into a conversation rather than a broadcast.

Vector also improves campaign performance and ROI. By focusing only on contacts with demonstrated intent, you cut waste. Ad spend gets channeled to real prospects, not random job titles. A recent Vector case study notes that using contact-level audiences “dramatically increase[s] match rates” and lets you get “the benefits of retargeting — before they even visit your site”​. In concrete terms, you might target only those 50 engineers who browsed your solution’s documentation, instead of 500 people who just share a company. This hyper-targeted approach boosts conversion rates while slashing cost-per-lead​. And even when people click your ads without converting, Vector identifies them so you can retarget those “ghosted” clicks with follow-ups​. In one example, “Michael, a CTO at a growing SaaS company,” clicks a cloud security ad and bounces. Vector will reveal Michael’s identity so you can send him a tailored case study or answer his objections – turning a lost click into a new lead

Here’s how Vector can activate CBM across your funnel:

• It alerts your team the instant a high-value contact visits your site (via Slack, email, etc.)​.
• It uncovers off-site intent, surfacing people researching your solutions on other websites.
• It builds targeted audiences by pushing those high-intent contacts into Google/Meta/LinkedIn campaigns.
• It syncs contacts into your CRM and marketing automation, triggering personalized emails and sales actions.

For example, Vector describes an automation where “when Jason, a VP of Sales, shows strong buyer intent signals, Vector can automatically add him to your high-priority Salesforce campaign, trigger a tailored email sequence, and include him in your executive-focused ad audience” – all without manual data exports​. This kind of workflow means you can handle thousands of intent signals without extra headcount, effectively scaling your CBM efforts.

Bringing It All Together

In summary, Vector is like a CBM engine that plugs into your existing marketing stack. It identifies who your prospects really are and what they’re interested in, then helps you reach them at the right time. By combining website de‑anonymization, off-site intent data, and contact-level ad audiences, Vector lets you “fill the funnel with high intent contacts, not meaningless accounts”. Marketers frustrated by the limits of traditional ABM find that Vector’s approach unifies signals across web visits, email, ads, social and more, and automates follow-through with “fully customizable workflows and AI agents”​. The result is more personalized touchpoints, higher conversion rates, and a campaign that scales smoothly as your market grows.

Whether you’re a small team just getting started or an enterprise ready to modernize your stack, Vector offers a self-service CBM platform that fits. You can start for free to see who’s on your site​ and then expand into paid tiers for off-site insights and advanced automations. In the era of fragmented buyer journeys, having contact-level clarity is a game-changer. As Vector.co puts it, contact-based marketing “gives you visibility into exactly who is on your site at the contact level” – and the ability to act on it​.