You might say Mozes is on a rock-n-roll these days.

Within just the last few weeks, Wired ran a feature on how the Palo Alto, Calif-based Mozes powers Umphrey’s McGee’s interactive UMBowl, a concert series that enables fans to shape the concert – in real time – using their mobiles phones.

And just this last week, The Silicon Valley Business Journal ran a profile on the company, which focuses on mobile engagement at live events for brand clients such as Coca-Cola, Ford Motor Company and Rock The Vote, among many others.

In part three of tour May Mobile Marketing Roundtable, we get the inside scoop from founder Dorrian Porter (full disclosure: A longtime friend, client, and sponsor of this blog), on how brands are leveraging the power of mobile at the all-important "point of inspiration."

MOBILE ROUNDTABLE (PT 3): MOZES ROCKS THE MOBILE REVOLUTION

Click here to listen to: Mobile Roundtable (Pt 3): Dorrian Porter - Mozes Rocks The Mobile Revolution

(11:07)

ALSO LISTEN TO:

MOBILE ROUNDTABLE (PT 1): Julie Fajgenbaum - How AMEX Banks on Mobile Marketing

MOBILE MARKETING ROUNDTABLE (PT 2): Organic's Rachel Pasqua - Kimberly Clark, Specialized Bicycles Ramp Up Mobile Marketing

The Audience Insights platform seeks to simplify the process of traditional "tagging" by using information that is already available. Audience Insights takes an accretive approach as it merges data from campaigns on DoubleClick and Atlas via the VivaKi Cookie Syncing Process, with the ultimate goal of providing a more robust and scaled view of audience insights and profiles.

"It has been very rewarding to see this initiative turn into an industry offering that can scale," said Kurt Unkel, president of the VivaKi Nerve Center. "This was a collaborative effort in which BlueKai and the Nerve Center brought forth ideas and technology that could truly make this a game-changing offering."

"We are thrilled to partner with VivaKi to bring this best-in-class platform to the marketplace," said BlueKai CEO Omar Tawakol. "Put simply, this partnership is furthering our mission to enable the ecosystem to not only have access to good data, but to also have the ability to drive ROI, make it actionable and integrate data in every platform."

If someone walks into a party and takes his pants of and swings them over his head, wears a toga, or does a dance with a lampshade on it'll be memorable. Or in the case of Jim Belushi, wearing a toga and smashing a guitar:

Click here to view the embedded video.

What's interesting is the next morning, you'll probably just recall "some crazy guy doing something crazy." You won't know his name or anything about him. Everyone remembers Belushi doing crazy things in Animal House, but who remembers his name was Bluto, or anything about him?

In contrast, how many parties have you been to when everyone leaves having met the soft spoken, brilliant artist, businessman, or college student. Maybe this person made a clever point over dinner, or just circulated in an easy fashion listening and chatting intelligently about the ideas and events.  Perhaps, he or she was a guest speaker who was invited to say a few words between cocktails and dinner?

The next morning, you turn to you wife or husband and recall this Memorable Person by name. You maybe even Facebook message the Memorable Person with ideas social or business. The Pants Taker Offer  - he's just a crazy story you tell. You don't need to take your pants off to make an impact. And in fact, if you're remembered for doing so, no one knows who you are, and no one would think of reaching out to you.

Large interstitial ads, push downs, and skins are the crazy guy at the party.  You kind of know something happened that was jarring but not much else.  This is why typical display advertising only has a brand lift (increase in favorability or purchase intent as a result of seeing a banner) of say 30% at best.

In contrast, Social Advertising, can see lifts that are multiples higher:

We've seen similar results in our work with GE and Virgin, among others.

What's amazing is how soft-spoken this social messaging can be.  A small icon saying, "Post by Brand X," or a Twitter feed or even just a Facebook post.  If the content is produced by the brand and exemplifies what the brand aspires to, no one misses who the message it from.

Click here to view the embedded video.

(Jump to 3:35 to see ad great Lee Clow explaining this phenomenon)

It makes people love and respect the soft-spoken thoughtful brand - there is no reason to wear a toga.

And so when I'm asked, "is there enough branding?" I point to the data.

The data shows, you don't need to wear a lampshade online to be noticed and remembered. And in fact, if you do don the toga, the results are pretty clear - when was the last time the guy who twirled his pants was remembered by name, respected, or asked to lunch.  You're jarred by the crazy behavior, but that's about it.

The way to behave at a party for the long term is pretty clear, and on the social web, it's just the same.

It’s obvious, but sometimes it takes a mother to show us that the well-worn path is not always the right path. And this is why your mother can actually buy media better than you.

Some Historical Perspective

See, here’s what she knew that can help online marketers right now. All online ad tracking systems used today are legacy systems built 15 years ago.  They erroneously give all credit for a conversion to the very last ad in line.  So if 10 ads were involved from the top of the conversion funnel to the bottom, the bottom one gets all credit.  You’ve heard of line cutters (folks who cut in line), these are funnel cutters—stealing all the credit by jumping in at the end. Why do we still measure everything this way?  Because that’s the way it was done, and we’re following everyone right off the media cliff.

We Are To Believe What?
Today, all those tracking systems have just one slot for which an online ad is credited with success (display/search social media/affiliate, etc).  Just one?  Are we to believe that college-educated media buyers pouring many hours over optimization should accept there’s only one ad responsible for a conversion?  Only one?  Even though the advertiser may be investing in five channels…there’s only one ad responsible for a conversion?  There are never two, three, or perhaps 17?

Are we to believe that even though the purchase funnel was created in 1898 by E. Lewis there’s no purchase funnel online…beginning with Awareness, Intent, Desire, and Action.  None?

Committing Media Suicide
Of course, anyone who looked at this situation with some perspective (like your mom) would  draw some parallels.  Your mom knows it takes many dates before you get married in the real world--and in the online world, it takes many impressions and clicks to convert.  Not just one.

What would your mom say?  In a slightly surprised and slightly irritated tone, she’d say, “What are you doing?  Just because everyone else is doing it that way, why would you do that!!  If all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you do it, too?  Of course not; you’re smarter than that!”

Your mom is or was smarter than every online advertiser who’s not using an attribution model.  And if your mom can see it, your client and your boss are going to see it very soon.

Now What?
What moms do is take a very complex problem and make it simple.  Same thing with attribution. It involves millions of views and clicks and thousands of transactions and attribution when used with a two-way communication platform, makes it easy enough that even your mom could buy media better than you (if you continue using legacy ad tracking systems).

Here’s how.  In a fractional attribution model, 100% of revenue, say from a Zappos transaction, is split and attributed among Originators, Assists, Converters plus what we call a Roster.  This can be done so that all four pieces of the pie equal 100%, and each of these four has a very different pie percentage--by industry, and by client.

Each ad player deemed worthy of attribution credit is tied to purchase funnel chronology with algorithms, like skipping brand term search credit when in last position and skipping credit for non-viewable impressions.  The fractional revenue is apportioned to the ad players on the team, which become the numerator of a fraction--and the cost of the ad player becomes the denominator of the fraction.  Divide them, and you have a trademark number called attributed value-to-spend-ratio.  A ratio of 2.0 means:  for every $1 you spent on a certain ad you get $2 in attributed revenue back.

With this one number, attribution modeling takes complex, big data and simplifies it.  You just gave birth to a new way of measurement:  an accurate way of measurement.

Growing Up
But as your fractional attribution baby grows up, its capabilities grow, too.  You might want to run sensitivity analyses or even conjoint analyses in C3 Metrics’ attribution sandbox as your data set gets more robust--or have our team of award-winning marketing scientists and Ph.D.s validate and adjust weights at finer levels with transaction-stream detail.  But for now, by not jumping off the media cliff with everyone else, your mom can buy media better than most.

You’re smarter than that.  Your mom knows it, too.

Mark Hughes is CEO of C3 Metrics

With apps such as Pandora, Slacker, TuneIn, Spotify, Stitcher, and iHeartRadio available at your finger tips, internet radio has become a popular way to access audio stream. Through the eyes of the advertiser, this phenomenon provides the opportunity to get what they really want: active consumers willing to engage in their brand.

Unlike traditional radio, many of these on-demand apps offer customized playlists, allowing the consumer to design the type of content they want. With registration data often including zip codes, this allows the advertiser to place relevant and compelling ads based on the consumers personalized music selection and their location. Internet radio can provide national reach or local market targeting and allows consumers to interact and engage with the advertisers website or Facebook page.

So what do these Internet stations offer and how do they differ in both a consumer and advertising perspective? Here is a brief summary of just a few of the popular stations being used today:

One of the main stations, and arguably the most well-known one is Pandora. According to a study released from Nielsen in June 2010, Pandora is one of the top three most downloaded apps from the Apple app store and consistently ranks in the top five most used apps in the BlackBerry and Android stores.

Like Pandora, iHeartRadio allows users to listen to stations based on artist, song or album. The difference with iHeartRadio is its vast majority of song selections. iHeartRadio listeners can choose from a massive catalog of more than 11 million songs and 400,000 artists- more than 10 times the number of songs offered by Pandora.

Another popular consumer choice is Slacker Radio. What sets Slacker apart from its competitors is that it has professional DJ’s that customize the song selections and stations. This offers more personalized content than the other technology run sites.

Stitcher is the leader in internet radio for the “world beyond music.” This online site “stitches” together news, sports or talk shows from stations like Fox News, CNN and ABC.

TuneIn allows you to listen to live local and global radio from wherever you are. Whether you want to listen to sports, news, music or current events, TuneIn offers over 50,000 stations and 120,000 shows. It gives you the effect that you “right there with the people and places that are important to you.”

Spotify allows branded apps and channels that allows an advertiser to provide an added value to their target audience. Louisiana Tourism recently used this to their advantage. When the campaign is no longer live…the channel lives on as a wonderful reminder. Spotify utilizes the king of social networks; Facebook. You can share your playlist with your friends. They have taken this one step further with the “life sound tracker.” Using the tracker, consumers can select friends on Facebook and Spotify will generate a playlist containing music from upcoming concerts in your area based on a mash-up of your friends’ music. Users can then have the option to generate a Facebook invite and send it to their friends.

Although Internet radio offers advertising opportunities across both online and mobile platforms, users can also pay a fee in order have an ad-free experience, which could be dismaying to a media partner.

But in an article written about Pandora, media and marketing specialist Kathryn Koegel, states:

“Typical radio stations play nine minutes of ads per hour according to a 2006 study and in a study of clutter on radio, it was reported to be as high as 20 minutes per hour on some stations*. A service like Pandora currently runs a maximum of three audio ads or less per hour and banner ads only appear on a device when a phone is not locked or dimmed thus only when the consumer is interacting with the device.”

The research shows that only 9% of Pandora subscribers pay to use the product. It is also shows extreme growth in the amount of users listening to Pandora on their mobile device versus the web. It allows optimization as we saw with a recent client. By paying attention to ongoing measurement, we saw that mobile’s click-thru rate was much higher than the web; therefore we switched impressions to only mobile.

As marketers, we can conclude that the majority of consumers do not mind advertising, especially if it is targeted to the listener. However, we must stay ahead of the curve in terms of unique and targeted advertising. With mobile technology rapidly advancing, the way consumers listen to radio will continue down this ever-changing path.

Well, what if you were told that your company’s message could be put in front of people actively searching for your products or services, that you could pick and choose your audience by location, gender, and age, and that you could even control what time of day and device type they found you on? Would it sound too good to be true?

And yet there’s more. Imagine this advertising tool allowed you to simultaneously test multiple ad messaging, didn’t require costly and time-consuming ad production, and could take affect almost immediately. And, unlike traditional advertising, you could measure everything - conversion rates, conversion costs, ROI, and what keywords or ads result directly in a lead.

Before you think the catch is that this must be super expensive, consider that you can set a fixed advertising budget as low as $50 a month, and only get charged if a prospect actually visits your online page.

This marketer’s dream is called Paid Search, often referred to as Search Engine Marketing (SEM). It’s real; I’ve been using it to grow my business since this tactic’s beginnings, then offered via the “GoTo” platform. I’ve kept pace with this evolving advertising method and have leveraged it to help grow my clients’ businesses, too. Regardless of the size of the company and the budget, Paid Search is one of the most efficient and effective tactics for generating leads, driving traffic, and growing a business.

Our team believes in Paid Search so much so that we now offer an end-to-end solution for this affordable advertising. We call it Managed SEM Programs. In short, our expert SEM managers identify clients’ goals; conduct extensive keyword, competitor, and bid rate research; develop optimized landing pages; and leverage sophisticated software to run campaigns across multiple search engines, monitor and analyze performance daily, and provide detailed reporting.

So if your company needs a boost of new customers, use the powerful and cost-effective channel of Paid Search. And if you prefer to let the professionals handle it, inquire about our Managed SEM Program to get even better results without having to shoulder all the efforts. Click here to request a free Search Engine Marketing analysis.

Today, more ad dollars are being allocated to digital and advertisers are working with retailers to develop campaigns that can be executed across all channels. Creating “cross-platform” campaigns can be difficult, however, when it comes to buying different types of media and integrating them into a single plan. From campaign creation to optimization and reporting, working across multiple platforms takes a great understanding of how to properly execute a campaign on every level.

At the recent ad:tech event held in San Francisco, there was a lot of discussion around the growth the digital advertising industry has seen and the challenges advertisers run into when executing “cross-platform” campaigns. A few of these challenges include:

Reducing complexity. When it comes to buying different types of media, there’s a concern for reducing the complexity of digital advertising and moving towards transparency between publishers and advertisers – knowing exactly what you are paying for.

Effective targeting. There is a struggle to effectively deliver an advertisement to a relevant audience. In order to achieve maximum ROI, retailers need to effectively reach consumers that fit their shopper profile. It will not matter if your advertisement reaches a large audience if they are not the right audience to receive your messaging. Fortunately, today, localized targeting ad solutions allow you to apply high accuracy targeting – getting local reach while maintaining national scale.

Despite these challenges, the opportunities digital advertising vehicles provide can demonstrate a strong return on investment. It has been and continues to be a great complement to traditional advertising methods. Data-centric planning paired with strong ad elements and DMA specific messaging/targeting are all components of a strong advertising campaign. Leverage current creative used for traditional channels for pre/mid-roll video ads on digital channels to reach a whole new audience and create a strong marketing mix.

The key participants of the this year’s Digital Content NewFronts (Hulu, Microsoft Advertising, AOL, Yahoo, Google/YouTube, Vevo, Disney) are telling us as Steve Jobs once did: to think differently. This different thinking is evident as the digital content landscape continues to evolve, as people continue to shift, integrate and multi-task with media channels and on devices.  Broadcast and digital are becoming more integrated.  The time people used to spend watching is now spent interacting, socializing and searching.  Video content is being pushed and pulled to all devices and consumers are watching video everywhere they go.  But what will they watch down the road?

The mission of the Digital Content NewFront (DCNF) is to shape a new marketplace for connecting the wealth of native digital content with brand marketers and their media and marketing agencies.  Similar to the Broadcast Television upfronts, the DCNF’s goal is to bring together a media industry comprised of the digital content space, brand marketers, investment, planning, across all media for a two-week series (April 19 – May 2) of events focused on digital content and media.

Before we move forward, let’s go back a few years.  Broadcast TV is bought in an upfront manner for two reasons: price and inventory guarantees.  Advertisers, fearing inflation over the year, want to lock in the lowest rates possible and get a guarantee of delivery.  Additionally, as the number of commercials in a program is fixed, advertisers also do not want to miss out on an opportunity to see their brand in a specific program.  So, in the ever-changing world of digital, would I want to commit dollars for an entire year, not having anything left for the next big thing?

Digital video publishers are trying their hand at this game, believing that by generating original content, they can create the same supply and demand dynamics in the marketplace.  YouTube invested 100 million dollars in original programming, Hulu is complementing its broadcast programming with more than nine original offerings, and Vevo is starting to look like MTV.  Ultimately, viewer behavior will determine the preferred programming.  Will they be willing to watch original programming on Hulu, where they are looking for that missed broadcast opportunity. It feels like YouTube will win here presenting original content since it really is just a big search engine.

Now, it’s time to argue the value of lean-forward and lean-back viewing.  Nielsen has its formulas, offering guarantees based on Nielsen's new online campaign ratings system, which purports to group digital television viewers into gross rating points-like collections of unique ad-watching users.  Even the CW Network recognizes that 70% of its audience leans forward, thus packaging both experiences into its total ratings delivery.  Supporting this proposed value of lean-forward, digital Newfront CPMS are looking to be twice that of traditional broadcast.

The bigger question is, who is buying the digital video?  Is it the domain of traditional TV buyers or the new dawn of digital specialists?  TV buyers will argue that if it is coming from the TV.coms then they should place integrated schedules using C3 ratings and fully-loaded commercial breaks.  What’s left for the digital specialist?  Hulu and YouTube might be the only scale in town.

So, what are the implications?  There is more inventory available than ever before for your video distribution.   It’s all digital, especially since TV stations stopped broadcasting in analog a few years ago.  You need to make your decisions based on meeting your client’s goals and expectations.

Finally,  the real game starts in two weeks when the traditional broadcast upfront begins because money does make the world go ‘round.

I don't think I need to make a case for politics being digital, so I won't bore you with that. But politics is branding. And just like a brand, political campaigns and political issue initiatives need to know where their customers come from. In politics the customers are different. They’re called voters, donors, influencers, or volunteers. By identifying the media patterns of those “constituents” and ensuring that ads you run to support a campaign are relevant and visible, campaigns can act like the most successful brands.

Political Campaigns Are Brands
This ability to advertise to constituents like the most successful brands becomes eminently more urgent because of two trends. The first is the SuperPAC.  SuperPACs are the Super Bowl of political spending. They are the force to dominate the battle of the airwaves with big impact. But as any battle tested brand knows, eventually you need to reach constituents on a micro level, giving way to the second most important trend in a political race:  micro-donations. Here's what I mean. Four years and three months ago, an election was determined by fund-raising, and the different approaches were apparent.

If you’ll remember, at the time, Obama and Hilary Rodham Clinton were in a tight race.  In January 2008, Clinton announced she raised $8.5 million and put in an additional $5 million of her own money for that month’s fundraise.

Obama nearly quadrupled Clinton in fundraising, clocking a raise of $32 million that month.  It was the final nail in the coffin for the Presidential nomination.   Clinton used old school strategy seeking big checks from few people.  Obama departed from the strategy right before Super Tuesday as the $32 million haul came predominantly from donations of $100 or less, with a staggering 90% of those donated on the web.

Micro Donations are Todays Super PAC
Fast-forward. Mitt Romney’s campaign, which has raised $86 million with only 9% of donations coming from $100 or less, is now appealing to smaller donors, which will have to carry the campaign through fall. Ted Moon, president of Washington DC-based interactive firm Pathfinder Interactive, says, “When the average voter plunks down their twenty dollars, things change.  They become actively vested in the campaign and start showing their support with stickers, yard signs, and today’s electronic yard sign:  Facebook.”

But a lot has changed in four years on the web.  Sites like Votizen didn’t exist, and ad technology was just coming into its own with display banner exchanges and real-time-bidding for Internet display banners, which were only an idea back then.

Micro Metrics Are Needed for Micro Donations
“Internet technology has gotten incredibly complex,” says Moon. “The biggest issue is attribution.  Campaigns spend precious ad dollars trying to rope in a donation of $20.  The difficulty is figuring out which ads on what sites and what geographies were the most efficient at raising those $20 donations which will soon amount to $50 million a month for the Presidential nominee.  So if you spend $10 or $30 million of ad dollars to get that $50 million, the difference could be $20 million a month either wasted or kept within the campaign to rope in even more donations.  It’s a huge difference.”

Now political marketers are confronted with the same shock that commercial marketers are now grappling with:  outdated online tracking systems mistakenly using what’s called last ad attribution.  It may take 27 banner ad exposures to get that $20 donation.  The last ad attribution problem with online ad tracking is that entire credit is erroneously given to the very last, 27^th ad, ignoring the value (and the cost) driven by other 26 ads.  Marketers have no idea what websites first prompted the $20 donation.  They only know what ad inaccurately stole credit by being the very last ad.

Perhaps it’s the only industry where you get rewarded for last place, but there’s a history to this flaw, which is estimated to bleed 30-45% from the $30 billion a year U.S. Internet ad industry.  These legacy ad tracking systems were built at the infancy of the Internet in the mid 1990’s.  In 2000, the NASDAQ crashed and tech investors ran for the hills, and everyone forgot about tracking infrastructure as thousands were laid off from Internet jobs.  But in 2004, the financial markets came back, and advertisers came back with it.  As money continued to pour online, YouTube exploded, blogs became the norm, browsers became multi-tabbed, and people began taking advantage of more research, reviews, and opinions before making a decision with their money.

Advertising Attribution is the Solution
In 2008 C3 Metrics began solving the problem by replacing current ad tracking systems so advertisers could finally determine what actually creates and accelerates demand. The longest running study on Attribution from C3 Metrics demonstrated $5 million in additional profit within 12 months.

“In a world of uncertain politics, one thing is certain,” said Moon. “The success of the Presidential race depends on how efficient the candidate is in spending ad dollars to corral $20 donations, which will amount to $50 million a month.  Without a change to the way Internet ad dollars are measured for fund raising, a campaign is dead.  From Super Tuesday on, it’s how 90% of donations will be raised.”

©All rights Reserved Peter Schofield

This is part 2 of a series on the challenge of targeting SMB markets and how the use of buyer modeling and buyer-based marketing help organizations to grow their SMB customer base.

In the first article of this series, we visited two new realities. One, that many Fortune 1000 and Global 2000 organizations are turning a focused eye towards growing their SMB customer and revenue base. With revenue growth potential shrinking in larger strategic accounts due to budget and pricing pressures, many are dedicating attention and resources with more determination than in the past. The second reality is that they are finding a very different buyer this time around than in the past. Simply put, SMB buyers are more social, more sophisticated, more connected, and are transforming their buying behaviors at an accelerated pace. New technologies opening their world to advantages only once afforded to large enterprises.

Waking up to these new realities has set up another challenge for executive leaders. That is of how to get to know the new SMB buyer. Here’s how one sales executive put this to me recently:

“One of the things we realized is that we have got to get to know our SMB customers. If you keep in mind that we haven’t really dedicated much resource to this area, then we are lacking in knowledge per se’. We’ve got to find out what is important to them versus just giving them some generic sales pitch.”

This is a very salient point for many organizations tend to view the SMB as a whole segment in of itself. The reality is that the SMB is highly fragmented and consists of many layers of sub-market segments. Getting to know what makes SMB buyers tick is, by no means, as easy as saying this is your SMB buyer. Layer on top of this the enormous changes in buyer behavior, the invisibility of SMB buyers in their sourcing for information, and new empowering technologies makes this endeavor a higher mountain to climb. It is no wonder many executives are walking out of their meetings where SMB growth is identified as a top priority saying – now what?

Getting To Know The New SMB Buyer

The first tough challenge is realizing that viewing the SMB as a single market and that rudimentary means of segmenting by employee size and revenue figures are not going to result in the understanding needed. While vertical segmentation is of significant help, what is paramount is knowledge of how these sub-markets and buyers within behave. What are steps that executives can take to understand the new SMB buyer?

Buyer Research: This has to be a clear mission. Getting to know the new SMB buyer is going to take some level of buyer research. It is going to take the integrated approach of committing to both quantitative and qualitative approaches to understand the full 360 degrees of the new SMB buyer.

Buyer Modeling: Depending on the degree of fragmentation in sub-markets, powerful buyer modeling can be an extensive exercise. However, one well-worth the upfront investment to get to know the new SMB buyer in ways that transforms efforts into an order of magnitude competitive advantage. There are several areas of modeling that by understanding them deeply, can make your organization relevant to buyers and core to their problem-solving:

Buyer Persona Modeling: What is important here is not to model the single archetypal buyer but to model the new levels of interactions buyers are having with newly formed ecosystems and networks. They may be SMB but they are growing exponentially and organically by creating new ecosystems. Buyer persona modeling represents composite archetypes based on behavioral research with a focus on identifying critical goals that drive buyer behaviors.

Buyer Scenario Modeling: To get a handle on the problems SMB buyers face and what confronts them, modeling buying scenarios can give your marketing and sales teams insight into how to be relevant. Additionally, this gives you the ability to address fragmentation and identify sub-market segments that have the best optimal scenarios to be part of the SMB buyer’s solution.

Buyer Decision Modeling: How SMB buyers are making purchase decisions today is changing so fast and by sub-markets that not monitoring this aspect of a SMB strategy can put an organization behind the curve. While looking at the buyer decision journey can be fruitful, in my qualitative research I’ve noted how the new SMB buyers are adept at more ad-hoc decision-making. Furthermore, with the rise of ecosystems and networks, collaborative efforts in making purchase decisions are not so neatly streamlined. Newer technologies are also making purchase decisions more decentralized than ever – making fragmentation on this issue even more complex.

Buyer Value Modeling: SMB buyers’ value varies widely by sub-market segments. Gaining insight and modeling how these values operate in their day-to-day world can help you to tailor offerings and communications to fit specific sub-market segments. Depending on the industry and markets, values in the SMB take on a deeper emotive texture and can be a deciding factor in purchase decisions.

Avoid Big Data Trap

With the rise of big data, there will be a tendency to try and “cut the numbers” every which way to make sense of the SMB market challenge. When dealing with 5,000 SMB accounts to 150,000 SMB accounts, the tasks of getting to know these SMB buyers at a deeper level can look downright daunting. Analytics will play an important role towards reaching understanding. I also contend and advocate that qualitative and predictive buyer modeling is essential to integrate into the mix of discovering the new SMB buyer of today. Buyer behavior within the SMB world is rapidly changing. A reasonable assumption can be made that in some SMB sub-market segments it is changing at a faster pace than that of larger organizations.

The combined use of analytics and predictive buyer modeling can yield an insightful picture into how these new behaviors translate into uncovering why buyers make purchase decisions. And, get closer to the holy grail of uncovering the reasons why they would change.

Next Up: The Importance of Buyer-Based Marketing in SMB

Follow @TonyZambito

Related articles

• Your Top Priority Is Growing The SMB Revenue Base - Now What? (buyerology.com)
• How B2B Leaders Are Understanding Buyers Better With Behavioral Buyergraphics (buyerology.com)
• The Single Buyer Model: A Dangerous Road Towards Competitive B2B Marketing (buyerology.com)
• 4 Ways the Power of Buyer Choice Will Transform Business Marketing (buyerology.com)
• Slow Death of the Funnel: Why Buyer Choice Matters to Revenue (buyerology.com)
• Predictive Buyer Modeling Is Changing the Future of B2B (buyerology.com)

Successful across multiple verticals including consumer services, financial, retail, insurance and automotive, lead generation is a win-win for both the buyer and seller since the consumer is requesting information on a product that they are interested in and the brand is pitching their product to somebody who is already interested and has granted permission to the company to send them more information.

Since lead generation is a cost effective medium to acquire new potential customers, following are eight steps to creating a successful lead generation program:

Step #1- Establish a comprehensive plan that ties in sales and marketing goals and then establish goals for the lead generation campaign. While lead price should be a factor in measuring success, it should not be the sole metric but rather there should be a focus on back end ROI.  Since not all leads are created equally, attention should be given to quality over quantity.

Step #2- Identify the acquisition channels that best match your campaign’s core demographics and target audience.  Not all channels of media will be a fit for every client, therefore, try working with a digital marketing agency or expert who can help you determine what channel or channels will work best for your business based on their previous experience and knowledge.

Step #3- Maximize your campaign with an effective landing page.  The job of a landing page is to convert interest into leads, so it is important to make sure that your landing page provides a clear answer to your consumers’ needs.  A small increase in your landing page conversion rate generates more conversions for the same cost, so make sure that your messaging, imagery and form is maintained and speaks to your consumer.

Step #4- Implement and execute your campaign with relevant publisher placements.  To guarantee successful results, work with partners who reach your target audience and provide you with quality placement.

Step #5- Track your campaign performance and analyze your lead results.  Are all your leads coming from one specific publisher or acquisition channel? Are you receiving quality leads?  Are there additional fields you would like to add or remove from your form?  It is important to look at your leads in order to optimize your campaign for peak results.

Step#6- Establish a remarketing strategy. All leads generated from online efforts may not result in conversions during your initial effort at making contact with a prospect.  Ensure that you have a remarketing plan in place that is consistent and follows up with potential customers.  Make sure your call center and remarketing email messages are aligned with your initial message when a lead is collected.  Timing is also of the essence when following up with prospects.

Step #7- Based on overall results, continue to test and optimize your lead campaign to ensure optimal performance and results.  Some methods of testing include testing landing page elements such as headline copy, call-to-action copy, key product or service benefits, hero image, number of fields collected, A/B or multivariate testing, analysis of the conversion funnel process and testing and expanding new partners and acquisition channels.  Continue to test and improve on your remarketing efforts as the campaign continues to grow.

Step #8- The most important step-  MAKE THE COMMITMENT -  a lead generation campaign takes a lot of effort, testing and relationship building to become very successful for the long term.  Make a strategic and financial commitment as part of your marketing initiative especially if leads are integral to your business.  The initial ebb and flow of a campaign will only become more consistent if you are committed and follow some of the approaches outlined above!

The end goal for a lead generation program is to maximize leads and increase the bottom line.  With the help of these 8 steps, a successful and effective online lead generation program can be created and achieved.

Do Your Research Before You Pick Up The Phone © All Rights Reserved Kenny Madden

This is part 1 of a series on the challenge of targeting SMB markets and how the use of target buyer modeling and buyer-based marketing help organizations to grow their SMB customer base.

As we continue to come out of the deep freeze over the last few years, we are beginning to see encouraging signs of an economic recovery. However, the purse strings are still drawn tight and new patterns of buying has created an atmosphere of even more exacting pricing pressures from enterprise-wide level buyers and accounts. This means less room for revenue growth to come directly from the fabled 20-30 percent of large customers who typically have made up 70-80 percent of total revenues. This is how a VP of Sales in the software industry put it to me recently in my research:

“Here is what it looks like…we are actually selling more of our product into our larger accounts than ever before….but…over the last three years we've faced stiffer competition that has driven our pricing down. So the net-net has been that we are just holding on as best we can to these larger accounts. Another words, we are not getting significant real revenue growth from them.”

It is highly likely that this refrain is being repeated across many Fortune 1000, Global 2000, and even Inc. 500 listed companies across the globe. With revenue growth opportunities shrinking among their large accounts, senior leaders in these organizations are turning a focused eye towards the highly sought after small and mid-size business segment. For instance, in the highly compettive world of IT Products and Services, both HP and IBM made substantial investments and strategic moves in 2011 to target the SMB segment. Challenging Dell and its' low cost entry strategy for small to mid-size businesses.

A New Challenge And A New Frontier

There is good reason for Fortune 1000 or Global 2000 companies to target revenue growth from the SMB segment. It is one of the fastest growing segments and traditionally has been coming out of a recession. It also has proven to be lucrative when you consider that actual contribution margin percentages are much richer per sale when compared to large accounts. It is little surprise that senior executives have shifted at least one eye towards expanding their SMB customer base and tapping into the revenue growth potential that can exists.

While targeting or at least accounting for the SMB segment is not a new idea to larger enterprises, this time around they are waking up to new buyer realities. Buyer behaviors continue to change rapidly and these new behaviors are associated with largely buyer-driven changes. What is confronting those wanting to achieve revenue growth from SMB buyers and companies is that they may know very little about these buyers and companies. How to market to SMB buyers and companies becoming one of the hot priority items showing up on the agenda of many large enterprise management meetings being held daily, weekly, or monthly. As one Senior VP of Sales and Markerting in IT pointed out to me recently:

“I am almost afraid to admit that we may have taken the SME (my notation: some executives refer to SMB as SME – small and mid-size enterprises) businesses for granted all these years. We never really moved beyond segmenting by employee size and revenue so we really don’t know a lot about SME’s as we should. It’s easy say you want to target them but planning how to target them is basically a whole new ball game for us.”

Because little knowledge may exist about SMB businesses and buyers, there are perhaps more assumptions being made about SMB than for larger accounts. Generalized perceptions and preconceived notions run rampant in the halls and meeting rooms of larger enterprises attempting to figure out how to market to SMB segments. There is what I call a “definition churn” that can happen when knowledge is found wanting – new definitions, classifications, segmentations, and etc. begin to appear every 3, 6, 9, or 12 months. Moving around 1,000’s of accounts and prospects in virtual databases to new buckets created for employee size, revenue size, product targets, and verticals.

Unprecedented Transformation Occurring

In the past, working with these definitions may have been sufficient. Looking ahead into the future - and the near future at that – these definitions alone will no doubt prove to be limiting and even detrimental to growth. We are experiencing an unprecedented transformation in the world of business with new buyer-driven economies, ecosystems, networks, and communications emerging constantly – making understanding of SMB buyers and companies that may have been attained even as little 3 to 5 years ago nearly obsolete.

For many large enterprise organizations that show up on the famed Fortune 1000 or Global 2000 lists, growing the SMB customer base may be their number one, or at least in the top five, priority. It is also, as a result of new buyer realities that are emerging, their number one challenge. To tackle both angles of this two-sided coin, gaining deeper layers of understanding about SMB buyers and companies will need to get on these same priority lists.

Next Up: Understanding New Buyer Realities In SMB

Follow @TonyZambito

Related articles

• Predictive Buyer Modeling Is Changing the Future of B2B (buyerology.com)
• Revenue Growth by Choice and The Buyer Orbit (buyerology.com)
• 5 Ways New Buyer Behaviors Are Impacting B2B Sales (buyerology.com)
• 3 Ways To Connect With Today's B2B Buyers (customerthink.com)

The mobile space encompasses all users who view the internet either through their mobile smartphone device or through a tablet.  Shortly, we will be heading into a post PC world where total usage of smartphones, tablets and upcoming products will eclipse total usage of the desktop/laptop. What's amazing is the speed at which this transformation is taking place.  In 2011, there were a total of 117.9 million smartphones in the US and that number will continue to rise to 155.6 million in 2012, a 32% increase. Tablet usage is growing even faster, with the US tablet user base reaching 33.7 million in 2011, and expected to nearly double to 54.8 million in 2012, a 62.8% increase (eMarketer).

From the presentations at the summit and from speaking with other executives in the mobile business, it is clear that larger brands are taking steps to address the radical shifts in web usage taking place. Design wise, brands are encouraged to have responsive web designed pages, crafted with fluid proportion-based grids which adapt the layout to the viewing environment so users across a broad range of devices and browsers will have access to a single source of content.  A good example of this is JetBlue's newly redesigned home pages; larger buttons and simple navigation were purposely incorporated into the site to account for the increase in users accessing the site with their tablets.

The reality is that if they haven't already, brands need to also address mobile in their overall marketing mix and acquisition strategies.  A good starting point is to define what problem you are trying to solve with mobile marketing and then look to develop a campaign strategy that will address that issue.  Until now, many brands have looked at mobile as purely a tool to build stronger ties with existing customers.   However, with the growth of mobile usage, combined with the familiarity and comfort that consumers have with their devices, new customer acquisition and lead generation through mobile is increasingly becoming a reality.   When executed correctly, there is no reason why a lead generation and acquisition campaign cannot take place through a mobile experience.

Another area of interest during the summit was the growth of mobile applications in the marketing mix and the strategies being used to promote installations.   Again, with the incredible growth of the mobile app ecosystem, brands know they need to have a presence and a dedicated app strategy.  Mobile applications have greatly increased the number of innovative ways that brands can interact and attract consumers,  however, like building a great website, it is simply not enough to build an app and wait for users.  Brands are employing a number of tactics for driving installs, from viral campaigns to paid mobile media, but it is clear that a strong strategy on how you plan to promote your app is a key component even before building it.

Overall, it is an exciting time to be a part of the mobile advertising marketplace.  Successful digital marketing strategies such as lead generation, search and display have been adapted, customized and optimized for mobile devices and new strategies such as mobile application installs have been developed in order to address this new medium.  With a full range of mobile marketing solutions, it is great to see advertisers embrace the mobile industry as we enter the post PC age.

Where can you find this hidden treasure? Your domain portfolio.

If you’re using domain names effectively, your company probably has a pretty sizable portfolio. They’re an important piece of the online marketing puzzle for branding, copyright protection, search engine optimization and overall ease of navigation for your customers. Most companies own hundreds or even thousands of domains for these purposes.

You or your colleagues purchased the domains in your company’s portfolio for a variety of reasons, and although some of these names are serving their intended purpose, others are not. Maybe you purchased a handful of keyword domains for a product that never panned out. Maybe you created a landing page for a creative campaign that just didn’t take off. Now is a better time than ever to take a close look at your company’s domain portfolio and to start identifying names that are sitting idle.

Why? Domain name prices have reached historical highs, making it a great time to sell.

According to IDNX, the world’s first standardized domain price index, the domain market set a new record in terms of sales prices during March 2012. Using real estate economic methodology and applying it to hundreds-of-thousands of domain transactions over the past six years, IDNX provides critical insight into the market value of domains. In fact, IDNX shows strong correlation between the value of domain names and other economic indicators like the NASDAQ.

IDNX compared to the NASDAQ 100 and share price of Google since 2006

Just like other economic assets, domain values may fluctuate, but they’ve proven to appreciate over time. Because of this, there’s very little financial risk to buying domains for a variety of online marketing needs. Don’t be afraid to experiment with how your company uses domains: if certain names don’t work out, you can always sell them to get your money back or even turn a profit.

If your company is already using domains strategically, now’s the time to audit your portfolio. If you have names that are just sitting idle, list them for sale. Using a trusted marketplace, you could put them to auction, list them at a fixed price or – for names that may be particularly valuable – broker them privately.

You could be sitting on a cash reserve without even knowing it. With domains priced at an all time high, it’s a better time than ever to take a closer look.

Higher Grade Product Design Concept Models (Photo credit: Jordanhill School D&T Dept)

This is part 5 and final article of a limited series on why buyer choice modeling is the new view B2B Business must adopt to improve revenue performance and develop long lasting relationships with buyers.

How buyers make choices today, in large part driven by empowering new technologies, will transform how B2B businesses will view buyers as well as redefine what is meant by business marketing. The rigid funnel will no longer serve as a workable means of communicating unique views of buyers and their buying behaviors. This not to say that buyer processes, stages, and steps are no longer relevant but to highlight that buyers today no longer make choices neatly in the paradigm of the funnel. A rigid funnel view, whether it is drawn up horizontal or vertical, cannot provide the orbital view of choices being made continuously.

There are four ways that new buyer choice dynamics will transform the practice of business marketing and alter the view of what practices are relevant:

Predictive Buyer Modeling And Intelligence

As we covered, many B2B businesses are wrestling with the unknown and the invisible. B2B buyers are remaining invisible in their behaviors associated with exploring as well as establishing new networks of participants in decision-making. There will be a rise in the use of buyer modeling techniques as well as integrating the use of buyer intelligence, predictive analytics, and the illuminating aspects of predictive buyer modeling. The changes underway in buyer behavior will cause B2B business marketing to extend well beyond conventional buyer profiling as well as simplistic buyer persona creating for demand generation.

Reorient From Business Marketing Teams to Buyer Driven Marketing Teams

Traditional business marketing has been historically put together teams that are seller driven and narrowly funnel focused. The single buyer model view narrowly shared across all channels. Leaders in B2B marketing and sales will soon have to migrate towards buyer segment teams that are focused on activities that are focused on the buyer’s entire brand and buyer experience. We are beginning to see leading organizations, such as GE, move towards aligning their organizations to industry buyer segment teams focused on deeper understanding and alignment with buyers.

Create Orbital Match With Buyers

B2B is becoming more complex with every passing month. When informed with deep buyer intelligence, business marketing can begin to align to the continuous orbital loop of what confronts buyers and how they make choices. The new role of business marketing is to pull buyers into an orbital loop that mirrors their own and enables choices that are buyer driven. The new business marketing strategy is to create the gravitational pull that buyers feel and are drawn to because it aligns with their own orbital loops. Conversely, how can your organization get close to the buyer’s own gravitational pull and be drawn into their orbital loop? This is a departure from the seller driven and narrow funnel view of push messaging. Another way of positioning this concept in simple terms is this: either your B2B business becomes part of the orbital loop or you can watch it from afar with a telescope – and be out of the loop.

Total Brand and Buyer Experience

Business marketing today can take a strong leadership role in organizations by transforming itself to an orientation around the buyer. Historically, in the seller driven and narrow funnel view world, business marketing has been positioned as the conveyers of getting information in front of buyers. Producing material that buyers could read, provide messaging to sales, and putting together promotional programs with the aim to get sellers to sell harder. My intuitive guess is that in the world of business marketing, this positioning still exists in a large majority of B2B organizations – perhaps trapped within the label of marketing communications. To influence corporate strategy and decision-making, business marketing must now become the conveyors of buyer intelligence and influencing organizations to orient around the buyer. Conveying that what counts is the total brand and buyer experience and that business marketing’s role is to help create these experiences for buyers.

Business marketing today, by making these four ways the cornerstone of transformation, can enhance their leadership role in organizations. Orienting businesses around the understanding of buyer choices being made in a new complex buyer driven world. This is no easy challenge yet one that business marketing must take up. It must demonstrate that it understands buyers deeply and that a designed focus on the total brand and buyer experience is the new business marketing strategy. It is time for business marketing to come out of the literature closet and lead.

(This 5 part series has been compiled into an eBook entitled, A Matter of Choice: How B2B Buyers Choose in Today’s Complex Markets, to make for easy reading and sharing. Click on the hyperlinked title to receive.)

Follow @TonyZambito

Related articles

• 3 Ways To Connect With Today's B2B Buyers (buyerology.com)
• The Buyerology of the Buyer: How B2B Leaders Respond to the Psychology of Buyer Choice (buyerology.com)
• Revenue Growth by Choice and The Buyer Orbit (buyerology.com)
• Slow Death of the Funnel: Why Buyer Choice Matters to Revenue (buyerology.com)
• The Single Buyer Model: A Dangerous Road Towards Competitive B2B Marketing (buyerology.com)

I will admit, while being a little surprised that Apple does not have a mobile optimized site, I am not the least bit surprised when other websites don’t (some of our competitors in the Mobile Advertising market do not). In fact the opposite is true – I am pleasantly surprised when they do.

According to a recent report, only 20% of the FTSE100 corporate websites currently provide support for mobile devices. How can this be acceptable?

Mobiles and smartphones in particular, are quickly becoming our primary content consumption devices. Research shows that accessing the web through mobile devices has consistently doubled every year since 2009 and by 2014, will overtake desktop internet usage. Morgan Stanley predicts that in the next five years more people will connect to the Internet via mobile than on a PC.

So not only are the majority of companies not catering to the habits of their users and not keeping up with changing trends, they are also causing their business to under perform.

Research by Aberdeen Group shows that companies that provide mobile-optimized content outperform those that don’t by 80% in terms of year-over-year increase in web traffic and achieve a 55% greater year-over year increase in the number of repeat visitors. And different research predicts that companies with properly mobile-optimized sites, can increase sales by 12%.

Now days, most companies have adopted digital marketing into their overall marketing strategy – from sending out email newsletters to online search campaigns. However, the market has moved so quickly, that companies without mobile sites, are again behind the trend.

Between 15 – 25% (and in some industries up to 50%) of people read their emails on a mobile device. That means that if you have links to offers or news within those emails, your customers are being taken to sites that are not optimized for the device they are viewing them on.

And mobile search already accounts for over 12% of total search and more than 50% of all “local” searches are done from a mobile device. Just imagine the lost opportunity that this represents with so few companies able to fully utilize this traffic.

So why have companies been so slow at implementing mobile sites?

Fears of additional cost or the management of multiple sites are often quoted as reasons for not implementing mobile sites. However, mobile sites are not meant to be identical to an existing website. They are meant to be “slimmed down” versions that are easy to navigate on the smaller format while still be a great showcase for the business.

And the cost of implementing these sites can be small, especially relative to the lost opportunity of not having a mobile site. And for companies that don’t have the in-house resources, there are a multitude of companies and software solutions to turn existing sites into a mobile optimized site.

The reality is, with so many companies still struggling to implement effective web strategies, this is just another area of digital marketing where they are going to lag even further behind the market. For those that have begun or have already implemented their mobile strategies – the market will be their oyster.

UXD is changing how brands approach strategic planning and how they develop customer insights. Once thought of exclusively as a digital concept, UXD promises to stitch together what consumers say with what consumers actually or habitually do to create insights that will suggest how messages are framed and where messages are transmitted and received.

In applying  UXD principles to integrated marketing programs, consider these 3 key factors.

End-to-End Planning. It’s not just about the product or the transaction. People want to buy into brands not just buy stuff. You need a longitudinal perspective on the process. Anticipate and plan for information needs, feelings and functionalities at every step from the first glimmer of an idea in your prospect’s mind through the completion of a successful interaction and onto the next one. Every customer takes a journey to identify and interact with your brand. Map it. Think about it and carefully decide when, where and how you will have opportunities to shape the sequence, the messages, the offers, the incentives, the rewards, the confirmations and the back sell communications.

Frictionless Interactions. The holy grail of UXD is to make every interaction simple, easy, intuitive and rewarding. It’s a very tall order, which requires alignment of all your resources to figure out where the likely hiccups might occur. Understand who your prospect is, what they are after and how they go about getting it. Then design your engagement mechanisms.

Ethnographic research, rapid prototyping, task-oriented testing, in situ observation, eye-mapping and careful interviewing are the preferred UXD techniques which when married to focus groups, qualitative and quantitative research and customer data can deepen or supercharge a brand’s customer insights. The more you get into her head; the better. The more you understand her context; the better. The more you understand her workflow and her coping devices; the better. The more you anticipate where and how she’ll be hesitant, confused or doubtful; the better.

Create Visual Cues. Too many brand experiences are like driving in New Jersey; under-marked and confusing. Develop plenty of visual cues to orient and direct prospects and customers. You can never reinforce where they are and where they are heading too much. Think of the customer journey like driving the interstate highway system. Anticipate where prospects will get antsy, where they need gentle reinforcement, where they need a big honking sign and when they need confirmation that they’ve gone in the right direction or made the right choice.

The integration of UXD with traditional strategic planning will create a more accurate and powerful tool for brands to build deeper customer understanding, intimacy and loyalty.

As the price of oil rises, it’s become economical to invest in new technologies thatrecover previously expensive sources of natural gas and oil. Two techniques - natural gas 'fracking' and shale oil extraction –have emerged as viable alternatives that.Both approaches require new technology, place a premium on available inventory and are disruptive to existing producers. These are not methods you use when oil is cheap and plentiful.

Oil isn’t cheap and plentiful like it used to be. 30 years ago China and India weren’t growing at 10% a year and the internet was nothing more than an academic and military communications tool.

The parallels between the energyeconomy to the current ad technology ecosystem are not obvious at first. But when you take a look at the ad ecosystem - and Terry Kawaja’sLumascape - the parallels are stunning. As demand for more has risen over the last two decades, more companies and more technologies have arrived to fill the gaps and create new sources of inventory to satisfy new demand.

When oil was first 'discovered', in western Pennsylvania in the middle of the 19th century, it was very close to the surface. This madeextraction simple, but messy and inefficient. John D Rockefeller's consolidation of the early oil industry into Standard Oil introduced efficiency. As worldwide exchange for trading oil and its derivatives developed, the US dollar was standardized as the Reserve Currency to stabilize the market. Since thattime all oil, even internationally, is bought and sold only in US dollars.

The development of this complex system for extracting, trading, transporting and refining oil took  nearly a century to develop. By comparison, the same process took the online ad industry less than 15 years.

Within the ad tech ecosystem, Doubleclick was Standard Oil. Overture would have been British Petroleum, but they ceded this mantle to Google.  24/7 Real Media became Dutch Shell. Various other ad networks became versions of Philips, Citgo, Getty, Chesapeake Energy and Lukoil.

A barrel of Oil? In today’s ad world, the standard measure is CPM.

Over time, vertical control of oil field operations left the control of the 'oil' companies and became separate businesses. The rise of the SSPs echo this development, as companies like AdMeld, The Rubicon Project and Pubmatic became the Halliburtons of the ad world and helped manage yield. Their plumbing provided the raw material for Google AdX and other exchanges to monetize. Media companies like Yahoo, seeing the value of their own fields, sought to buy technologies like Right Media to better monetize their own inventory and then applied this technology to other companies’ fields. DSPs like Turnand Invite developed ways for buyers to target the fields that best met their needs.

Still, during all this time, these companies were recovering most of the easy stuff: web display ads on the best publishers' pages. Using a standard set of recovery tools - iFrames, JavaScript, and Flash - these OPEC-like players competed for the ad inventoryby bidding for the highest quality impressions, or the best crude oil, that they could find. Like wildcatters of the old days, Publishers realized that more home page inventory meant more revenue and created new editorial products to be sold. As long as the users visited and occasionally engaged, all was good. Publishers even started to monetize impossibly tiny audiences on impossibly small screens via mobile apps and companies like AdMobwere created overnight to pursue and exploit this market.

However, throughout this flowering of ad technology innovation, one humongous source of potential inventory has stubbornly avoided profitable exploitation:  the real estate residing within email newsletters, alerts and notifications. Breaking news. Friend and game requests. Transactional messaging. Status Updates and reminders.

Email, the universal tool of communication - the number one way for publishers to remind you to visit their site, for social media services to notify you of a post, and for etailers to send you your confirm – has until recently relatively untouched by the ad tech revolution. Unmonetized except by retail email marketers. While retailers have long appreciated email as an effective marketing tool, the issue is that, in the hands of a publisher, email has long been underutilized and has remained a loss leader. Big time.

Why is that?

Cost. The hassle factor of buying and selling email inventory. It’s been too hard to sell, and too hard to buy. Everyone else has been selling impressions and clicks while email has been selling sends. And selling them asynchronously. The time has come for a change.

The amount of premium display inventory available in email dwarfs that of display. There are approximately three billion email addresses in existence today, four times the number of Facebook users. Much of that email volume, estimated at 170 million messages a minute, is being read using HTML readers, which, similar to display, are capable of serving images. As more users move to smartphones, the number of HTML5-enabled readers grows by the minute. All of this is for a solution to recover the valuable latent ad inventory locked within it.

The reason email inventory hasn’t been exploited is very simple: without flash, javascript and iFrames – the drilling tools of the ad tech ecosystem –advertisers and agencies couldn’t buy it the way they can buy display. And publishers couldn’t sell it like they could sell display.  So it just sat there. Until now.

LiveIntent has ‘fracked’ the latent inventory lying dormant within email newsletters, alerts and notifications and has made it available for buyers and sellers just like every other form of interactive inventory that’s been created.

With this revolutionary extraction method – no flash or javascript required - email advertising finally has developed the real-time technology to unlock the high-attention, opted-in ad inventory of the newsletter, which allows it to be bought and sold as efficiently as display. Publishers can now fully monetize inventory, something that had been nearly impossible and cost-prohibitive prior to this innovation. Advertisers can now target, bid and buy impressions within emails where users are routinely spending 20 or more seconds - impression quality that approaches billboards or television.

This is a really big deal. With the growth of the smartphone, people are spending increasing amounts of time reading email. Where before it was a desk-bound activity, now people – for good or bad – can read email anywhere they want, and on devices that render in HTML5, often a better platform than what they have on their desktop computer.

Advertisers can now buy email ad inventory that can truly be called local and mobile. Publishers can now make money sending email like their counterparts within the retail sector.

What’s most exciting? People click ads in email at a rate 10x in traditional display. People spend almost 30 seconds in an email when they open it.  Why? Because unlike in display, with it’s high bounce rate and short time on page, readers of opt-in newsletters have asked to receive the content, and there is high trust factor when requested content is paired with an ad.

So if you were deciding whether you were going to create another subsection on your website, another page four clicks down, think twice. There is another property that you own, another property that you can sell, and you push it to your best customers – it’s your email newsletters, alerts and notifications. Use this inventory and you’ve ‘fracked’ your way to some new revenue that technological innovation has created for you.

Definitely worth a read on some of the major issues, Namely’s CEO, Matt Straz pointed out in a bold MediaPost article, “People who work at agencies are frustrated because RFPs are still largely managed through email. A single RFP sent to a dozen publishers can result in hundreds of emails going back and forth among the parties.” Clearly, the process is tedious and lets be honest – it can be maddening.

A special poll recently conducted by STRATA (with agencies of varying sizes that are on a wide spectrum of buying systems) turned up some alarming information, mainly that many people have thrown their hands in the air when it comes to the Digital RFP process. While 27% say they plan to purchase a platform to handle the process – a more surprising 58% said that they will not buy a system to handle this increasingly important media process.

So what are they left to do? Here is the shocking part for all of us in the media buying software industry – only 25% say they will use their media system. Ouch. Nearly half said they will use Excel to handle the process. A process that Straz labeled in his article is a pain in the neck for literally everyone, including the sellers, buyers and publishers.

I’m not saying that STRATA removed the Digital RFP sword from the stone when no one else could, but we have recently launched a Digital RFP module to our buying system that boils the request/response workflow process down to a couple of clicks while expediting negotiations and inventory selection.  I’d be lying if I didn’t say that we are pretty excited about it. BUT, there remains a problem. It is a problem of a mindset that is stuck in a traditional process. It is a mindset that as we have noticed for years – where Digital is great but Traditional remains the bread and butter. Well over a third of STRATA Survey participants say that they don’t ever see Digital ad spend being greater than Traditional.

What does the industry need to do? Educate. We as system providers need to educate the agencies on what is needed to streamline the process that includes Digital RFP. Yes, it is different than Spot TV or Print. But they can be equally or even more effective (sorry, Excel isn’t efficient). If agencies feel comfortable leveraging these tools, that will come across to their clients and demonstrating the value of Digital will be simple. I know for us at STRATA, we have the tools in place and it is up to us to educate agencies to help push this ever-changing advertising avenue forward.

Building A Tribe Of Buyers ©All Rights Reserved Kenny Madden

Many B2B Marketers today are faced with the daunting tasks of connecting with buyers in new ways and using new mediums that are still in infancy. New tactical approaches have been introduced at a rapid rate and some old ideas re-purposed with new labels – all in an effort to find the ever flowing fountain of gaining buyer attention. The shelf-life expectancy of some of the new approaches is yet to be known; making investment and resource decisions for leaders in B2B Marketing a road filled with risks. For many of these new approaches, the foundation of thinking is still directed towards the single buyer model that has been the standard way of thinking for several decades.

Evidence is building that the standardized focus on a single buyer model has major disadvantages: depictions have lacked in the reality of the real world today, they are narrowly focused on messaging to one buyer or role, it is an over simplification of marketing and selling to a buyer, they are created with little research, and are routinely ignored by selling teams today. These disadvantages are overshadowing the higher-cost and dangers of the single buyer model used in ways where missteps are being made in overall buyer strategy. These missteps resulting in significant loss of marketing dollars and waste of valuable yet limited resources.

How Did We Get Here?

The single buyer model had worked well right up to the advent of the Internet and email. That’s when the barriers started falling down like the Berlin Wall at the end of the cold war. Up until then, all the power of information was held in the hands of the supplier. And in most cases, there was a single buyer target that needed the closely held information. Complex buying was an arduous task assigned to one decision-maker and sellers did all they could to target that one most important buyer – including bringing coffee and donuts. Marketing played the role of supplying information in literature form and focused on advertising. Sales role was to target the single buyer. Sales training was all geared to train sellers how to persuade the single buyer and in the 1980’s we started to see models of how to determine the psyche of the single buyer – was he or she an amiable or an analytical?

The single buyer model is still the major face of the buyer in many B2B organizations. Evidence suggests that this singular picture of the buyer is cracking like an old oil painting found in an attic:

• • It made sense for many years. After all we are talking about the buyer and that is the focus of marketing and sales. On the surface, the profiling of a buyer target seems like an easy fix. In this new age of social and newly emerging forms of networks – it is no longer an easy fix.
  • Emerging is buyer networks extending beyond our traditional views of the buyer. New technologies, social and Enterprise 2.0 as examples, have completely erased the barrier to information and allow buyer networks to operate as one and to weigh-in on purchase decisions.
  • Buying has become more complex since a key factor in buyer networks and the ecosystems they support are interdependent. Meaning more parties participating and more validation is occurring in the purchase decision-making.
  • The tools of the single buyer model are no longer effective. Sales in particular at the frontline routinely discard sales enablement tools given to them by marketing according to recent IDC research.

What Are The Dangers?

Continuing a narrow focus on the single buyer model is a dangerous path for B2B Marketing. Evidence points to major disadvantages occurring.

First, with a focus only on the single buyer model, businesses risk finding their organization being excluded from a buyer’s network and not seen as an integral part of the buyer’s ecosystem. This is a heavy price to pay if you are indeed outside of the network and not an ecosystem player.

Second, the use of the single buyer model has proven to be fraught with shortcomings. They can best be characterized as only helpful today but not revealing. Several executives I interviewed in the last six months of 2011 are saying it best:

“What we’ve learned is that buyer personas, building tools for sales, creating lots of content, and etc. don’t meet the mark in today’s competitive market we are in – we need to know more.”

“Our marketing department created marketing material that targeted a specific role in our industry and they rolled out it out with all the fanfare you would expect. Let me just say everybody had a piece a cake and the party was over that quickly.”

“Our sales people barely look at the tools we give them.”

Third, the research connection has been lost in the conversation. While we are seeing a rise in predictive analytics, companies are yet lacking profoundly in qualitative buyer behavior modeling. This is important due to the evidence which suggests that the introduction of new technologies and networks are changing buying behaviors rapidly.

Fourth, companies are experiencing missed opportunities. When marketing and sales operations have a singular focus on one buyer, it is like having horse blinders on. There is much swirling around the buyer and their buyer network. If the company doesn’t seem to “get it” in terms of what is going on from a network standpoint, then they are unlikely to be privy to other opportunities. More from the voice of a senior director of global marketing:

“We did this whole campaign around the CFO. Yes, we even did a buyer persona. Only to find out we could never talk to a CFO and that they were not the right buyer!”

Fifth, the use of a single buyer model has misdirected focus towards targets that have always been there and has even backfired. They are problematic in today’s world as they are fraught with many built-in assumptions that were developed over the years. The risk here is that buyer requirements and the very nature of the buyer have changed. Here’s the voice of a senior level sales executive articulating this point:

“After the first year of joining this company, I began to realize there was a disconnect between sales and our customers. What occurred to me is that our customers have become highly educated folks and were of a different background of let’s say fifteen years ago. The disconnect is that our sales force hasn’t kept pace with this change.”

Is There A Better Way?

For many executives today in B2B leadership positions, there are three constant clouds twirling around their heads: the lack of insight about buyers, they are faced with tremendous uncertainty about the direction to steer their organization, and they lack the ability to predict as well as forecast into the near as well as far future. The better way points towards providing clues to disperse these clouds before the rain extinguishes any hope they had. There are several ways that I believe can give businesses the insight they need to respond to the ever changing buyer of today:

• Engage in predictive buyer modeling that models the behavioral trends of buyers – a need that aligns with the fast pace of change
• Connect predictive buyer modeling to predictive analytics to illuminate a 360 degree view of buyers
• Balance market and buyer research investments to include qualitative research along with quantitative research
• Develop robust B2B oriented Business Buyergraphics based on purchasing behavior that extend beyond buyer personas, demographics, and firmographics and serves as the triborough bridge between marketing, sales, and strategy
• Utilize target buyer modeling as a gateway to understand and model fast emerging buyer networks and buyer ecosystem dynamics
• Develop a renewed focus on descriptive buyer segmentation based on purchase behaviors

The single buyer model no longer works in this new complex world. We are confronted with a world where buyers no longer act independent of others in decision-making and are dependent upon networks and ecosystems. The imperative for senior B2B executives is to adapt to change and make the tough decisions that come with change. Modeling the behaviors, decisions, and buying scenarios of buyers and their networks give leaders what they seem to be asking for: deeper understanding of buyer behavior, how to attract more buyers, know which direction to lead their organization, and keep the ship floating upright while at the same time plugging the leaks.

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