Cross-platform ad networks today are struggling to find a single, unified way to understand their audiences. For example, mobile networks’ panic over what to do about UDIDs has been going on for months. But on a broader level, how does a post-PC world deal with an audience that is everywhere, on every device, all at once?

The answer is social.

Social identity is fast becoming the great unifier of online activity. While UDID and other device identifiers can help direct marketers confirm that an app store purchase has completed, little else is available. Public social profiles include basic demographic and location information along with valuable context: who a person follows and what a person likes. This aspect of social is known as the interest graph.

The Quick Guide to Interest Graph Targeting

Social advertising networks have many ways of reaching a brand’s desired audience, but one of the most effective methods of targeting is through the interest graph. Targeting people based on their interests, keywords they say and see, and who they follow is a simple way to achieve social relevance in advertising. When a user logs into a social app, the public data about who they follow is used to analyze their interests. Almost everyone follows someone influential — and influential people tend to be influential on particular topics. For example, @Forbes is influential among financial products consumers, @nytimesbooks is influential among book lovers, and @ESPN is influential among sports fans.

Targeting Consumers in Social: 3 Examples

Advertisers can effectively build audiences in social advertising by aggregating the followers of influencers on particular topics. Let’s take three big events in May: Mothers Day, the Indianapolis 500, and the Grammys.

Mothers Day

Many kinds of retailers capitalize on Mothers Day as an occasion to drive sales. Imagine that a consumer electronics retailer wanted to reach people shopping for gifts for Mothers Day. For this campaign, the brand could use a conquest strategy to reach people who favor consumer electronics brands and news. Brands such as @BestBuy, @Amazon, @Pinterest, @wired, @engadget, @gizmodo, @gadgetlab, @ForbesTech, and @mashable combines a large group of followers into a single group. And people who follow more than one targeted brand will be prioritized to receive the retailer’s message.

The Grammys

Now let’s make it a little more complex. What if you need to target two audiences at once? Let’s say a retail brand is sponsoring the Grammys and wants to make a continuity play in social to reinforce the other media in the plan. In this case, we would target both fans of retail influencers as well as music lovers. So the brand would create a custom audience of the followers of brands like: @hm, @TeenVogue, @TOMS, @Burberry, @americanapparel, @zappos, @Etsy, @JCPenney, @Target, @TheGRAMMYs, @Rihanna, @Eminem, @katyperry, @Shakira, @kanyewest. By an extremely broad definition, up to 50 million people can be targeted with this combination of personas.

Indy 500

Interest graph targeting works for every vertical or type of event. Let’s say a CPG brand wants to make a big push around the Indy 500 for a promotional tie-in with a specific driver it sponsors. The principle is the same as for the Grammys: target the followers of sports and racing influencers (including the sponsored driver!) as well as CPG shoppers. The CPG brand promoting around the Indy 500 would aggregate the followers of accounts like the CPG brands @kraftmacncheese, @Skittles, @Oreo, and @miraclewhip; the sports brands @NASCAR, @ESPN, @SportsCenter; and popular drivers @dariofranchitti, @danicapatrick, and @h3lio.

Now you should have a better understanding of how interest graph targeting can be used to aggregate followers into audiences. Do you know of a brand facing a unique targeting challenge, or do you have any questions about interest graph targeting? Let us know in the comments.

• How can you reach your target audience in such a narrow area?
• How can you ensure that your messaging is meaningful to each local audience?
• How can you reach 100 or more local communities across the country easily, efficiently and cost-effectively?

One strategy that consistently wins in the local marketing arena is the “Local Marketing Triangulation Strategy,” as described below. It combines the traditional with the new, the localized with the scalable, and the online with the offline. And it works.

Local Advertising

Advertising is the most efficient way to reach as many local audiences around the country as possible. For a franchise or chain, advertising is absolutely critical to achieve reach efficiently.

Even for a single restaurant, bank or yoga studio, though, advertising is efficient in reaching audiences. It’s the fastest way to reach the maximum number of prospects with your compelling message or offer.

There are various vehicles for local advertising. Paid search is a highly effective way to target the local market through geo-targeting. In addition, direct placements on relevant websites get you in front of qualified prospects. Retargeting can be effective, assuming your website has sufficient traffic. Mobile advertising works well for local businesses with foot traffic. Advertising in directories that perform well in the search engines is worth testing. And hyper local sites, such as the Patch network of sites, are one more option.

The key to making local advertising work and to averting wasted advertising spend, though, is to advertise for both 1) context and 2) proximity. If you spend all of your advertising on one and not the other, it’s difficult to maximize marketing results.

Localized Content

What national franchises and chains prefer not to hear is that localized content outperforms generic content. Various national outfits attempt to get over the localization hurdle through concatenation (e.g., “financial advisor in Boston,” “financial advisor in Chicago,” “financial advisor in Denver,” etc.). However, this type of generic messaging will lose every time to truly localized content that resonates with the local audience.

What’s more effective is localized content that ties into local news, weather, events, sports teams, economy, sentiment, etc. For example, a restaurant offering a 2-for-1 hot soup deal on a cold, rainy day. The restaurant chain Houlihan's has achieved success through this type of localized content, empowering each of its restaurants to leverage its homegrown "Foody Call" mobile club that alerts local diners to immediate offers, specials and promotions. A local furniture store could similarly offer discounts based on a sports team’s performance, as Warren Buffett-owned Jordan’s Furniture has done repeatedly and with great success in the Boston market.

For certain industries, proving expertise can be critical to closing more sales. For example, a property management company can leverage hyper local blogging in demonstrating its experience, knowledge and expertise in a certain area to claim geographic differentiation.

Online-Offline Integration

It’s wishful thinking on the part of digital marketers to believe that you can maximize your local revenue through only digital channels. For most businesses targeting local audiences, revenue will increase with the integration of online and offline marketing efforts.

Offline marketing can start with the ways you’ll help the local community get stronger. For example, a restaurant may help feed the hungry. A realtor may help the homeless. Identify the cause that fuels your emotions, and make it part of the DNA of your business. And then get involved in a big way. Partner with local groups, be vocal in the local media, and conduct local campaigns to make a real difference to those in the neighborhood. Your community WILL notice, and it will endear you to your neighbors like no advertising could.

Complementary to your cause marketing, integrate your message into the daily fabric of your towns. For example, a home remodeling business is going to get greater results by using yard signs, town-specific direct mail, and partnerships with real estate agencies than by relying exclusively on digital marketing vehicles. An ice-cream shop is going to attract more buzz by holding local ice-cream eating contests, offering samples of unique flavors on the sidewalk, and forging a partnership with the local movie theater.

With local, offline matters. A lot.

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.

© All Rights Reserved I-5 Design and Manufacturer

This is part 4 of a series on the challenge of targeting SMB markets and how the use of buyer-based modeling and buyer-based marketing help organizations to grow their SMB customer base.

When it comes to the SMB segment and the multiple sub-markets, it is just a plain fact that you cannot be everywhere. We addressed the segmentation thought process crucial for buyer-based marketing to the SMB segment in the previous article, Grow SMB Revenues With Buyer-Based Marketing, as a means to know where to have a presence. Therein lays the new buyer realities of today. Having a presence that creates a gravitational pull of SMB buyers towards your organization is the new realty of mastering the SMB challenge.

SMB marketing and sales began to become more than just an afterthought in the early ‘90’s through the early 2000's. Considerable investments were made in establishing inside sales organizations and in outbound marketing activities specifically to reach the SMB base of customers and prospective buyers. Newly created inside sales organizations endured the trials and tribulations of field sales entrenched infrastructure as well as the ownership battle of the mid-size customer gray area. Marketing discovered that outbound tools for inside sales and for marketing to the SMB segment varied greatly from that of a focus on large field accounts.

In a span of 5-7 years we find ourselves in a drastically different world. The notion of reaching buyers is becoming a huge hurdle to climb for those wedded to predominantly outbound activities related to inside sales. As mentioned, establishing an inside sales function can be a sizable investment. The Fortune 1000 and Global 2000 today find themselves with inside sales units loaded with personnel, technology, software, and etc. that were installed and aimed at outbound efforts. What we now have is the challenge of turning on a dime to repurpose inside sales and marketing support to at least gain balance in inbound marketing while succeeding at a level of outbound demand generation as well.

This has more to do with transformation shifts in buyer behaviors with new technologies being the driving force behind these changes. What is profound is that this is more than the labels of the elusive, invisible, or buyer 2.0. No, they didn’t go anywhere and they are not hiding. Nor, should we be of the mind that buyers are now just empowered – as if sellers gave them the empowerment. Buyers today - with SMB buyers a significant part of this picture - are creating new ways of working and conducting business. Here’s the smell the coffee moment for sellers: SMB buyers, in addition to larger accounts, are creating a new world of buyer-driven economies whereby as sellers - if you do not fit or adapt – it is a world in which you will not be participating within.

While I may be seemingly digressing here, I do so to make a very salient point. SMB buyers are adapting new technologies in the entrepreneurial fashion they have started their business with in the first place. Unburdened by large scale infrastructures, they can see how to make new uses of technologies nimbly and drive new ways of conducting business as well as expand their own customer bases. SMB businesses, not so surprisingly, may be surpassing larger enterprises in their adoption of new technologies for interacting with buyers.

What Does This All Mean?

If you are part of a larger enterprise marketing to SMB buyers, what this all points to is a higher stakes challenge. Expectations on buyer experience are being renewed at a constant rate for the reasons mentioned above. Many of today’s new technologies, which for the most part had their original invention in non-business pursuits, have balanced the equation. While larger enterprises enjoyed an advantage in acquiring newer technologies over that of SMB businesses, this may no longer be true. In fact, the opposite in many cases may be true with SMB businesses able to leap frog into newer technologies as cost factors continue to be driven lower.

With this being the case, larger enterprises need to focus on creating seamless buyer-based experiences that allow SMB businesses to act quickly, make choices, and do so in the channels they prefer. This applies to both inbound and outbound efforts. A key focus for inbound efforts is that of enriching the buyer experience. Darren Pleasance, a Principal with McKinsey & Company, recently covered this topic in an excellent article entitled, Serious about SMB experience? Focus on your web site, on McKinsey's Chief Marketing & Sales Officer Forum site. Darren mentions the importance of the web site experience, providing the ability to buy seamlessly through multiple channels, and investing in post-purchase experiences as keys to success in the SMB segment. All of these contributing to enriched buyer experiences. The core of SMB buyer-based marketing and selling will not only be the web site as Darren articulates, but I believe the totality of the buyer experience now becoming the driving force behind how SMB buyers choose.

This brings us back to outbound. Does this mean inside sales and other outbound activities will simply go away? Far from it I believe. A fundamental shift however needs to take place in how organizations view and orient their outbound efforts such as inside sales. This shift relates to transforming from a tools-based approach to a buyer-based experience approach. Here’s the voice of one SMB business executive articulating this point:

“The thing that kills you is that you get what you need from the web site but contacting them directly is a whole different matter. It’s as if they are clueless that I may have visited their site and got information to review. On top of that, I get calls from their people saying they are my account manager. Really? Then how come they don’t know that I talked to someone in their company already?”

This exemplifies what happens when organizations fail to connect their inbound activities with outbound activities in SMB buyer-based marketing and selling. On the other hand, connecting the two tightly enriches the experience as this SMB business owner says:

“I was really impressed to be honest. I went on the site and found a few items I wanted to read so downloaded them. I got a call from the company; his name was Steve, first acknowledging that I had downloaded the papers and then asking if I had questions. We wound up having a discussion on some of things we’ve been working on. Wasn’t pushy or anything like that.”

To create impressive buyer experiences, this integration of inbound and outbound cannot be ignored. While the shiny object these days is inbound and the incessant promotion of content marketing, for some products and services, the ultimate deciding factor will continue to come down to the buyer conversation taking place. One thing we can count on is that more and more SMB buyers today come to table ready for a conversation – are you?

Next Up: Closing the deal in SMB with Buyer-Based Selling

Follow @TonyZambito

Related articles

• Grow SMB Revenues With Buyer-Based Marketing (buyerology.com)
• How To Get To Know The New SMB Buyer (buyerology.com)
• Your Top Priority Is Growing The SMB Revenue Base - Now What? (buyerology.com)
• Channeling Buyer-Based Experiences in SMB (buyerology.com)

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.

Buyer Persona © All Rights Reserved Cristian Cardenas

The sheer size of the SMB makes for a daunting task for any organization intent on marketing to the SMB segment. When you consider some Fortune 1000 or Global 2000 organizations can have in the 10’s or 100’s of thousands of companies in their customer bases, the expression of zeroing in on your target buyer can sound near impossible. It is a dilemma however that cannot be ignored. The U.S. Small business Administration estimates that the SMB segment accounts for better than 98% of all businesses in the United States.

In the previous article in this series, How To Get To Know The New SMB Buyer, I touched upon the means to get to know the SMB buyer. Marketing to the SMB segment and buyers should first start with visiting the segmentation issue a little deeper. There have been many means tried for SMB segmentation whether it is by size, type, vertical, products, solutions, and etc. To some degree, they have helped to manage the challenge of bringing a tighter focus to the SMB segment and its’ sub-market segments. Analytics of your SMB customer database is like fighting numbers with numbers – you can contain the data but without behavioral insight – you will not be able to get inside them. The call to action now is for organizations to bring more science and evolution to the challenge. Why? Because buyers in general have changed so rapidly in the last three years alone that gaining a competitive edge has become much more complex.

Getting Descriptive

Going beyond conventional methods of segmenting the SMB customer base means getting more descriptive about how SMB buyers behave and how goals drive their behaviors. This includes getting a good sense about their Buyergraphics – their attitudes, perceptions, values, information needs, and more. The attempt here is to answer some tough questions that help to bring more focus to an SMB strategy:

Who are our best customers in the SMB segments and why?

In what SMB sub-market segments are our best customers?

Who are our best prospects and in which SMB sub-market segment are they?

What are the best means of engaging our best SMB customers and best SMB prospects?

Descriptive buyer modeling helps you to get answers to these questions and gives you insight into the data as well. In the previous article I stressed the importance of buyer modeling to help get to know your SMB buyers. Modeling buyers and portraying them via buyer personas and scenarios helps you get to the first two questions mentioned. To help round out the SMB buyer picture, learning their attitudes towards your product, service, or technology and how these attitudes drive information needs help to get deeply descriptive. There are three specific buyer modeling efforts that can help shed light on the attitudes and goals driving SMB buyer behavior and help inform buyer-based marketing strategies:

Buyer Mental Models: collecting a picture of SMB buyer attitudes, perceptions, and goals that influence buying decisions can be a descriptive means for segmenting as well as buyer-based communicating. For example if your product technology is getting high marks for user-friendliness and there is strong attitudinal resistance to perceived complex technology in 3 out 5 identified sub-markets, then creating buyer-based marketing strategies around this mental model is one way of segmenting.

Buyer Content Models: identifying the information needs and goals of buyers today extends well beyond just the concept of content marketing. With the rise of SMB sub-market segments engaging not only in new technologies but forming new ecosystem, the information needs of SMB buyers are vastly different and changing rapidly. Carrying the above example further, the information needs of the 3 sub-markets may vary differently in context and how information is shared amongst both suppliers and partners. More and more, organizations will need to think context-based marketing and context-based selling as opposed to just content-based marketing. While this will apply to all types of businesses, I believe this will be especially true for the SMB markets.

Buyer Experience Models: how SMB buyers view, perceive, and expect experience is undergoing transformative gyrations. The way SMB buyers experience inbound marketing and other newer technology-based marketing and sales is certain to be different than larger enterprises. There are many more what I call Buyer Moment of Truth in SMB that are frankly invisible to marketers and sellers today. Not identifying where these moments of truth are can be a significant disadvantage in laying out both inbound and outbound marketing and sales strategies. Understanding experiences is important since they are instrumental in shaping attitudes, perceptions, and perceived values. For the examples mentioned, previous experiences with technology not yet cleared of bugs may have created entrenched resistance to both new and complex. Reshaping thinking around experience can then become an important strategy.

Modeling SMB buyers to a deeper level and around the three modeling efforts mentioned gets organizations closer to a true buyer-based marketing effort. In addition, it gives more robust ability to segment SMB by behavior and context. Buyer-based marketing can be most effective when it addresses how buyers behave and understanding the context of why they make purchase decisions.

Informed with behavioral buyergraphics that hone in on buyer behaviors and how they are influenced by mental models, information needs, and experience can be a powerful way to resonate with SMB buyers. Getting at the heart of their contextual environments, which will vary by sub-market segments, gives the insight needed to develop specific buyer-based marketing strategies that defies one-size fits all. When it comes to the dilemma of how to make sense of thousands of SMB customers and prospects, taking these steps eliminates wasteful guessing and pinpoints buyer-based marketing at the right buyer, the right sub-market, the right context, and the right time.

Next Up: Connect With SMB Buyer Through Buyer-Based Selling

Follow @TonyZambito

Related articles

• Your Top Priority Is Growing The SMB Revenue Base - Now What? (buyerology.com)
• How To Get To Know The New SMB Buyer (buyerology.com)
• How B2B Leaders Are Understanding Buyers Better With Behavioral Buyergraphics (buyerology.com)
• How To Get To Know The New SMB Buyer (blogs.imediaconnection.com)
• Grow SMB Revenues With Buyer-Based Marketing (buyerology.com)
• Use Buyer-Based Selling To Engage The New SMB Buyer (buyerology.com)
• Your Top Priority Is Growing The SMB Revenue Base - Now What? (blogs.imediaconnection.com)

Full disclosure: We’re in the travel business. But it’s not our only business. We saw substantial increases month-to-month for our audience-targeting platform over the past 12 months. In fact, we have almost 250 million individual customer data profiles. But this not an individual success story. This is a vertical success story. The success of the travel ad vertical can be duplicated, and should be duplicated as brands like P&G, Unliever and GM increase the acceleration of their overall budgets from offline to online spend. Kantar Media reported in November, “the display spending gain of 12.9 percent and 8.6 percent spike in search (for 2011) were driven by travel, local service and insurance categories.”

We know from other data that offline spending for travel was flat. The conclusion: the migration rate for travel from offline to online spending is more rapid than most any other category, from the best data we can gather. Now, think about other verticals. Automotive is coming on but is still TV focused. Pharma is ready to start a vertical migration, but privacy concerns continue to hold it. There are other ways in which the success of the travel ad vertical can be duplicated.  A closer look shows the following five market conditions and marketing activities that have made travel an effective vertical to copy:

Loyalty culture: Ever since the debut of the first frequent flyer program 30 years ago, travel marketing has centered around loyalty programs. Loyalty programs live and breathe on the effective collection and usage of customer data. This loyalty culture has migrated very easily online. Example: Starwood enhanced its loyalty program on Feb. 1 for its top tier customers. It recently reported that just 2 percent of travelers drive 30 percent of Starwood’s profits. With that in mind, the company spent the last three years building a customized online service to better understand the needs and desires of these guests. It is built into the DNA of every travel company. Other verticals can learn from this. Loyalty programs at the very least generate more useful customer  data if they don’t generate incremental sales. Data can drive digital marketing.

Partnerships: Travel companies partner very effectively and cooperate on many levels. It goes beyond the car rental company that partners with the airline, or the hotel chains that partner with the restaurant franchise. They learn from each other at conferences and through other partnerships. Now, other verticals have approached this. In fact, the entertainment business has pulled off many effective CPG partnerships. But none of them share information at the depth that the travel industry does.

Retention: Travel companies use digital marketing to keep and grow customer activity. It’s the laser focus of their efforts online. They have a handle on what it takes from an offer, discount and partner perspective to keep a customer coming back. Branding is a secondary focus for travel companies. Customer retention is job one, and they continue to commit to improvements. Seems to me that the automotive and retail business could take a lesson here.

Efficiency: Economic pressure and media efficiencies have forced travel companies to digital media. Gas prices are up, business travelers can connect virtually and they have to fight for their business. So digital media is not only more efficient and effective, it is a necessity to maintain mind share.

Targeting: Travel companies don’t want everybody.  Emirates Air doesn’t want the discount traveler for its high-priced first class section. Holiday Inn isn’t going after the billionaire that wants a luxury suite. They have an informed profile of the customers they want and digital has proven to be the natural platform for accessing them.

Loyalty, partnerships, retention, efficiency and targeting are well within the control of any company. Some larger economic forces have played into the travel budget move. But the big airlines and hotel chains in particular have raised their stake in digital marketing. As other verticals look for a blueprint to follow, travel has a good flight plan.

©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)

That got me to wonderin’ – how do some of the world’s most popular religions, in effect, ‘market’ themselves? What are some of the digital tools available online and does going the virtual route somewhat detract from physically being in a place of worship or complement someone’s spirituality?

So I spent a bit of time wandering in the digital desert and came across a number of interesting sites and apps.

Here’s a snapshot (alphabetized -- not listed in any particular order of preference):

Buddhism

Sumi Loundon Kim, the Buddhist chaplain at Duke University and minister for the Buddhist families of Durham, NC, summed up the dilemma of teaching Buddhism to a new generation that uses texting, Facebook, Twitter and other online social media.

“These other worlds exist only through the eyes and mind; there is no touch, no taste, no smell, and very little hearing. As such, virtual worlds present us Buddhist teachers with students who live not just one step removed from reality, but two,” said Kim.

Kim added that Buddhist teachers can’t afford to underestimate the impact of social media on young people today since they have become ‘neurologically adapted’ to this lifestyle.

“The next generation of dharma teachers must not shy away from understanding the force of technology,” she said.

And one of these entities is The Buddhist Channel. The site’s home page has a pithy slogan on its landing page – ‘Bringing Buddha Dharma Home.’ The Buddhist Channel offers a welter of information and tools – global news related to Buddhism, features on archaeology, arts & culture, healing, travel, various podcasts from Buddhist scholars, even e-cards and games.

Another site, Unfettered Mind was established in 2001 by a Buddhist teacher, Ken McLeod. It provides scores of hours of iTunes podcasts, Buddhist text translations, sutra sessions, and more.

In South Korea, where smartphones are more ubiquitous than in the U.S., there are numerous Buddhist apps ranging from a mobile version of Buddhist prayer beads to a location search program that uses GPS to find the nearest temple. Another app, ‘Hello Dharma School,’ features pop-up animations of the Buddha’s life and uses simple vocabulary to explain basic Buddhist philosophies.

“Modern day people are too busy and don’t have time to visit temples,” said Jung Ho, director of missionary research at the Jogye Order, the biggest Buddhist sect in the country. “With mobile apps, people can keep in touch with Buddhism – smartphones can serve as mobile temples.”

Christianity

Even the pope’s gone digital.  The Vatican is using technology to help Pope Benedict XVI reach out to his flock of more than one billion Catholics worldwide. The site has its own multimedia player called Vatican Player that aggregates content from Vatican media (managed by Vatican Radio). On the site you can access the pope’s encyclicals, homilies, read apostolic letters, download info on basilicas and papal chapels, etc.

But in one of his messages, the pope offered a caveat. New media and social networks offer a ‘great opportunity’ but he warned of the risks of having more virtual friends than real ones.

“It is important always to remember that virtual contact cannot and must not take the place of direct human contact with people at every level of our lives,” said the pope.

Another thriving Christian online site is GodTube.com, which is now drawing over two million monthly users. CEO Chris Wyatt recently said “we apply web technology to the Gospel in a way that appeals to young people – we call it Jesus 2.0.”

Chris Ford, a social media expert with the Southern Baptist Convention, said social media is a big plus for Christianity and has had an overall positive impact in three areas – evangelism, ministry outreach, and educational communications.

“It should be no surprise that, for spreading the Gospel and globally mobilizing people for missions, social media can have significant, positive implications,” said Ford.

Brandon Vogt, a Catholic writer/speaker who also blogs at ThinVeil.net, said that at its core, the church is ‘one giant social network.’ Church fellowship, noted Vogt, shouldn’t be exclusive and closed in on itself – it should always be outward-focused and mission-oriented.

“Fellowship in the past was constrained to times when people gathered at churches or in homes, but now conversations about Sunday sermons can linger throughout the week,” said Vogt.

Vogt added that social media also opens the doors of Christian fellowship, inviting millions of outsiders to join the community.

“Young secularists who would never darken the doors of a church find themselves dialoguing with Christian bloggers, and an atheist YouTube viewer stumbles across a religious debate and becomes intrigued by the idea of God…when used prudently, social media tightens the bonds among Christians and also connects them with millions outside the faith,” said Vogt.

Hinduism

Hinduism, the world’s third largest religion after Christianity and Islam, has about 950 million followers. It’s the dominant religion in India, Nepal and among the Tamils in Sri Lanka.

Hindu Online purports to be the world’s largest portal on Hindu religion, culture, shastras, and more. There’s a vast array of information available on the site – scores of articles, sections devoted to religion, culture, community, a digital library featuring manuscripts (e.g., Veda, Upanishads, Ayurveda), even a Learn Online area where you can get up to speed on everything from Sanskrit to Vedic mathematics.

Two more interesting examples:

Kauai’s Hindu Monastery, located in Kapaa, HI, is a monastery-temple complex with 21 monks. Established in 1949, the monastery has a very popular Facebook page – at last count almost 4,200 had ‘Liked’ it. The Facebook page features photos and videos of the temple, and site visitors share their thoughts and experiences on the monastery’s Wall. Lastly, the site provides links to other Hindu organizations such as the Hindu Students Association, Hinduism Today Magazine and Hindu American Foundation.

Twitter is also being used more frequently for major religious holidays.

Diwali, India’s biggest and most important holiday of the year, is celebrated in October or November each year and is also known as the Festival of Light. Run a search that time of year and you’ll find that #HappyDiwali will be trending.

One popular Tweet last year came from Bollywood actress Kareena Kapoor:

“A very happy Diwali to all of our followers! Spend some quality time with family and friends and be safe!”

Popular Hindu leaders have jumped on the Twitter bandwagon to reach out to their followers. Devotees of Mata Amritanandamayi, a spiritual leader and guru who is sometimes referred to as ‘The Hugging Saint,’ regularly tweets (@amritapuri) in order to provide real-time updates of her activities.

Islam

It has been well documented how social media helped usher in last year’s ‘Arab Spring.’ But technology is also playing an important role in reaching out to Muslims worldwide on religious matters/issues.

For starters, there have been a suite of apps developed for smartphones that have become popular during Ramadan, the ninth month on the Islamic calendar. Ramadan generally lasts about 30 days; participating Muslims refrain from drinking, eating, smoking and sex during daylight hours. Other apps help find the nearest mosque or halal (food that’s permissible per Islamic law) restaurants in various cities.

Some examples:

iQuran, an Android app on Google Play, enables viewers to read the Holy Quran in Arabic alongside its translation. It provides verse-by-verse audio playbacks, repeat functions and unlimited bookmarks.

The Essentials of Ramadan, available on iTunes, provides in-depth info on the rules and laws of Ramadan.

Find Mecca, also on iTunes, uses GPS to locate the Qibla (the direction that should be faced when a Muslim prays; it’s fixed as the direction of the Kaaba in Mecca) anywhere worldwide using an iPhone or iPad. Users can see Mecca with the camera in augmented reality mode; the app also can set an automatic countdown to the next required prayer and adjusts to various time zones.

Nidhal Guessoum, reporting in The Huffington Post, said Twitter is now being used frequently to send Quranic verses and religious injunctions; YouTube and Facebook to disseminate sermons.

Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamanei, even issued a fatwa (a juristic ruling issued by an Islamic scholar) on using Facebook:

“In general if it requires engaging in immorality and evil acts such as spreading corruption, lies and false materials, or if there is concern that it is sinful, or it strengthens the enemies of Islam and Muslims, it is not permissible. Otherwise it’s fine.”

Judaism

There are about 13.4 million Jews worldwide, about 0.2% of the world’s population, with about half in Israel, half in the United States. The rest are scattered widely.

One rabbi in the U.S. has taken proactive steps to bridge this diaspora.

Rabbi Laura Baum founded OurJewishCommunity.org – catchphrase under the Welcome sign on the home page reads, ‘Bringing Judaism to People Where They Are.’

The site’s chief objective is ‘to provide the same services of a brick-and-mortar congregation, such as access to rabbis, sermons, educational materials, social networking, discussions, and more.’

OurJewishCommunity.org uses a variety of tools to generate live content – live stream, blogs, video casts on YouTube, audio podcasts on iTunes, a Facebook Fan Page (currently more than 5,200 fans from 18 countries) and a Twitter feed.

Baum recently presided over an online Passover Seder, which attracted more than 400 people – but no Orthodox Jews, who are not allowed to use electronic devices during the Seder or Sabbath (Friday night through Saturday sunset).

“Sitting in a room is a powerful way to have community; but the fact you can do Passover with people all over the world, that is not any less of a community,” said Baum.

There are also a number of interesting mobile apps being used by Jews around the world.

The Orthodox Union recently released a new mobile app that provides information on what food products are kosher for Passover.

Crowded Road, a software firm, rolled out iTorah-iPad Edition, which includes vowels for Hebrew text to make it easier to read.

Davka Corporation, which bills itself as ‘First in Judaic Software,’ offers the Tanach Bible, a Study Tool for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. It includes the Hebrew text and English translation of the Torah and other important works, and can be downloaded on iTunes for $1.99.

Can social media glean modern day solutions to the challenges that first arose during biblical times and are still with us thousands of years later?

Jury’s still out. But these digital tools are having a significant impact on the social and religious lives of people of all faiths and denominations.

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)

One of the most interesting sessions I attended today was Search: The Search Ecosystem and Integrating Search Into Your Marketing Mix

The session positioned Search as center stage in marketing, not relegated to the basement of performance driven campaigns to drive sales. Search is no longer just "Search," it is an interconnected ecosystem that instead of only driving results or just supporting your "more important" campaigns, Search can, and probably should be influencing or even directing your brand campaigns. Huh? Heresy! Well, not according to our experts. So why should you be "listening" to what Search is telling you?

Kevin Ryan, CEO Motivity Marketing explains; Affliction is one of their clients. They noticed from the search data that people who were searching for "Affliction" were also searching for "Blasko," Ozzy Osbourne's bassist. So they integrated him into Afflictions overall campaign. This is Search influencing up instead of being influenced down. This is Search connecting with consumers by listening to them without them even realizing it. Listen to what is happening in search data. For instance, one of their clients Bugaboo which makes high-end strollers sells an attachment. It is not a "food storage device" or "drink storage" it is a "Cup Holder" or "Snack Tray." It does not matter what the attachment is called, you have to use search terms as to how people refer to it. "Brand Terms" deviate only when practical knowledge intervenes. He also educates us that even with a premium brand like Bugaboo price inclusion works very well and is a significant driver so do not forget to include it in your campaigns.

"Brand Terms" deviate only when practical knowledge intervenes.

For Rhonda Hanson, Director of Search Marketing, Getty Images, she only jokingly admits that "Google does not have a good idea of how to index imagery at all." And she also admits that it is not really their fault; it is a struggle for companies in the photo space as imagery comes with much less meta data that search engines can crawl. And Search is such vital importance to these types of services.

What she did is launch a contest called the Mishmash Video/Music/Images Remix Competition where people could use Getty Images to make mashup videos. The campaign seeds Getty throughout not only the Search ecosystem, but the entire Social Media ecosystem as well. She used Google site links on her brand terms to get extra promotion for the campaign, and demonstrated through the use of promoted Tweets which only cost $300, through the Google Display Network for another $5,000 and through traditional Press Releases how they could increase Getty's Search footprint. And the lesson is simple. Since there are many companies where Search is the number one way people find and interact, Search, and campaigns that help Search should be a primary strategy... AND it does not have to cost you an arm and a leg.

Mitra Naeimi, Director of SEO and Social Media, Shutterfly also understand that. She knows how important search engine optimization is to one of her brands Tiny Prints. Tiny Prints started using Pinterest in Q4 of last year, but the majority of their traffic is to through organic search. They noticed that they were missing a big opportunity to capture the long-tail traffic. They were doing well with the "head" search terms like "Photo Printing" etc... but were no where to be found with long-tail terms like "Twinkle Little Star birth announcements." She implemented a three step process after doing a site audit.

1. She added a "Related Searches" modules on their category pages. What this enables is it creates the dynamic link graph across the site. This helps crawlability, extends content, make content richer, creates a better user experience, and makes a difference in ranking.
2. She added "Related Products" to each of her product pages for the same reasons and that it helps provide content richness which improves the user experience.
3. She structurally implemented "Rich Filters" (the ability to sort by "rounded corners" "heavy stock" "color" etc...) so that all different types of pages were created that were "search type specific." This takes advantage of the way that people search and find information online, so these filters restructure their pages and act as links, efficiently linking into their product pages. This cross-linking dramatically increases search relevancy in

If you are a product company, you need to restructure your site for Search, and Mitra outlines a three step process that works. Search elevates up to influence design, structure and site functionality. It actually should be the first place to start.

Matt Lawson, Vice President of Marketing & Partnerships, Marin Software rounded out our panel of experts, and his four step process educated us on on how to integrate mobile device platforms in search

1. Separate your mobile campaigns. i.e. "Call us now to reserve a table" instead of a brand ad works in mobile. Recognize how consumers interact with their devices. i.e. With GAP a desktop campaign promotes a sale, whereas a mobile device promotes the store location.
2. Target users with specific device copy. Banana Republic has created a specific "http://...../iphone" URL that is displayed. This can increase click-through 9%-15%. No one wants to click on something on a mobile device and end up on a non-mobile site.
3. Prioritize Ad Position. Even though the cost per click in mobile is lower, you need to bid higher due to there being less positions. On a desktop being on the first page of ads is fine. In mobile if you are not position one or position two do not bother. Especially bid on your brand terms to protect your brand in mobile.
4. Optimize for the User Experience. You do not have to create the worlds best app, or the best mobile site, but you have to check your landing pages to make sure they look good on iPhone and Android and have some sort of mobile friendly landing page. In addition, the notion of conversion may be different for mobile devices. Is it a Call? a Reservation? a Map lookup? Put a dollar amount against it and measure it.

And I will add to that the advice "Measure what is Valuable, Don't Value what is Measurable."

This four panel of experts and all of this advice was from just one session at AdTech. I started by saying I could write a book on all the session I attended. In fact I could write a book, and a good one, on just the lessons in this one session.

AdTech is what you make of it; ask questions, take notes, email panelists and presenters, they are all willing to help almost anyone and answer any questions within reason... but before you can do any of that you have to attend all of this value.

The truth is we could spend all day working on traffic acquisition strategies, spend thousands (even millions) of dollars on PPC, SEO and ad targeting, and launch the most advanced email marketing system fully integrated with our POS systems to drive people back to our website. Heck, some of us are still throwing a lot of budget and resources into direct mail and couponing. But, while all of these strategies may work, the puck does not stop there. Your marketing dollars must reach far beyond “more eyes on your website” and ensure conversion rates that turn those browsers into buyers, and turn your marketing dollars into revenue. And it starts with CXO.

CXO Defined
Customer Experience Optimization (CXO) is about making every experience with your brand matter. (Yes, I definitely want to do that!) CXO is dynamic, adaptive and specific to each customer’s interaction with your brand, while optimizing for your business goals. (Right, sounds good to me). CXO is about using multivariate testing, personalization and multichannel marketing to gain real time feedback from customers on which content works, and which doesn’t to increase conversion rates; it's about allowing marketers to tailor website experiences on a personalized level to improve average order values and repeat buyers; and it's about filtering these insights into all marketing channels for maximum ROI and brand consistency. (OK, how do I get started?)

Online Testing + Internal Culture Shift
A/B and Multivariate have indeed become more mainstream, so it’s safe to assume that most companies have attempted some form of testing. But launching a test a month, or employing a testing program with a solution provider doesn’t mean you are nailing CXO 100%. The notion of internal cultural shift that centers around CXO is must. In other words, brands who have a testing program in place need to swear by it: testing any and all changes that happen on the site first, before making any permanent changes.  By letting live visitors and customers tell marketers what they like through their clicks, conversions and purchases, the evolution of providing exception online customer experience can fully begin. 100% optimized, 100% of the time.

Level Up: Personalization
Thanks to mobile apps, site aggregators and even Google, all consumers can easily comparison shop and search. You may have even found yourself throwing more money to stay in the mix at search, PPC and affiliate marketing. But those strategies, while they may help in the short-term, they aren’t going to change the fact that consumers are more fickle than ever and cultivating loyalty is a real challenge. Fortunately, the personalization component of CXO means marketers can meet this challenge head-on.

Segmentation and product recommendations are great ways to get started with personalization, though technically there is no order to which you can start providing better customer experiences. With segmentation, you can create user profiles that allow you to segment visitors into basic groups, which will dictate visitors’ experience the moment they land on your site. Even the simplest categorizations allow for better customer engagement with content and offers that are more relevant.

Or you can apply meaningful product recommendations that help you sell, cross-sell and up-sell: “viewers who bought that, also bought this”, for example. You can even segment and apply multivariate testing directly to those recommendations. Or you can get even more sophisticated, with automated behavioral targeting, by modeling what is the next best content to show an individual in real time. (Wait, tell me more!)

The Holy Grail: Automated Behavioral Targeting
Real-time personalized marketing is now a reality. And if you want to achieve the CXO trinity, it’s a must-do. But, you will need the help of technology here, since it would take way more than the likes of Rain Man to come up with a set of rules that could effectively, and precisely, target your visitors with the right content.

Using sophisticated mathematical modeling, automated behavioral targeting empowers you to present highly personalized offers, products and experiences to each individual website visitor. This type of behavioral targeting takes into account everything you know about your customer, including existing customer data, such as current products owned or a propensity score, it uses all this complex data to identify the best offer for each customer, and then adjusts over time to dynamically optimize visitor experiences with content that yields the highest conversion rate.

In other words, you are spending your marketing dollars to get people to the site, and personalize it, then letting the technology take over to learn, adjust, segment, promote and improve the site experience over time. All this equals more conversions, more loyalty, more revenue, and more marketing ROI.

There are plenty of debates regarding the best tactical means to connect with B2B buyers. The effectiveness of these tactical means, as reported by once again the likes of IDC and etc., show that many B2B leaders believe these tactical efforts such as content marketing and marketing automation may only be effective about a quarter of the time. It does represent a big gap and it begs for a rephrasing of the challenge – this a big disconnect with B2B buyers. Enough to keep any sane B2B CEO and their senior management team scrambling for answers. Part 1 and part 2 of this series pointed out that conventional funnel thinking is woefully inadequate in today’s B2B buyer landscape and is limited in the ability to address new and evolving complexities.

Determining new strategies as well as tactics that can meet the challenge of connecting with today’s B2B buyers revolve around understanding new buyer psychology and dynamics that are in a state of continuous evolution. B2B businesses can do three things to help grasp the connection issue and make plans that close the gap:

Buyer Modeling To Understand Buyer Choices and Scenarios

Business executives today are using the concepts of buyer modeling to understand as well as visually illuminate buyer choice. Buyer modeling incorporates the elements of attitudes, beliefs, values, goals, perceptions, needs, and motivations. By modeling buyers, buying scenarios, buyer experience, and decision journeys, B2B executives can then map strategy as well as tactical marketing and sales activities that enable them to connect with B2B buyers on a relational level. Buyer modeling is based on qualitative research that addresses choices being made versus inadequate interviewing that is done in the context of the funnel.

Focus On The Total Brand and Buyer Experience

B2B businesses are learning how to think outside the context of the funnel and how to encompass the total view of the brand and buyer experience. The invisibility of buyers who are in explore and network mode of the buyer choice model makes it an imperative for B2B businesses to better understand how different buyers interact with different channels that create impressionable brand and buyer experience. The emphasis here is on identifying critical Buyer Moment of Truth™ impression points that contribute to the overall brand and buyer experience. For example, does the web channel brand and buyer experience stay true to form when buyers interact with either the social media, sales, resellers, partner, or service channels? HP, for instance, has a strong ecosystem of reseller and partner channels where the brand and buyer experience has many potential pitfalls and has several challenging Buyer Moment of Truth handoff points that can make or break their involvement. B2B leaders today can conduct buyer experience mapping that identifies critical Buyer Moment of Truth and ensure that the brand and buyer experience stays true to form throughout.

Descriptive Buyer Segmentation Based on Buying Behavior and Opportunity

By integrating the benefits of predictive analytics with that of predictive buyer modeling, B2B leaders are gaining smarts on taking segmentation to a new level. With the use of visually illuminating B2B Buyergraphics, buyers can be segmented descriptively by explore and buying behavior and also by modeling buying scenarios that identify where the organization can reach a “best fit” level with buyers. This can be especially useful in industries where there is a strong company or account focus as well as complex buying scenarios that involve lengthy buying cycles. Descriptive means of segmentation helps to illuminate the many elements related to choice, needs, goals, attitudes, behaviors, values, and experience. This approach enables both marketing and sales to focus on resonating with buyer segments that have similar goals and buying behaviors where knowledge in doing so is dynamic and enriched with each company or account interaction. In essence, allowing B2B businesses to build strong connections with B2B buyers in buyer segments that have higher winning percentages.

When B2B leaders can do these three things, they can be better informed on how to guide the overall trajectory of their organization. Their focus is on identifying the buyers and buyer segments that they can best establish a connection within the context of understanding choices being made. More importantly, they can learn how to connect with B2B buyers today in ways that resonates and invites participation into the buyer driven world of goals, challenges, issues, uncertainties, and growth objectives that orbit them continuously.

Next up: Transforming B2B Business

Follow @TonyZambito

Related articles

• The Buyerology of the Buyer: How B2B Leaders Respond to the Psychology of Buyer Choice (buyerology.com)
• Slow Death of the Funnel: Why Buyer Choice Matters to Revenue (buyerology.com)
• Revenue Growth by Choice and The Buyer Orbit (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)
• Predictive Buyer Modeling Is Changing the Future of B2B (buyerology.com)

© All Rights Reserved Kenny Madden

This is part 3 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.

When it comes to understanding the psychology of the buyer, much has been done in the world of B2C to get inside the mind of consumers to understand buying choices and preferences. For B2B, it has been harder to translate B2C research dynamics into ways that would make the psychology of B2B buyers more readily understood. However, what we do know is that there is an increasing consumerization effect happening in B2B buying whereby B2B buyers have the same desires for more experiential purchasing as opposed to a heavy emphasis on sterile transactions.

In part 2 of this series, I discussed the Buyer Orbit and the elements of the Buyer Choice Model. Each of these now filled with more psychological aspects related to why B2B buyers buy. This comes with many implications for B2B leaders to not only understand new buyer psychology but to also shift business models, operations, strategies, and interactions that transforms the way they connect with B2B buyers. In part 3, let us look at how B2B leaders are responding to new buyer psychology in relations to the elements of the buyer choice model.

Psychology of Buyer Choice

Understanding buyer choice has many implications for B2B strategies and tactics – whether they are focused on demand generation, content marketing, or selling approaches. Addressing new buyer psychology and buyer choice paradigms, within elements of buyer choice modeling, can be transformational:

Explore

With more and more buyers mapping out exploration due to the proliferation of content and information channels, a side effect of B2B businesses scrambling to be noticed in the 50% to 70% window of buyers remaining anonymous, B2B businesses are considering the implications of buyers taking deliberate action to map out their exploration.

What this means: predicting and modeling how buyers map and begin their exploring as well as what forms of navigation they usually take specific to their industry.

How to respond: devote more resources to qualitative investigative means, such as contextual interviewing and ethnographic research, to uncover how buyers begin their efforts to explore and how they are dealing with content proliferation.

Network

As elaborated upon recently, the single buyer model is no longer sufficient and more and more B2B buyers operate from the new buying model of working within ecosystems and relying on network participation. Codependency is here to stay and B2B businesses must adapt.

What this means: reexamine how buyers are viewed internally and what forms of outmoded approaches may be resulting in missed opportunities.

How to respond: use various forms of B2B buyer research and begin working with buyers to understand important ecosystem and network drivers for their business and industries. Incorporate important ecosystem views into strategy and organizational infrastructure.

Decide

The art and science of decision-making is becoming more complex each year. An increasing number of variables are being introduced into decision-making such as globalization, uncertainty, ecosystem considerations, and more – shifting how buying is taking place.

What this means: how buyers are buying today is shifting dramatically and B2B businesses need to understand the new rules of decision-making, in addition to the buyer decision journey, that are being implemented for purchase decisions.

How to respond: shift internal focus to understanding new rules affecting decision-making, acquired through the mix of analytics and qualitative insight, and support how buyers are making purchase decisions.

Buy

Buying today, as mentioned in part 2, is a higher stakes game for many businesses today. The margin for costly mistakes is the slimmest in decades. The extent of poor choices can have disastrous effect on many aspects of a business. Understanding high stakes motivations enables a focus on why B2B buyers buy.

What this means: B2B leaders must not confuse how buyers buy with why buyers buy. The focus here is on understanding the new buyer psychology in terms of their collective attitudes, goals, beliefs, perceptions, and drivers. This new collection of mental models are changing each time new variables, such as new technologies, are introduced.

How to respond: getting an understanding of buyer mental models through qualitative research efforts will become more crucial each year as buyer psychology continues to shift.

Relate

With higher stakes involved in decision-making and purchases today, B2B buyers seek more assurances post-purchase than ever before. Unlike the emphasis on engagement in B2C post-purchase, the need for deeper ties relationally is affecting long-term loyalty.

What this means: shifting out of funnel thinking and viewing the entire buyer experience cycle is a new rule of B2B thinking today.

How to respond: post-purchase support and talent can no longer be an after-thought of organizational planning but be seen as the gateway to being included in newly formed ecosystems and networks by buyers.

What we are witnessing today is a marked shift from funnel-thinking to that of focusing on the total buyer experience that does not fit neatly into stages or step approach thinking. The new buyer psychology compels B2B businesses today to make the buyer the centerpiece of strategy and respond to the continuous loops of what confronts them (the buyer orbit) and the choices (buyer choice model) they must make.

Next up: Impact on Marketing and Sales

Follow @TonyZambito

Related articles

• Revenue Growth by Choice and The Buyer Orbit (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)
• 5 Ways New Buyer Behaviors Are Impacting B2B Sales (buyerology.com)
• The Single Buyer Model: A Dangerous Road Towards Competitive B2B Marketing (buyerology.com)
• How B2B Leaders Are Understanding Buyers Better With Behavioral Buyergraphics (buyerology.com)

You know the saying: The times they are a-changing. And nowhere more than in our world of digital marketing. Whether or not you engage in the hype surrounding the shiny new technologies and platforms that constantly promise to “change everything,” you have to admit that these here are exciting times we live in. Get out your new iPad everyone and get ready to take some notes.

Now, I’m not a psychic. I don’t know what our world will look like in five years (though I did recently venture a guess in these very pages). But I do know that if you want to succeed as a marketer in our always-evolving world, you’d better be ready to be increasingly mobile, engaging, relevant, and aware of the contexts in which we all now operate.

To prepare for a “Minority Report”-style, hyper-connected future, here are five big ideas you can embrace now to stay ahead of the curve:

1. Geo-Power

Location features of social apps such as Foursquare, Ban.jo, Path, et al. are a potential goldmine of important data on consumer habits and preferences. Near-Field Communications (NFC) and wireless payments are here and just starting to show their potential. Privacy issues still need to be resolved, but there is a clear demand from consumers who want marketers to find ways to make their purchases and lives easier. And, if the rumors are true that the iPhone 5 will ship with NFC, expect this geo-power to go from leading edge to mainstream with the swipe of a finger.

2. The Video Land Grab

While online video and mobile are – unsurprisingly – attracting a lot of heat, the marketing spend they draw is still way out of line with the amount of attention they attract from consumers. Don’t just throw money at these new channels: Instead of placing pre-roll video ads and other “forced-view” options, look to user-initiated solutions that respect the user, their time, and their interests.

3. You Down with UGC?

I’m talking about the new UGC: User Generated Curation, powered by content-discovery apps like Pulse, Flipboard, Fancy, and Foodspotting. Publishers and merchants are providing the content, and consumers are cultivating feeds that suit their interests and contexts. The power to filter data and curate personalized information platforms has been put in the hands of the people. These are models for how brands will stay relevant to consumers. As these platforms evolve, they could provide the next great marketing platform. The massive attention consumers and marketers are devoting to Pinterest clearly demonstrates how personal curation and relevance can drive engagement.

4. Thinking Beyond the Tap

Tablets are obviously a magnificent canvas where marketers can paint engaging experiences for consumers. But what are you going to do with your users after you get them to tap? Don’t think you can count on rolling out the same old display strategy. It’s time to get creative and imagine the new possibilities inspired by this new platform. Media industry guru Ken Doctor points to innovative advertisers who take advantage of the unique iPad format: “What’s better for an insurance company like Liberty Mutual than threatening you with disaster (tornado, earthquake, flood) and then inviting you to simply tilt your iPad to watch the damage disappear?” Now that’s what I call mobile advertising.

5. United We Stand

Ditch the silos in your advertising strategy and focus on the most important thing – your customer. In this increasingly interconnected world, consumers don’t think in terms of silos, so why should you? The power of integration is evident in the dividends it pays for brands. Google found that consumers had 74% brand recall when the advertiser has an integrated strategy that carries across mobile, TV, and online. QR codes and “bridging” apps like Viggle that help deliver second-screen relevance can support marketers’ efforts to unleash multiplatform, integrated relevance.

So what are you waiting for? The future is here. Smart marketers will succeed in this world by engaging with the trends that have resonance and relevance for the emerging consumer of today.

I’m sure my hypothalamus is hardwired for chocolate – that old adage, “out of sight, out of mind” may work for some folks – not me. If there’s chocolate in the upper reaches of the pantry or it’s buried two-feet deep behind various foodstuffs in the fridge, my brain immediately sends out tracking signals – a cranial GPS (Godiva Positioning System), I reckon.

So not surprisingly, as a self-confessed ‘chocoholic’, I was thrilled a few years ago when I started reading reports about how dark chocolate – eaten in moderation (inhaled is more accurate for me) – may be good for the heart.

Some dark chocolate confections even contain various vitamins, nutrients and probiotics; research has also shown that flavonoids – antioxidants found in cocoa beans – may help lower blood pressure and LDL (think ‘Lousy’ – it’s the bad acronym) cholesterol, and also improve blood vessel function.

In fact, noted Joy Dubost, a nutritionist and spokesperson for the Washington, DC-based Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, “the higher the percentage of cocoa, the higher the flavanol content, the higher the antioxidant content and thus we believe the greater positive health benefit.”

All of the aforementioned now fully justifies my quarterly trips to Ghirardelli’s in San Francisco – I now order guilt-free the hot fudge sundaes with dark chocolate sauce.

This then got me wondering about innovative marketing campaigns various companies have rolled out to drum up sales for their dark chocolate products, and in some cases if interesting enough, plain old milk chocolate.

Cadbury

One campaign that Cadbury would probably like to recall/reboot was to promote Bliss, a chocolate product.

The august British company (established 1824 and now owned by Kraft Foods) ran an ad for the product with the heading, “Move over Naomi, there’s a new diva in town.”

Supermodel Naomi Campbell wasn’t thrilled about being compared to a chocolate bar and even her mum, Valerie Morris, chimed in, saying “I’m deeply upset by this racist advert. Do these people think they can insult black people and we just take it? This is the 21st century, not the 1950s. Shame on Cadbury.”

Cadbury, it should be noted, did do the right thing – the company pulled the ads and issued an apology to Campbell.

On the flip side, another campaign rolled out by Cadbury India fared much better. The objective was to publicize its premium dark chocolate brand, Bournville and further promote the catchphrase, “You don’t just buy a Bournville, you earn it.”

Cadbury launched a blog called The Dark Truth and introduced a virtual character – Old Hound. In one story, another virtual character, Mark, a friend of Old Hound, disappeared. While trying to find Mark, Old Hound got a clue that if he collected 100 stories about people receiving something after they have earned it, he would discover the whereabouts of his friend. The posts generated more than 2,000 daily readers.

Haagen-Dazs

A few years ago Haagen-Dazs rolled out its Dark Chocolate Orange flavor at 14 outlets in Singapore and Malaysia. A campaign slugged ‘Slow Melting in Progress’ was aimed at female professionals in their 20s and 30s who are “engrossed with their profession and family and tend to forget themselves in the process, neglecting to pamper themselves.”

That verbiage seems a bit askew but the radio/print/web campaign apparently worked as Dark Chocolate Orange became a popular flavor in that corner of Southeast Asia.

Cocoa Metro

Cocoa Metro, located in Auburndale, MA, markets various dark chocolate drinks. Their catchphrase on their home page immediately grabs your attention: 'Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark.'

The sweet maker recently rolled a multimedia ad campaign. One image depicts how Cocoa Metro’s decadent chocolate can be consumed – via juice boxes, pop cans and flasks, for example. Another series of ads relies more on clever verbiage and fonts to capture your attention (having a refrigerated backyard bunker full of chocolate seems like a very sound idea).

Rom

While not a dark chocolate, this campaign merits a brief mention. Rom is a hugely popular Romanian chocolate bar, first introduced in 1964. It features the Romanian flag on the wrapper and probably everyone from Bucharest to Brasov to Baia Mare has gobbled one down.

To fuel international sales and branding, the company rolled out a week-long hoax – the American flag was used on the packaging and various YouTube videos explained that due to a poor economy and a frustrated youth culture, Rom was ditching its Romanian heritage. Literally tens of thousands of angry Romanians vented their outrage on Facebook, YouTube and countless blogs.

The campaign was a stunning success – it reached almost 70 percent of all Romanians. Rom’s Facebook page fan total increased by over 300 percent and it’s estimated the company generated about $500,000 worth of free media. McCann Erickson’s Bucharest office also garnered two Grand Prix Cannes Lions awards in the ‘Promo/Activation’ category (for advertising programs that bring on immediate responses/engagements), and the ‘Direct’ category for direct marketing.

There are scores of other examples but quite frankly, I’ve written enough – time for some chocolate.

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.