Top 3 Media Buying Mistakes B2B Marketers Make

Wrong Way -- B2B Marketing Mistakes

Sometimes the best advice and perspective doesn’t come from the public figures we hear at conferences or see quoted in publications. It comes from the people who are hands on, doing the work in a wide range of situations.

Toby HudsonToby is one of those guys. You probably don’t know Toby, but maybe you should. He recently joined Business Insider as the Sales Director for the Southeast, after a number of years with CBSi, parent to B2B technology focused properties ZDNet and TechRepublic (among others). Like many of the people I work with at publishers, Toby works on more programs in a month than many of us work on in a year and that position gives him first hand insight into what is working, and what isn’t, at scale. [Read more…]

What Online Marketers Know About You

Rubble
According to many in the digital advertising industry, at some point in the future digital marketing will be so targeted that consumers will want to see the ads. Advertising will tell us about the products we want to know about, give us a direct path to the content we need and provide access to discounts on products we want.

How will marketers do this? Data, of course. Information marketers can use to determine what you are interested in. [Read more…]

A Simple Trick To Improve Your LinkedIn Campaign Performance

Missing
If you are a B2B marketer, you are paying attention to LinkedIn. You almost can’t ignore it today.

LinkedIn has become a powerhouse media company for B2B marketers, from opportunities for direct engagement (it does still have a few social media trappings) to publishing, content promotion and advertising. Not to mention the targeting data (but we’ll come back to that). [Read more…]

The Dark Future of Native Advertising

Dark staircase spiraling down.Native advertising, and specifically native publishing programs, will struggle in the future.

It isn’t because publishers’ offerings are flawed, because visitors have developed sponsored content blindness or because we have all developed an aversion to all sponsored content.

It comes down to a marketplace issue that, over time, will be a thorn in the side of native publishing. It will lead to a degradation of media brands, an influx of low quality content and ultimately the loss of many of the benefits that made native publishing attractive in the first place.

First a quick definition of native publishing. Then we will look at the research that points to an upcoming challenge to the growing native publishing market. [Read more…]

LinkedIn Has Opened the Content Marketing Floodgates

Linkedin Centipedes at 2010 Bay to BreakersLinkedIn has gone Tumblr on us and B2B content marketers are drooling. Finally, you can publish directly on LinkedIn, along with people like Bill Gates and Richard Branson.

It seems like the perfect opportunity, but it is brand new territory. What should you expect going in? How should you approach it?

Although it has only been available for two weeks, and only to a handful of people, here are my initial expectations. [Read more…]

Why The Analysts Are Wrong About Twitter’s Ad Platform

Media Buyers Are Dinosaurs: Picture of a FossilWhat happens when you survey 50 media buyers? You learn that media buyers have put a bit of social lipstick on their buys but they still don’t understand the potential of social media, the importance of content, and so much more.

About two weeks ago, two equity research analysts at Cowen & Co surveyed 50 ad buyers. 60% said Facebook delivers the best ROI, 25% picked LinkedIn and just 5% chose Twitter.

The analyst’s conclusion? Sell Twitter. They expect Twitter’s stock price to fall to $32 (it closed at $62.53 on 1/21).

My conclusion? The majority of media buyers are doomed. And Twitter will be just fine. [Read more…]

The Real Reasons Programmatic Ad Buys Fail in B2B Marketing

Fail Road SignProgrammatic buying, driven by real-time bidding (RTB), is the fastest growing segment of digital marketing today. But it isn’t ready yet for today’s enterprise B2B marketer.

Time and time again, B2B marketers fall prey to a wonderful sounding sales pitch for their demand generation plan that goes something like this:

“We use 100’s of data points and sophisticated technology that optimizes every single impression in your campaign. Through our connections to every major exchange, we evaluate billions of impressions across millions of sites every day to find the exact audience and inventory you need at a fraction of the cost you would otherwise pay.”

Wow, sign me up, right? Cost-effective, constantly optimized, highly targeted. Get this program live, I’m taking a vacation!

And then you see the results. [Read more…]

Invisible Brand Marketing Is Not Just a Facebook Problem!

Invisible Brand MarketingStop grumbling about Facebook’s latest blow to marketers.

You’ve increased your likes 100-fold in the last two years, and many of your competitors have too. Others have finally jumped on the social media bandwagon, adding their own voice to the marketing cacophony of Facebook.

Of course your posts aren’t reaching as many people on Facebook! [Read more…]