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B2B Lead Generation vs B2B Advertising: What You Need to Know

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Caution signAmong paid media and advertising tactics, lead generation programs are a key source of leads for B2B marketers, especially in the enterprise technology space. Tell a B2B publisher that you are interested in lead generation and the majority will point to some form of white paper syndication program they offer.

For the sake of this post, lead generation programs refer to publisher programs that promote your content and capture registration. These are contacts or inquiries, not sales leads, but in keeping with the terminology publishers use, we will refer to this as lead generation here.

In enterprise technology, publishers like IDG, Information Week and TechTarget have nearly turned these programs into a science, with guaranteed leads volume and a myriad of filtering and qualification options driven largely by email and newsletter promotions. [Read more…]

Modern Media Buying and Enterprise B2B Demand Generation

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The current trend in digital media is to move online advertising to trading desks, ad exchanges or real time bidding platforms. These platforms provide access to enormous pools of advertising inventory and allow media buyers to cherry pick their exact target audience, based on a wide range of audience data available for targeting.

However, for enterprise B2B marketers, these approaches are not mature enough to broadly support demand generation marketing. The challenges these platforms continue to face are access to sufficient high quality inventory and access to data appropriate for targeting company sizes and roles.

Published market research differs on the relative importance on audience and context, however the research I have seen does not align with the typical B2B marketing audience experience.

The problem: consuming traditional B2B content used for demand generation requires a significant time commitment. Taking the time to dive into a whitepaper or watch a webcast imposes a major time requirement. [Read more…]

Online Advertising Metrics: A Simple Framework

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When planning an online advertising campaign, or reviewing results, the data can be overwhelming. It seems everything can be measured sixteen different ways. Other times, it seems nothing that matters is measured. Lots of data, but little to no actionable information.

When digital campaigns are not driving a single discrete activity, like an ecommerce transaction, selecting metrics requires care. We cannot measure the ultimate outcome (sales) with a long sales cycle and be agile marketers. It takes too long and there are not enough sales to provide meaningful insight into each element of a program. We have to select metrics that have sufficient volume and are available quickly as proxies for our long-term objective, sales and revenue.

The following framework is a useful starting place, [Read more…]

Ad Networks, Exchanges and … B2B?

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Ad networks and exchanges are not just for consumer marketers. There are opportunities for B2B marketers to cost effectively add ad networks and exchanges to online advertising campaigns, increasing reach and cost efficiency. And with the emergence of self-service platforms, even marketers with small budgets can test adding these to programs.

Here are three opportunities every B2B marketer should at least consider.

Retargeting
Retargeting allows you to reach people again that visited your site but did not register. If you already have a way to nurture contacts that you don’t have a lot of information about, you know how to use retargeting. The difference is that your message is reaching people that may be earlier in the buying process (they were not willing to give up their information yet), but they already looked at your content. These are your highest value anonymous prospects, [Read more…]