Bizo – Supercharging B2B landing pages – BizAudience API available in beta today

Today, B2B marketing is largely a process of driving visitors to a website, and often to specific landing pages within that website. Whether a marketer is using email, search, webinars, display ads, or a combination of all of the above, the ultimate goal is to bring a visitor to their website to purchase a product or fill out a form for more information. A ton of work and budget goes into creating the campaigns that convince users to come to a landing page, not to mention the fact that roughly 50% of a marketer’s budget is spent on the website (according to Forrester) – the vehicle designed to convert the visitor to a purchase or a lead.

However, the success rate of turning a visitor into a lead is actually quite small – ranging from 0.5% to 20% of visitors. This small number of leads ultimately costs marketers billions of dollars. For example, let’s say a marketer spends $2.00 per click to drive visitors to their website from Google. If they are able to convert 5% of those visitors to leads, they are getting 5 leads for every 100 visitors or $200 they spend. That means they’re spending $40.00 for every lead. If they were able to improve the conversion rate of the landing page by just another 2%, the cost per lead would drop by roughly $12. This is a 40% improvement in the ROI of the marketing campaign. Multiply this across every marketer in the world, and the opportunity becomes clear.

One marketer that has cracked this nut is Amazon.com. The company has received a lot of well-deserved attention for its ability to personalize each site visitor’s experience. Every Amazon.com visitor has a different experience based on who they are and the products they’ve purchased in the past. Amazon.com predicts what a user might be interested in, which has driven the company to industry leading success and growth – all while delivering a phenomenal experience for the visitor.

Enter Bizo. The company was created to help B2B marketers target online advertising to business audiences. Today, Bizo is launching a new service that allows marketers to use this same targeting to significantly improve the conversion rates of their landing pages, creating an experience much like users get at Amazon.com. The service is called the BizAudience API, and simply, it tells a marketer exactly who is visiting their site – THE MOMENT THEY ARRIVE.

This service allows a marketer to create landing pages and websites that are personalized to each visitor coming to the site. For example, if a visitor from the healthcare industry comes to a landing page, the marketer can now serve their healthcare-focused case study. If a CFO comes to the site, a marketer can serve finance-related content or messaging that will be relevant to the CFO. Similarly, small business owners see SMB content when they arrive on a landing page.

Bizo is now providing the capability for any website owner to easily personalize the experience for business visitors, and ultimately convert more visitors for a higher ROI on all marketing activities. We’ve released the API in a limited beta starting today. If you are interested in an API key for the beta period, please reach out and email us at API-support@bizo.com and we’ll put you on the list!

The Next Generation of Truly Transparent Ads

If you’ve been following this blog or if you’ve spent any time on our Web site, you know that Bizo has a deep commitment to transparency. We built this company around the idea that it was possible to target advertising without compromising anyone’s privacy. (Read more about that here and here.)

But lately we’ve been thinking about what it might look like if we were to take transparency even further in the online ad space. What would it be like if with every ad you saw online, you knew exactly how and why it found its way to your screen?

It wouldn’t be all that tough to pull off, the technology is already there, just not the will. At Bizo, we’ve been imagining a scenario where all of our ads had icons that viewers could click to learn why they were seeing particular ads and what data was used to target them.

Our belief is that that kind of transparency and notification will create lift in advertising success, not detract from it. It’s all about making the consumer more aware of the value trade that’s taking place.

I like to use the example of Google search. A user types something into a search bar and sees content AS WELL AS HIGHLY TARGETED ADS based on what was searched. The user is aware of the tradeoff and appreciates the service – even though Google is tracking everything the user does, there is no (or very little) concern about privacy because the transaction is completely transparent. Because of the targeted nature of the ads, they are often viewed as content and not intrusive, and the ad links can be more relevant than the natural search results.

If we did something similar with display advertising, I believe it would make consumers worry less about why they are seeing particular ads. They would know more about the trade off they engage in to get the content they want to get online. And importantly, they could decide that the trade off isn’t worth it, and opt out if desired. However, for every person that opts-out, I believe there would be 10 that will be more likely to see the ad and appreciate the value trade off that is taking place.

Bizo is working toward launching a feature like this in 2010. We’d love to see others in the industry join us.

Bizo and Multi-Channel Media Attribution

One of the keys to fixing display advertising is finding an alternative to the click-through as a metric for measuring the success of online advertising campaigns.

The most promising – and most practical – form of next-gen measurement is multi-channel media attribution. Multi-channel attribution is measurement of how all marketing channels affect the actions of a prospect or customer. For example, a multi-channel attribution model would measure how adding a display ad campaign to search and email affects conversion rates across all three of these channels. Forrester surveyed 275 Web site decision-makers in 2008 and found that more than half of them believed that attribution would enable them to spend marketing dollars more effectively. Yet only 31 percent were actively using it.

Forrester and others like comScore have been working on methodologies for accurately recording all campaign touch-points in one place to make it easy to compare performance and not record duplicate conversions.

At Bizo, we support the efforts to move in this direction and are constantly talking with our advertisers about the best way to measure online ad success. When you are focused creating top-of-the-funnel opportunities and then moving those prospects down the funnel – as most B2B advertisers are – tracking leads through the sales process can be challenging. But we’re seeing that multi-channel media attribution consistently proves that online display advertising is very effective – well more so than “last-click” methodologies would otherwise indicate.

We want to be able to help marketers tell that story to their bosses. We’re currently working on strategies to more effectively track and provide reporting to prove the efficacy of a display ad whether or not a user clicked. Measurement such as: Who bought? How many times had they seen an ad before they bought? What type of business person is most likely to convert?

As marketers, have you had any success in this type of effort? What has worked and what hasn’t? We’d love your feedback on what capabilities and features we should be thinking about as we build our roadmap to solve these problems for marketers. Please reach out and help us deliver the best possible solutions!

B2B Across the Pond

Today we announced our partnership with The Digital Partnership, a UK-based digital business-advertising network that boasts 6.6 million unique business users. We’ll work with TDP to introduce our bizographic-based ad targeting to the UK. Through Bizo, TDP will get access to the anonymous targeting data for the more than 45 million business professionals in our bizographic database.

We’re excited to work with TDP to extend our reach across the Atlantic and participate in a market that is ripe with opportunity, in part because it's been developing at a slower rate than we’ve seen in the U.S.

I asked Matt Gower, managing director of TDP for his thoughts on the UK market and about the potential he sees in working with Bizo. Here’s what he sent us:

B2B digital advertising is still in its infancy in the UK and those B2B marketers that have come online are largely focused solely on sales generation activity. In fact, just 7% of respondents to a recent survey of B2B marketing professionals, conducted by the Internet Advertising Bureau, said they used online media for brand building. This means there is huge market potential which we are confident that Bizo’s bizographics technology is going to help us tap into. The initial response from advertising agencies and brands across the UK B2B market only reinforces this belief. We are very excited about this partnership and what it offers the blossoming UK B2B market.

At Bizo, it’s obvious that our commitment to the B2B marketplace runs deep. We’ve developed a way to use the right data to target the right business audience for the right advertiser. It’s a simple but powerful idea that makes B2B brand building so much more effective than it used to be. Working with a young market such as the one we find in the UK holds huge potential — both for TDP and for Bizo.

Our Vision

At Bizo, we’re passionate about our commitment to privacy and relevancy, the precise reach we offer advertisers and the revenue streams we provide for online B2B publishers.

To share some of these ideas in a more conversational manner, we’re launching a series of videos to talk about our principles and other thoughts that may be of interest to our customers, partners and others in the industry.

To kick it off we wanted to share the Bizo vision. Please take a look at let us know what you think. You can also follow our video channel at YouTube.com/BizoInc.

Model of Excellence: Bizo

Every year the good people at the InfoCommerce Group — the venerable consulting, research and events company in the specialized information and data publishing industry — set out to answer the question: Who’s doing it right when it comes to cutting-edge uses of data to solve complex business issues?

This year, we’re pleased to announce, Bizo was named as finalist in the process of answering that question. Bizo joined 10 other data-driven businesses to create the 2009 class of Model of Excellence finalists. Read about the winners and all the details from InfoCommerce here.

We are honored to be recognized for our business data targeting technology and go-to-market model. Bizo didn’t invent the concept of targeted advertising, but we’ve taken the concept to a new level in the B2B space by overlaying and supplementing anonymous registration data with IP address information and other third-party data for previously unheard of levels of precision online ad targeting. We pair that data precision with analytics and reporting that helps advertisers track performance and hone their campaigns.

In describing Bizo, InfoCommerce analysts wrote: “Bizo is a data-enhanced B2B ad network that targets advertising based entirely on bizographics: a person's company size, industry, gender, education level, location and more. Bizo's business is using data — massive amounts of anonymous data — to improve the quality and value of advertising impressions.”

Bizo joins the ranks of past finalists of InfoCommerce’s Model of Excellence awards including Pathfinder, Zillow.com, Spoke and Carfax.com. We’re thrilled to be among such lofty company!

Bringing B-to-B Publishers a New Business Model

In June, we hired B2B publishing veteran Bill Furlong as Bizo's Vice President of Business Development (You can read more about Bill and the rest of Bizo's team here). Here's Bill's take on the very important role Bizo plays for B2B publishers in the online world.

As someone who has spent most of his career in business-to-business publishing, I’ve been there to witness what the web has done to these outlets, how it has changed their business and how the best of them have adapted their models to survive and even thrive. Since the dot-com boom and bust, publishers have sought out reasonable pragmatic solutions to growing their online businesses. But since last fall, that urgency has doubled up on finding the right mix of digital initiatives along with keeping the cash cow of print as balanced as possible.

When I joined Bizo earlier this year, I teamed up with a company that has a real value proposition for publishers by providing them a new way to capitalize on the quality of their online audience.

B-to-B has always been about having a narrow but deep audience, for establishing industry must-reads and then capitalizing on them by marketing the audience to industry-specific advertisers. The nature of the business is deep targeting and sustaining a long term engagement with that narrow sliver of the general population. It is becoming increasingly critical to measure that relationship and to move one's prospects down the sales funnel — audience and data must power that equation.

Online, that model hasn’t played out until now. Bizo is bringing these publishers the same premium priced third-party revenue they grew used to in the print or direct mail list arenas. Not only that, but by working with Bizo, B-to-B publishers are able to continue to monetize their audiences wherever they spend their time online. Bizo has moved beyond the run-of-the-mill ad network and turned to generating revenue around one of those most important publisher assets — their qualified targeted audiences. What better way to monetize than to earn more on the audience that that these publications have invested in significantly in over the years? And at no cost of creating additional content or online applications, to boot.

For publishers grappling with the rapidly changing economics of print and online business models, this solution offers an improved source of revenue. One publisher we recently launched lamented that he can't seem to get his registered audience members back to his sites more than a handful of times a month (despite the fact that his newsletters are well engaged). The Bizo solution has allowed him to monetize those online subscribers 10 times over every month on our BTN network.

Another client has the enviable situation of having sold out their inventory and thus was hamstrung on getting access to what were larger than usual online ad budgets from their clients. Bizo implemented our audience extension service so now he is selling more ads to their audience while they are out browsing on our general network of sites. A win-win all around and a great innovation to set them apart from their competitors.

In this changing world of publishing, one must be willing to test and partner with new solutions partners as the landscape continues to move more to a digital "lead" versus to what was an ancillary platform for some just one short year ago. Innovate or die they say!