Why Every Marketer Should Incorporate Display across the Marketing Mix

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The one thing online marketers can’t change is time. No matter how hard we may try, we can’t increase the number of minutes that our prospective buyers spend online, crossing our fingers that somewhere, somehow, our prospects will download our latest white paper, read our tweets, or search for our product. Nor can we alter which online channels our prospects spend the most time on. There’s a lot of data out there on where Internet users are spending their days online—social media, search engines, email inboxes, news sites, etc. However, this data is changing every day, and placing your bets on any single channel simply doesn’t make sense.

So what’s the easiest way for marketers to stay in front of the audience they care about online?
By combining targeted display advertising across the entire marketing mix. Using display ads, you can cost-effectively access the precise business audiences you’re after and waste no impressions on users that are irrelevant to your business. If you currently invest in paid search, email marketing, or social media marketing, you can give these core programs a boost, simply by adding display to the mix. Here are some examples of how:

Display + Search: With keyword targeting, you can serve relevant display ads to prospects based on their keyword searches.

Display + Email: By implementing cookies in emails, you can use retargeting to stay top of mind with those in your email database even after they’ve left their inboxes.

Display + Social: Using a link shortener, you can gain insight into the business profiles of people who click on your shared links, and then retarget them later based on the type of content they’ve shown an interest in.

While your Twitter feed and Facebook page are great for building brand awareness, and your email campaigns do much to build and nurture relationships with leads, your prospects have other places to go online during the day. Display advertising—and the powerful technique of retargeting—guarantee that you’ll stay with them wherever they travel across the Web, and in the most relevant way possible.

Online Ad Predictions for 2012: Thoughts on ROI, Privacy, and Yes, More Acquisitions

By Russell Glass, CEO, Bizo
@glassruss

It’s hard to believe another year has gone by already. This past year, we’ve seen the online advertising landscape continue to evolve at a rapid pace, fueled no doubt by increasing accountability for online media, key acquisitions, and online marketers demanding more from their campaigns—and the technologies that power them. What’s on the docket for next year?

Here are my thoughts:

A NEW WAY OF LOOKING AT ROI

Finally—The Death of the Click
As the Drago of online advertising, the Click has been beat on from all corners, but has refused to fall. Next year will be the final round in the fight – and Drago is going down. I foresee the majority of savvy, online marketers finally abandoning the click as a success metric in display advertising. It’s been a long time coming, and marketers everywhere, particularly those targeting business professionals, have finally realized that high CTRs do not generally correlate to the most qualified leads. Among other things, I bet we’ll see an increasing focus on the value of branding and post-impression attribution.

First- and Third-Party Data Unite
In 2011, we witnessed more and more online publishers achieving a better understanding of the value of their audiences, and as a result, better monetizing their inventories. However, from the advertiser’s perspective, first-party data is only the beginning. Advertisers have seen the ROI benefits that come from using both first- and third-party data to target prospects. As a result, I predict that in 2012, these two types of data will begin to blend seamlessly, ultimately driving deeper insight and ROI for marketers. Advertisers will also buy third-party data sets to integrate with their own data for better efficiency and targeting.

As a corollary, advertisers will also begin to build pools of prospects that are in different parts of the buying funnel, and will use online advertising—and techniques such as retargeting—to nurture those people further down the funnel.

PRIVACY GOES MOBILE

You want creepy? Let’s face it, when advertisers can serve you Charmin ads because they know you’re in the bathroom, THAT’S when it starts to get creepy. Privacy will remain a hot-button issue, but while 2011 was all about browsers and online advertising opt-out features, 2012 will be the year of mobile privacy issues. Targeting users with ads on mobile devices will become widespread, sparking serious privacy debates that make Web privacy seem pedestrian and “so last year.” I predict we’ll also start to see a drop in the number of phones dropped into toilets in 2012.

PREDICTIONS AND INDUSTRY ACQUISITIONS – WHO’S NEXT?

The catalyst: The demand for third-party data and tools will also fuel greater demand for technologies such as AppNexus Apps, which allows its customers and partners to easily create their own customizable display ad platform.
Acquisition prediction: Google will extend their Apps Marketplace to the DoubleClick platform to compete with AppNexus.

The catalyst: The most advanced marketers using RTB will realize that they can run their trading desks internally and will bring the skill-set in house.
Acquisition prediction: IBM will acquire Turn or MediaMath to help provide those solutions to CMOs.

The catalyst: With its acquisition of Efficient Frontier, Adobe has placed a stake in the ground of online advertising, and it only makes sense for them to expand their portfolio in brand advertising. Adobe is building for brand marketers what Google is building for direct response marketers.
Acquisition prediction: Adobe will acquire online brand measurement company Vizu in 2012.

What are your predictions for next year?

New Data from Bizo and Vizu Characterizes the Political Affiliation and Donation Intentions of Business Executives

Politicians are not only rallying for votes, they are also jockeying for lucrative political donations. As with any online advertising campaign, the key to effective digital ad spend in political campaigning is reaching the right audiences. With political campaigns forecasted to spend record- breaking amounts, successful candidates will tap into the more than 20 percent of business executives planning to donate to a political cause this season in order to capture highly sought after campaign dollars.

Bizo / comScore Collaboration Gets Marketers One Step Closer to the Holy Grail

As marketers, we all know that there’s a Holy Grail to doing our jobs well and getting results: Putting the right message in front of the right audiences at the right time, as they progress through our respective marketing funnels. Given limited resources, budgets and time, this objective can often seem a pie-in-the-sky notion. But, there’s an increasing pool of available audience segmentation techniques, targeting data, and new and maturing channels that we can all tap into in order to reach the specific audiences we care about at the scale needed to really make our campaigns move the needle.

In this context, we are excited to share the news that the comScore-Bizo Index that we announced in August has now been integrated into comScore’s new Segment Metrix 2.0 solution. The Segment Metrix 2.0 is the next generation of comScore’s audience segmentation tool, which provides actionable insights into the online behaviors of Internet users in specific market segments.

Through this collaboration, which marries Bizo’s unique bizographic data on over 80% of the U.S. business population with comScore’s consumer insights, we are able to help marketers and media buyers understand the synergies and crossover of key business audiences with information seeking and online purchasing behavior for specific goods and services. For example, let’s say you are a brand marketer of a luxury good like jewelry or watches. Via comScore’s Segment Metrix 2.0, you could now see that Media & Internet Professionals are 467% more likely to purchase jewelry and watches online than the average U.S. Internet user. Similarly, if you’re trying to reach consumers likely to take you up on your holiday promotion to visit your premium resort destination, targeting Bizo’s Fortune 500 Audience segment would seem a good bet since they’re 53% more likely to be seeking information on hotels and resorts online .

Our new collaboration with comScore puts insights like this at the fingertips of Segment Metrix 2.0 users - insights that both underscore the value of business audiences as high value consumers and reveal a clear path to grabbing the marketer’s Holy Grail.

Partnering with Publishers

You’ve all heard the old adage, “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you!” In a way, that sage advice is a cornerstone of Bizo’s core business model. Over the last three years, Bizo has developed partnerships with more than 1,800 business and news publisher sites. Now, I can’t claim that every single one of those relationships has been a raving success, but the vast majority of them have been mutually rewarding – symbiotic, if you will.

A key element of that success is due to the fact that Bizo follows a very ‘publisher-centric’ business model in which we diligently avoid creating channel conflict with our partners. We do this by following one simple, but iron-clad rule:

- We do not allow advertisers to target campaigns by site, and that includes NOT providing advertisers with any site-level reporting after the fact.

Bizo offers our marketers the ability to target campaigns against specific business audiences – what we call bizographic segments. We enable advertisers to reach their audience at scale and to own share of voice within that target segment. And, we provide very detailed reporting on what audience metrics are driving success. However, if an advertiser asks about delivering ads on a specific site or targeting ads to users from a specific site, then our answer is simply, “Sorry, we don’t do that – but we’d be happy to introduce you to our publishers if you’d like to advertise with them directly.”

This model has enabled Bizo to grow rapidly, to develop strong partnerships and to help drive mutual success with a host of business publishers. We have built Bizo on this bedrock of mutual trust and shared revenue opportunity, and we envision great success in this model for all constituents in the business audience marketing space!

The Key to Unlocking the Potential of Your DR Programs: Branding

As marketers, we now have the ability to impact the direction of our respective businesses like never before. We’ve entered the age of the revenue marketer where we strive to tie every marketing dollar invested to revenue contribution -- and we look to test, measure, and learn from everything we do. We also now have the systems to help accomplish this and really shine in our roles.

But, we may have a blind spot.

The immediate gratification of today’s leads may be causing us to spend a disproportionate percentage of our time and budget focusing on the very small population of target prospects who are already in our nurturing sites. The unintended consequence of this direct response program focus and leads addiction is that we may be handicapping every dollar invested and hour spent on that tiny part of our target audience that is ready to engage today (think lower funnel) at the expense of taking time to educate the broader population of buying audiences that we care about (think upper funnel).

Compared to our overall target audiences, we all have relatively few prospects that are actively seeking a solution to a problem today. These few make up the smaller pool of target prospects that might take the time to download our white papers, register for our webinars, or get started on our free trials.

What if we resisted the urge to drive those additional 500 conversions this month and spent more time and budget making sure the broader audience that we care about knows who we are, what we do, and why we matter – long before a formal buying process kicks-off? I bet you half of next quarter’s marketing budget that you’d get more out of every dollar invested in programs across your mix, you’d see more of the right traffic making it to your website and converting; and you’d increase velocity of leads through your sales process.

By forcing ourselves to think beyond this quarters lead flow, and mounting targeted branding campaigns (there I said it – the “B” word!) to educate the broader audiences we care about, wherever they choose to consume information online, we’ll start getting at the true potential value of a marketing dollar invested in our direct response programs.

Note: This post originally appeared on Business2Community http://a.sw.io/JWaqY0M

A Jobs Solution: In-Shoring and Education

Over the past few decades, largely because of innovation in the technology that powers everything from agriculture to manufacturing to the Internet, the United States has become increasingly more efficient at producing just about everything. This efficiency has allowed companies to do more with fewer people, thus reducing labor needs, decreasing their costs and increasing their profits, dividends and/or spending on R&D. At the same time, the access to global labor forces has increased exponentially, further driving jobs outside of the United States and reducing need for home-grown talent.

Everyone from President Obama to the corner grocer to the typical 20-something graduating from college has one topic weighing on their minds right now – jobs. Specifically, what is the United States going to do about the jobs crisis, and the structural changes discussed above that have pushed us to potentially permanent 9%+ unemployment rates?

As the CEO of Bizo, a fast growing company in the technology industry, I have a simple solution. While simple, it will only be successful with heavy doses of that through which our country has always succeeded: hard work. Ultimately, jobs are about people. Bizo hires only great people, but we hire them just about as fast as we can find them. We are one of tens of thousands of businesses in the same position. The solution to getting America back to work will start and end with people and their skills. And therein lies the problem. Our workforce isn’t properly trained for the positions that are in high demand today let alone the jobs of the future, and many have little incentive today to get those next generation skills in most areas of the country because jobs aren’t available there.

The solution – we need to bring the jobs to people. They need to believe that if they get new skills, there will be a job available to them, so that they have the incentive to acquire the skills they need to be successful. As Obama mentioned in his American Jobs Act speech, the technology industry will be the driver of both current and the next generation of jobs. Leading a technology company in Silicon Valley, I believe we have a responsibility to do our part to create and fill jobs in this country. This isn’t just generosity, but simple economics. If the economy thrives, we will be more successful and our children will be more successful. Ultimately that’s why we all work in the first place, isn’t it? This is something that we take very seriously, and we hope that other tech leaders agree and will join us in attacking this problem head on. So I thought it would be worthwhile to capture a few notes on exactly how we are taking responsibility for job creation and how others can follow suit in a way that actively supports and grows their respective businesses. We look at the opportunity as concentric circles – inside our company, inside our community and inside our country. Here’s what we are doing:

Inside Bizo

We realized early on that we needed to hire only great people to build our company. However, hiring people only in the local San Francisco bay area was a significant limitation, and we would have to sacrifice quality or over-pay to get the right resources. This is a huge problem that all high-growth companies in technology face today. At the same time, we didn’t feel that we could build the right tight-knit culture we wanted by off-shoring to India, Belarus or other far-away lands. Our solution? Again, a simple one: use powerful and cheap existing communications technologies like Skype, Google Docs, Dropbox, instant messaging, and web conferencing to manage our company and “in-shore.” That is, hire a resource anywhere in the United States and build a culture that enables this setup to work effectively. Today our 45 person company is represented in 10 states around the country including one person in far-away Hawaii. This serves big benefits for Bizo: 1) we have built an infrastructure to hire incredible talent regardless of where they live in the country, 2) our average cost per employee is lower than our competition so we can hire more of them, 3) we have network effects to having people around the country that fuels our ability to hire more great people. In fact, we haven’t used a single recruiter to find our employees – we’ve done almost all of our hiring via networking. Finally, we have built in diversity of experience, background and location, a key benefit to making good decisions.

It is my belief that better companies are built this way, and in-shoring has the potential to alter the landscape of this country’s job market. If the laid off auto worker in Detroit, or the high school student in Little Rock, or the former textile marketer in Greensboro sees that there are jobs available to work for high growth Silicon Valley (or Silicon Alley or Boston, etc.) technology companies if they only had the right skills, they will go out and acquire those skills.

Inside our Community

My belief is that everything comes down to local government and local education. At the end of the day, federal government can help set direction and grease the skids, but policies and education are actually implemented at the state and local level. Given this, Bizo has been active in organizing San Francisco mayoral debates and organizing local technology leaders and entrepreneurs to ensure that we are all contributing to the process of building the right infrastructure and education for future success. The technology and innovation are all there, but the local and state governments of areas that have high-growth industries have a responsibility to continue to enable these companies to grow to be successful long-term businesses which will fuel further innovation. The innovation cycle is self-fulfilling, and is what will drive this country into the next decades.

Inside our Country

Finally, as a fast growing business in the technology industry, we believe that we quite literally represent the industry and type of company that will power the future job creation engine of the United States. We must compete across borders with innovation and not with labor or price wars. We have never been a follower as a nation, and our core differentiation has always been the freedom to innovate and create. This is still largely missing around the world, and no other country has more potential than does the United States to create the IBMs, Microsofts, Amazons, Apples, Googles, and Facebooks of the future. In that vein our belief is that we need to work with other technology leaders, their companies and the government to ensure that our country is set up to support innovation, education and growth. We have met with Congresswoman Jackie Speier, Ed Felten at the FTC, have been active in public and private debates, and will continue to drive this agenda as we grow our company. We believe that payroll tax cuts for hiring employees and in-shoring across the country is a great step in the right direction, but we must also provide for the right education and retraining opportunities for young and old alike. We all need to make sure that everybody has the access to learn the skills necessary for the future jobs that will drive this country to prosperity.

There will be more to come from Bizo as we endeavor to do our part to drive job growth over the next many months and years, including online education and training that I will discuss in a future post. What are you doing to drive jobs in this country? What else should we be doing? I would love to hear from you.