A Marketer’s Alphabet Soup: A Look into DMP, DSP, SSP, and RTB

By Pete Schott
Wednesday, May 22, 2013

In today’s digital marketing landscape there are an infinite number of acronyms.  As a marketer, you might have KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for your RoS (Run of Site) campaign with the end goal of driving new MQLs (Marketing-Qualified Leads). While I could go on for days describing all of the acronyms that you might run into, there are a handful that are tossed around quite often in digital marketing speak that are a bit more difficult to digest:

DMP: Data Management Platform

The DMP enables...

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Get More Mileage Out of Your B2B Buyer Personas through Display Advertising

By Pete Schott
Monday, May 20, 2013

Have you and your marketing team spent time developing buyer personas? Perhaps you’ve segmented your database in order to craft focused email campaigns to specific industry groups, or for guidance in purchasing third-party email lists. While these are worthwhile applications for audience segmentation, many B2B marketers are applying their persona and segmentation strategies to display advertising. One of the most precise yet scalable channels available, display advertising lets you target only...

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The Future of B2B Marketing: Thoughts from Leaders at Eloqua and Bizo

By Jen Agustin
Friday, May 17, 2013

B2B marketers face challenges in bringing more leads into the funnel and turning them into buyers. Doing so calls for changing how marketers tend to think about branding and engagement through all stages of the funnel. That’s what Bizo CEO Russell Glass and Eloqua CTO Steve Woods addressed in “Staying on the Bleeding Edge of B2B Marketing: A C-Level Fireside Chat with Bizo and Eloqua,” a discussion moderated by Digital Marketing Remix editor Sean Callahan. Here are some of the highlights of the...

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Moving beyond the Last Click: Debunking Misconceptions about B2B Marketing

By Jen Agustin
Tuesday, May 14, 2013

As we continue to break down and illuminate each of the points we made in our recent summary of the biggest misconceptions of effective B2B marketing, we come now to our second chapter of this series. This time, we’ll be talking about the hazards of assuming that you can attribute credit to the last click in a buyer’s path and get an accurate idea of the impact of your marketing dollars.

Back when the web was still relatively young and marketers started demanding some measurement of digital ROI,...

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4 Ways B2B Marketers Can Fend Off the Summer Slowdown

By Pete Schott
Monday, May 13, 2013

In summertime, the livin’ ain’t always easy for B2B marketers and salespeople.

The fact that activity slows during summer months for many B2B companies is not news to anyone. However, while the sales team may have to wait more patiently to close deals during this period while prospects are planning and taking vacations, B2B marketers can find creative ways to keep their audience engaged and prepare them to buy once the vacations are over. Here are four tips for fending off the summer slump:

1. Hit...

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Why We're Offering $100 in Retargeting Credit

By Pete Schott
Saturday, May 4, 2013

To help organizations of all sizes get comfortable with the power of website retargeting, Bizo is offering $100 in advertising credit to all new users of our Self-Service Marketing Platform. But before talking about the platform itself, I’d like to further explore why we’re doing this free promotion.

As marketers, you and I, we like to test. We’re a risk-averse bunch that are challenged with finding the best vendors and technologies that make the biggest impact on our bottom lines with the best...

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The Top Challenges Facing B2B Marketers: If These Sound Familiar, What's Your Next Step?

By David Karel
Friday, May 3, 2013

A recent BtoB Magazine survey found that a lengthening B2B sales cycles and struggles with audience segmentation and program attribution are among the top challenges facing B2B marketers today. It’s worth taking a deeper dive into these challenges, and how marketers can react to continue to scale their marketing engines to support the needs of the business.

Challenge: 90% of the B2B purchase process happens before sales people get involved.

At the end of the day, sales needs marketing to help...

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Laying the Groundwork for a Display Campaign that Counts

By David Karel
Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Like any program, your display campaign is largely destined for success or failure based on the decisions that you make, steps taken, and the quality of work done before you ever launch.   As mentioned in a previous post where I gave an inside look at where display advertising fits in our mix at Bizo, my team has been aggressively testing, learning and getting a handle on how to design, flight, measure and optimize display campaigns since our earliest days.  So, I thought I’d share the 5-step...

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B2B Ad Creative: What Works for Mid-Funnel Engagement

By Jen Agustin
Monday, April 29, 2013

 

mid-funnel impactIn my last post, “B2B Ad Creative: What Works for Top-Funnel Branding,” I explored how display advertising strategies differ depending on where you’re looking to make an impact within the marketing funnel. For example, if you’re looking to increase brand awareness, you’ll want to fill the top of your marketing funnel with as many prospects within your target business audience as possible. To accomplish this with our own internal Bizo display ad campaign, we sought to use ad creative that was...

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Interested in Online Video Advertising? What B2B Marketers Need to Know

By Pete Schott
Friday, April 26, 2013

If you’re one of the 70% of B2B marketers that creates online videos, you’re likely distributing them via Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn…the usual suspects. Yet unless your video goes viral, the reach available to you within your own audience is limited. Paid video advertising online gives marketers access to 75 million daily viewers in the U.S. that are streaming 40 billion videos per month, and marketers have taken notice. U.S. online video RTB spending accounted for $402 million in 2012...

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Step Aside Marketers: Social Media is for the Sales Team

By Pete Schott
Tuesday, April 23, 2013

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how B2B marketers are learning to love social media for lead generation; now I want to explore how B2B salespeople should too. As a marketer, one of your responsibilities is to better equip salespeople to generate qualified opportunities and close deals. One of the best ways to do this is to urge them to monitor and react to social conversations as much as you do.

Twitter hashtags primarily exist to enable like-minded professionals to connect and participate...

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Introducing Bizo Data Solutions: Digital Advertising 2.0 Has Finally Arrived

By Mark Dye
Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Bizo Data SolutionsFor the more than five years that we’ve been building Bizo’s B2B business, there’s been a constant challenge of “back to the future.”

Despite all the technological advancements in the AdTech space—from supply-side platforms (SSPs), demand-side platforms (DSPs), and data management platforms (DMPs) to customer relationship management (CRM), marketing automation, and content management systems (CMSs)—two 1999 metrics still largely ruled the day: click through rate (CTR) and view-through...

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Yes, Branding Matters: Debunking Misconceptions About B2B Marketing

By David Karel
Friday, April 12, 2013

You may have recently read about the greatest misconceptions of great B2B marketing. We’ll be undertaking a series of posts to dive deeper and get a better handle on each misconception, helping us all collectively steer our marketing efforts down the most productive path.

To kick-off, let’s consider the notion that “branding is less important in B2B.” Ever catch yourself thinking that investing dollars in branding is for the B2C marketer endeavor? Think again. We’ve explained recently why...

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How to Battle the Quick Death of a PR Hit

By Pete Schott
Thursday, April 11, 2013

A big public relations announcement can immortalize a major milestone for your company, have lasting effects on SEO and branding, and produce a considerable spike in website traffic. The value inherent in a boost in Web traffic however, as mouth-watering as it is for B2B marketers, remains a largely untapped, lasting opportunity for most. Hundreds or perhaps thousands of people might be driven to your website by PR coverage for a one time, short-lived visit, and never convert.

Looking at Bizo’s...

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Full-Funnel Marketing Case in Point: Brand Awareness to Lead Conversion

By Pete Schott
Thursday, April 4, 2013

The goal of B2B marketers is to communicate with all prospects that could possibly influence or be part of the decision making to buy their products or services. However, finding the right people is only half the battle, and putting an offer in front of them through one channel simply isn’t enough. The answer? Marketers using a full-funnel marketing approach are able to start the dialogue with their target audiences before they’re even thinking about purchasing a new product, continuously...

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You Ask, We Answer – Frequently Asked Questions About Bizo’s Partner Network

By Tara DeZao
Thursday, March 28, 2013

Questiona and Answer for Bizo's Partner NetworkWe know that before targeted ads comes quality data and Bizo has plenty of it. Part of having superior data is having a robust ecosystem behind it. In my last post I addressed Bizo’s data collection process. Now it is time to pull back the covers on the framework behind the process.  Below are some introductory answers to frequently asked questions about our network of partners and how we cultivate data.

Why is Bizo different from other data providers?

Bizo is unique in that it: a) focuses...

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How Targeted Display Advertising Outperformed a Television Campaign—and at 5% of the Cost

By Pete Schott
Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Every event marketer has at one point shuddered in angst at the thought of, “is anybody going to show up?”

Even the most confident marketers know event marketing is a numbers game. To draw 1,000 attendees you may need to drive 2,000 to 3,000+ registrations, knowing well that a significant portion of that group will be unable to attend. How can event marketers amplify the reach and awareness of their events with their core target audiences while prompting these prospective attendees to register...

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B2B Ad Creative: What Works for Top-Funnel Branding

By Jen Agustin
Thursday, March 21, 2013

When it comes to our own B2B display advertising at Bizo, we have a three-pronged approach: use display ads to fill the top of our marketing funnel with as many prospects within our target business audience as possible (i.e. online marketers), incorporate mid-funnel display ads aimed to educate and nurture prospects, especially through social paid advertising, and use retargeting to nurture them anywhere on the Web and ultimately drive conversions at the bottom of the funnel. These may sound...

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5 Reasons Why Branding Matters to Lead Generation Marketers

By Pete Schott
Wednesday, March 20, 2013

All action results from thought, so it is thoughts that matter. - Sai Baba

Do you want your prospects to take action when they encounter your offers? Want to be the “go-to brand” in your industry? Get them thinking about your brand first. Tell a story. What can you do to make your prospects better understand what value you provide, and make them feel more compelled to take action?

In your own experience, what is the likelihood that you’ll fill out a form for content from RandomCompany, Inc. if...

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Keep Your B2B Audience Engaged: Target then Retarget

By Pete Schott
Thursday, March 7, 2013

Attracting the attention of your target audience is hard. Keeping them engaged and turning them into buyers is even harder. One of the primary reasons for this is that 97 to 98 percent of visitors don’t convert during their first visit to a B2B website. Getting your brand and messaging in front of the right target audiences is only one piece of the puzzle—to maximize conversions and ROI, retargeting must be included in the mix.

In my last post I shared how 75 percent of the conversions in...

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