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!