Audience Segmentation in Action

Hoover’s is one of the leading sources of proprietary business information with a database of information on more than 30 million corporations and organizations, and more than 35 million people. Their trade is the intelligence that business people need to get their jobs done.

Earlier this year, Hoover’s marketers went through the process of drilling down to answer just what kind of businessperson is their best target customer. It’s an exercise that marketing departments go through all the time, but when Hoover’s took the answer to the Bizo ad-targeting platform they were able to put into action.

“What was intriguing to us was the ability to target people in their network based on their job title, the size of their company, what level they are at the company.” said Rocky Brown, marketing manager at Hoover’s. “We were able to take the segmenting work we had done — which identified sales roles in micro to small businesses, and marketing roles in pace-setter mid-sized businesses as our key customers — and translate that to targeted advertising.”

Because of the research that Hoover’s had done up front about these audience segments, the creative wasn’t challenging to execute. Because the ads would be targeted to a particular subset of the business audience, the ads could be very specific in their messaging.

Working with Bizo, Hoover’s was able to target ads to exactly the audience that their own research had shown would be the most receptive to their messages. It was also an audience they hadn’t been able to target effectively in the past. They started targeting their ads in September 2009 and the results have been significant.

Hoover’s, which had been advertising on ad networks that had advertised themselves as reaching business audiences, saw clickthroughs on its advertisements improve at a rate of 3x higher than the last campaign.

Rocky was pleased to see the results come in so strong. “I can’t say it was surprising, but we were pleased to actually see it happened.” Because Hoover’s sales doesn’t usually stretch past a month at the most, Hoover’s was able to quickly calculate ROI on its online advertising spend. It came in at 181% in September and 278% in October.

“What we saw was using a reduced spend — and I’m not ever advocating for a reduction in marketing expenses —we were maintaining the same amount of revenue,” said Rocky. “The ROI was fantastic.”