Weekend Favs June Four

Weekend Favs June Four written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.

I don’t go into depth about the finds, but encourage you check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from Flickr or one that I took out there on the road.

Good stuff I found this week:

Instaemail – add a button to your blog page that lets people email the link directly from your page

AnswerThePublic – free visual keyword and content research tool gives you questions and ideas for any term you submit

PressKitHero – free, hosted press kit creation tool

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5 Unlikely Obstacles Hindering SaaS Conversions

Want more conversions?

Well, it’s possible.

However, the first step is realizing that conversions are people. And those individuals desire a remarkable customer experience.

The key is to remove barriers in the sales cycle. This includes cumbersome checkout processes and poor follow-up sales procedures.

Your SaaS team must perform better. It’s one of the best ways to crush the competition.

“Successful sales people, and successful sales teams, exhibit a superior ability to eliminate the common barriers that would otherwise prevent their prospects from making buying decisions,” writes Bob Apollo, managing partner at Inflexion-Point Strategy Partner.

“They take pains to identify how and why their prospects choose to buy, and what they need to do to straighten the path and remove the obstacles that might stand in their way.”

Earn more sales. Solve these five obstacles blocking your SaaS conversions:

1. Too Many Steps to Sign Up

Do you remember that classic Tootsie Roll commercial? The one that challenged kids to answer the question: How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll Pop?

Kids would literally waste an entire afternoon counting their licks.

Your SaaS team should ask a similar question. How many clicks does it take for a customer to convert?

People don’t enjoy time-consuming tasks. And if they’re ready to buy, prospects don’t want to spend the next 15 minutes clicking through all your useless sales steps.

“Asking your users for a lot of information even before they’ve seen your app could backfire.
Marketers tend to get greedy with information, but the more info you require, the more friction you introduce. If you’re asking for more information up front, make sure to justify each action to eliminate friction,” states Sadhana Balaji, a product marketer at Chargebee.

So, limit the number of steps it takes for a prospect or free trial user to sign up for your service.

According to MarketingSherpa, “by optimizing step one of its sign-up funnel, 1-800-DENTIST lifted conversions by 23% in less than a week.”

Moreover, as you decrease the steps in the process, consider eliminating the multiple add-on features during initial setup.

Studies show that “contrary to economic belief that more choice is better, confronted with too much complexity, we make bad decisions, or stick with what we have already got.”

Thus, overwhelmed prospects may just abandon their sale completely.

Save the customer time and boost your revenue. Remove the 12-step signup process.

2. Treating Every Prospect the Same

People are different. We don’t think the same. We don’t eat the same foods. And the needs of a 20-year-old woman are different from an 80-year-old man.

This concept holds true within your target audience. Prospects are buying your products for different reasons.Some may desire the all-in-one platform, while others love the 24/7 email support.

Use your customers’ differences to your advantage. Start segmenting.

Segmentation helps your team sell specific product benefits to different users.

“If you are looking for segmentation ideas, a great place to start is by asking the sales team about the various roles and buyers they speak to on a regular basis…Use the information you gather from sales to create segmentation strategies that will resonate with your audience,” states Anna Talerico, executive vice president of ion interactive.

The goal of segmentation is to customize the shopping experience. You want prospects to feel like you’re talking directly to them.

Graphic design tool Snappa sends targeted emails to their subscribers based on their position in the sales funnel. Here’s an example of their process flow diagram:

“Marketing leaders must have a single view of the customer that allows them to engage in two-way, personalized conversations across technologies, locations, and physical objects at mass scale,” says Joydeep Bhattacharya, author of Seo Sandwitch Blog.

Don’t get stuck selling everything to everybody. Differentiate your message.

3. Nurturing Like A Used Car Salesman

Research reveals that “65% of B2B marketers have not established lead nurturing campaigns.” Without a clear path, your SaaS team may be causing more harm than good.

Poor lead nurturing results in unethical sales practices, missed deals, and negative brand image. No one wants 10 voicemails in a day from a salesperson.

Rather, strive to educate and build a relationship with your prospective user. That means informing them about your product, not selling.

“It’s about giving the right content to the prospect at the right time, and you can only do this by watching for signs that they’re progressing through the buying cycle. This is done through lead scoring…,” says Sarah Burke, content writer and marketer at Spokal.

Learn where the buyer fits into the sales process. Then, adjust your lead nurturing efforts accordingly.

The image below details the types of content that fit the buying cycle. Top of the funnel prospects may desire video, while the bottom of the funnel consumers may need quotes.

Image Source

Moreover, lead nurturing is built on trust. If buyers don’t trust your brand, it’s time to add some social proof to your sales message.

“Trust badges are also known to increase conversions. Getting a BBB seal can put people at ease knowing that you’ve been vetted by one of these organizations. You’ll also want an SSL certificate to show that your payment gateway is secure and trustworthy,” writes Sid Bharath, an entrepreneur and growth hacker.

Sell with the intention to build relationships.

4. Value is Unclear

Studies indicate that “91% of organizations said they aspire to be among the customer experience leaders in their industry, yet only 37% had started a formal CXM (customer experience management) initiative.”

To jumpstart your CXM program, figure out what value you offer your users. It should be clear and concise.

Aim to make an emotional connection between your product and the consumer’s needs.

Invision’s value proposition is simple. The SaaS offers people the opportunity to design and collaborate efficiently. They want their customers to design with confidence.

Kevin Dewalt, a startup founder, investor, and advisor, suggests offering incentives to portray value. He states:

“Offer additional purchasing incentives to customers who complete Acceleration events to get them to convert early. Examples of purchasing incentives are coupons, annual contracts, or special offers. Or simply tell them to enter a credit card now so they don’t lose service.”

Take control the customer experience. Show the value of your service.

5. Redesign Your Sales Page

Adobe reports that “38% of people will stop engaging with a website if the content/layout is unattractive.”

Customers want eye-catching websites. Your design must grab and hold their attention.

In addition, with loads of information at buyers’ fingertips, it is rare for someone to call a sales department.

So, if customers don’t like what they see, they may just leave. That’s why your sales page must explain your product and address your consumer’s concerns.

“As buyers spend more of their time self-educating before contacting sales…the pricing page of SaaS websites has reached critical importance in the buyers’ journey for enterprise SaaS sales..,” writes Brian Devaney, inbound marketing strategist at New Breed Marketing.

Unbounce’s sales page is an exemplary example. It tells prospects what they will receive and the prices. And the layout is clean with ample white space.

Evaluate your sales page. Is it time to change the copy or the layout?

No More Barriers

Eliminate the roadblocks in your sales cycle. Gain more users by improving the overall experience.

Ditch the multiple steps to sign up. Stop mass selling with one message. And revamp your sales page from the customer’s perspective.

Get rid of the obstacles. Start converting.

About the Author: Shayla Price lives at the intersection of digital marketing, technology and social responsibility. Connect with her on Twitter @shaylaprice.

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Why You Are Losing Leads by Not Integrating Events with Marketing Automation

Did you know that businesses that use marketing automation to nurture prospects experience a 451% increase in qualified leads? According to the State of B2B Event Marketing study, events are the most effective tactic for B2B marketers to increase their sales pipeline and generate revenue.

So, how can events and marketing automation work together to bring in more leads, increase their sales pipeline, and ultimately generate more revenue? And, why are marketing and event automation essential lead generation tools for marketers, and why are these systems integral parts of any effective marketing strategy?

Here’s an overview of how event management has evolved, how marketing and event automation work together, and why the two are integral components to any modern marketing technology stack.  

Why Is Marketing Automation an Essential Part of Any Effective Marketing Strategy?

60% of companies with revenue of 50 million or more currently use marketing automation. Being an effective marketer today means having access to rich and insightful data and having the ability to use this data to personalize customer engagement, automate lead nurturing, and drive up-sell and cross-sell activities. Marketing automation enables marketers to qualify and nurture large quantities of leads, capture customer intelligence across channels, and analyze the results of cross-channel marketing. With marketing automation, marketers eliminate operational inefficiencies and become more effective contributors to revenue in their organizations.

What is Event Automation?

63% of marketers use in-person events as lead generation tools. Event Automation takes event management a step farther, by fully integrating marketing and event management systems together. Event Automation allows companies to automate, personalize, and measure event management and marketing activities, so they can increase marketing leads, sales pipeline, and revenue generated from events. Despite the growth in digital marketing, in-person events continue to play a critical role in enterprise marketing and make-up 28% of the total B2B marketing spend.

Why Are In-Person Events Often Missing from the Modern Marketing Tech Stack?

Marketers are no longer merely responsible for building creative brand campaigns. Success for the modern marketer hinges on credible revenue generation, and this requires a much more systematic approach to market engagement and a deeper understanding of technology. When the integration of marketing and event automation is not a part of the marketer’s modern marketing tech stack, it is because in-person events have been treated as “offline marketing" and not integrated with online efforts and event objectives have not been fully developed in corporate marketing goals.

But in order for today’s marketers and event professionals to deliver more measurable goals from events, today’s marketing tech stack must be designed accordingly. Integrating marketing automation and event automation helps event planners and marketers deliver personalized experiences for attendees, sync attendee data into marketing automation platform to send them follow-up material, and deliver credible ROI from events.

Once you have a solid marketing automation platform, you need to have an enterprise-level event automation system that is capable of easily integrating with your marketing platform. Events no longer need to be left on the sidelines of the marketing automation and marketing analytics world.

When we take our marketing activities offline through events, we shouldn’t lose sight of our customers. Instead, the goal for marketers should be to create a fully immersive and engaging customer experience with their brand, messaging, and activities at an in-person event, and to capture all of this rich data within the systems we use to analyze and leverage it.

To learn how to increase your sales pipeline and generate more revenue from events, download The Deep Dive Guide to Integrating Marketing Automation and Events.

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6 PPC Misconceptions You Need to Know for Success

6 PPC Misconceptions You Need to Know for Success written by Guest Post read more at Duct Tape Marketing

photo credit: Free Digital Photos

PPC won’t make you wealthy overnight, spawn record-setting sales or turn your company into the ‘next big thing.’ Like any tool available to marketers, there are some quick wins, but the long-term gains are where you’ll excel. Here are six PPC misconceptions keeping your campaigns from success and what you can do about it.

1. A PPC Campaign Will Increase Your Sales Overnight

Effective bids and keywords may raise your campaigns to the top and give you some quick wins, but for others, these efforts are futile. Niche products and segments often have a harder time reaping the benefits of PPC, simply because there are fewer people searching for that product or service.

Regardless if you have several quick wins or minimal success with PPC, stick with it. PPC is not a set-and-forget function, and it takes time and effort to optimize campaigns for success. However, be realistic in your expectations, too: you may temporarily increase sales, but it’s up to you to maintain that growth.

2. A PPC Campaign’s First Two Weeks Are Indicative of Long-term Success

It takes time for your campaigns to settle, and very rarely are your efforts perfect right out of the gate (and if they are, they won’t be for long). Testing and optimizing a campaign can take up to three months before it truly settles. During this time, patterns and opportunities present themselves that can be used to adjust your ongoing campaign efforts. These adjustments can lead to a fruitful campaign performance.

In the long-run, variations in your PPC campaign are signs of a good, strong, and healthy performance. Don’t cut your testing short in haste. Stick it out, monitor performance, and make adjustments to maximize your ROI.

3. PPC Campaigns Are Only Profitable on Google

It’s estimated that 65% of all searches are performed on Google so naturally it makes sense to concentrate advertising efforts there, right? Wrong. Google AdSense is likely an important part of your marketing mix, but you’ll presumably have a better ROI by taking a portion of your budget elsewhere. Tier 2 search engines have searches performed, but advertising here is a fraction of the cost, making them not only profitable but an excellent complement to an AdSense campaign.

4. All Keywords Generate Good Traffic

Developing campaigns around all keywords that could seemingly be of interest to your customers is tempting, but this blanket catch-all approach can be costly and leave you with no results.

For instance, as a real estate developer offering elite condos in an urban setting, the marketing team may choose the keyword ‘Urban.’ However, if this keyword is not properly optimized using negative keywords, a teenager’s search for ‘Urban Outfitters’ might result in a click with no chance of converting. On paper, ‘Urban’ might be a strong keyword, but it’s unlikely customers of Urban Outfitters are also looking for a high-end condo.

5. PPC Is a Miracle Worker

If there are preexisting sales issues, PPC won’t necessarily solve all your troubles. It might draw attention toward your product, but it won’t convince people to buy it.

Take the adage “it’s like selling ice to an Eskimo.” Sometimes things are out of your control: why would an Eskimo buy more ice when they have an unlimited supply? The same is true for a luxury yacht maker in a recession or a snow blower manufacturer in an unseasonably warm winter. PPC is great when there’s a need for the product or service, but it can’t make people purchase something they don’t need. Instead, focus your efforts where there’s a need.

6. PPC Raises Organic Search Results

Good SEO practices increase your visibility in organic search results, not PPC. The combination of success with both PPC and SEO can increase your visibility, which increases your likelihood of converting. But simply having a PPC campaign won’t affect your organic search results.

For better long-term results, effective PPC campaigns are important, but so is strong SEO. PPC will provide a few quick wins—but ranking organically is sustainable, scalable, credible, and an all-around healthy business practice.

PPC is not designed to make you a millionaire overnight. But, it can help you increase brand exposure, gradually raise sales, and successfully grow your business while making you feel like a million bucks.

Michelle Brammer writes about pay per click and pay per call marketing, as well as digital ad fraud and small businesses. Michelle is the Director of Marketing for eZanga, a digital advertising firm focused on pay per click, pay per call, and ad fraud management. Previously, she held senior marketing and sales management positions with Genji Sushi, Dominion Enterprises, and Frito-Lay North America. She regularly blogs at http://ift.tt/1XVW15N and can be found on Twitter @eZangaMichelle.

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Online Marketing News: Snapchat Unicorns, Periscope Moderation and Instagram Business

How Snapchat Became a Social Media Unicorn (Infographics) Unfortunately, SocialTimes isn't referring to the mythical, fuzzy, four-legged cuddle stallions we've come to know and love. "In the tech world, unicorns are private startups that reach at least a $1 billion valuation. E-commerce has the most unicorns, with 25 percent of the total pool, while 18 percent are in internet software and services and just 5 percent are in social media. No social media unicorn seems to get more attention than Snapchat, which was recently valued at $16 billion." It would appear unicorns are more common than we were led to believe. SocialTimes Official: Instagram adds business profiles, will tell brands how many times their organic posts are shown Instagram has finally made it official - businesses can now have business profiles on the platform. Those profiles come with the benefits you'd expect in terms of tracking. Business pages will be able to track impressions (not views, as the Marketing Land was sure to emphasise) and understand the breakdown of their follower base according to age, gender and location. Marketing Land Periscope Now Lets Users Moderate Comments During Broadcasts Periscope has announced that users are now able to flag comments as abuse or spam during broadcasts. The popular live streaming service is allowing this moderation in true American fashion - by popular vote. Once a comment is flagged as abuse or spam, the application surveys a random selection of viewers for their vote - is this comment truly inappropriate? This could be a big turning point for moderation on social media, live-streaming in particular, effectively shortening the review time for flagged content. As Periscope commented: "There are no silver bullets, but we’re committed to developing tools to keep Periscope a safe and open place for people to connect in real-time." SocialTimes Google says page speed ranking factor to use mobile page speed for mobile sites in upcoming months Staying true to form in the commitment to mobile-friendliness, Google is planning to take mobile page speed into account when determining mobile rankings. In the last few years, Google has made leaps and bounds to ensure that sites that promote a good user experience on mobile are easy to find on mobile search, and benefit from that elevated search status. For web developers, this means that designing for mobile isn't only important for rankings now, but it will be even more so in the months to come. Search Engine Land Facebook Pages Paid for 31.68% of Total Reach in April (Report) According to SocialTimes, "social analytics and reporting firm Locowise found that 43.28 percent of the 5,000 Facebook pages it studied in April used Facebook advertising, which accounted for 31.68 percent of their total reach." This validates the all-too-well known mantra repeated by digital marketers everywhere -- Facebook is increasingly becoming pay to play. The report also found that organic posts were only reaching, on average, 10.71 percent of a page's total audience -- down over six percent from March to April alone despite reported overall increases in organic reach. SocialTimes Snapchat's redesigning Discover to make it more like a newsstand Who doesn't love a good, old fashioned newsstand? Browsing the racks of shiny covers and pretty images, picking out the latest news, gossip or entertainment for your reading pleasure was once America's favorite way to consume content. Snapchat is picking up on that intrinsic desire to browse by switching up their 'Discover' feature to be more like a newsstand. Will this mean more content impressions and engagements for publishers? If so, we can expect to see even more exciting content coming from the app's top publishing partners. Digiday Snapchat Has Reportedly Surpassed Twitter in Daily Users by Reaching 150 Million After four years, it has finally happened -- Snapchat has surpassed Twitter's daily users, according to a Bloomberg story. AdWeek also added some additional information, saying "Snapchat has grown 50 percent year-over-year in daily users, up from 100 million at this time in 2015." With the new developments we're seeing out of the app, coupled with the stagnant growth Twitter is reporting, it's reasonable to assume that the social landscape could be seeing some big changes in the year to come in terms of market leaders and marketing strategy. AdWeek What were your top online marketing news stories this week? Stay tuned, next week I'll have more entertaining marketing news for your enjoyment and, of course, lovely video commentary featuring the talented Mr. Josh Nite. Have something to share? Tweet me @Tiffani_Allen or @toprank!

The post Online Marketing News: Snapchat Unicorns, Periscope Moderation and Instagram Business appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

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Un-Acquire – The Counter-Intuitive Way to Build an Early Customer Base

Churn. Lost deals.

Those are dreaded words at any stage of the company. For a very early stage company, these events are even more impactful. Behavioral economics tells us about ‘loss aversion’ mindset. As founders, we hate to lose deals. We hate to turn down customers. It’s classic ‘loss aversion’ at play. But, just as you launch your product into the market, you need to be cognizant of such biases and be courageous enough to say ‘No’ to certain kinds of customers.

By doing so, you’ll not slow down. Instead, you’ll avoid churn and bring the right customers into your customer development journey.

In your early stage, your customers have a profound impact on the trajectory of your product & your company, because:

• They can impact what gets built
• They have a direct impact on your acquisition channels, the cost of acquisition and hence your precious little runway.
• This one’s more important – Each customer is representation of a potential market segment or a niche.
• If you choose to say ‘No!’, it brings focus. You’ll spend time, money and your product bandwidth to keep the ‘Yes’ customers happy. You’ll avoid ‘spray and pray’.

Now that we’ve established that deliberately flushing out prospects from your funnel is good & even important, let’s see some of the criteria we’ve used for our own company, when picking our first 50 customers.

Your product’s performance should not be affected by factors that aren’t under your control

Let’s say you are building a lead-generation software for tech sales reps. A staffing firm company may be a bad first customer because it’s a business with very little differentiation and would not excite a prospect that much. However well your lead-gen product discovers new prospect opportunities, being an undifferentiated offering, response rates are going to be poor.

You need to have an idea of the kind of customers to whom your product in its “as-is” state is going to give superior results. Only then are they going to engage deeply with your product (which is essential for you to derive insights for your product roadmap) and hopefully become your source of ‘word of mouth’ appreciation.

You should be very familiar with the industry dynamics of your first few customers

Not all prospects are articulate and vocal about their wants and needs. As a product owner, we need to fill in the gaps, instigate with the right questions and deduce insights. All this is possible only if we relate with the problem space or the industry of the prospect.

If you do onboard customers without fully understanding their motivations to use the product, you won’t know why they churned either (or at least you’d incur significant follow-up cost to just find why they churned).

No customer pilot should demand unreasonable amount of your or your team’s time

I will again take an example to drive this point. Let’s say you are building a mobile chat tool that can be integrated into any app for the app owners to provide chat-based support. There will always be a prospect that’d say that they need a web interface as well. Now, don’t rush to launch a web-client just to sign up that customer.

Why? Because you decided to launch it on mobile for a reason. You have a market hypothesis that you are trying to prove. Don’t get distracted and pick another hypothesis until your current hypothesis has proven there is not a market for it.

But then you might ask why turn down a customer if it’s just a bit of additional work. Well, in the early stages of our companies we are severely short of time, money and other resources. If one customer draws up significant amounts of your engineering, product management and quality assurance time, something else gives. Most often, it affects your original customer development journey.

Alignment beyond the current product version

Early stage customer acquisition costs are high, because the founders are involved and it’s often one-to-one selling. So it’s important that such customers don’t just hire your product today but also for several quarters to come. Your product roadmap and their expectations have to be in sync for a long time. One way you could be sure of this is by doing a customer interview to understand the reasons they’d buy your product. If your current product is a subset of the needs of your customer, you’re in the right direction. One framework we’ve used to do the customer interview is the ‘Jobs to be done’ framework. It takes another blog post to write about it. So I’d leave it to you to read up on JTBD.

If your product is a quick fix to a bigger problem for which they need more sophisticated solutions that you don’t intend to offer, your customer is going to churn out. You are better off not selling to them in the first place.

No ‘Pay It Forward’ customers. Only honest & real customers

We all have friends who can write checks just to see us succeed. Take their money but don’t make them your customers. They never had the need for your product. They aren’t going to give you insights. They are going to churn at some point. It’s better to avoid ‘nice’ prospects that are just ‘paying it forward’ or ‘returning you a favor’. If you don’t, you’d end up being that blind man whom was led by another blind man.

At the early stage you need customers that give feedback. I can’t stress the importance of getting your product hooked up with a good analytics suite from day one – start with Google Tag Manager or Kissmetrics or one such tool. But don’t postpone. Observe which customers complete what actions. Bucket the core actions of your product and find out what percentage of customers complete it. Later on you may expand such analysis to cohorts.

Before you reason out a pattern, pick up the phone and talk to customers. It doesn’t need to be a structured interview but one that will give you a good grasp of why users do what they do. Here’s a good list of customer development resources. And before picking up the phone be sure to first read this post from Chuck Liu which covers which questions to ask in customer interviews.

Remember that just adding users isn’t your goal in the early stage – The goal is to add the right kind of customers that complete core actions of your product (for them to stick around for long), give earnest feedback and are representative of a large segment.

Templates for a future customer base

You are not acquiring your first few customers to become profitable. You are acquiring them to demonstrate or experiment with ‘Product-Market Fit’. So each prospect that you convert should be buying and using your product for reasons that are common to the next cohort of customers as well. Your first few customers, as a cohort, should collectively represent your market.

Please note that I use the word ‘buying’ as some investment that’s non-trivial that shows serious intent. It could be giving their credit card information or email or even buying a few credits – whatever that fits your business. The goal isn’t revenue or price discovery – so for the early customers, move them to the path of using the product as soon as possible, even if it means removing all but bare minimum friction that validates seriousness.

It’s hard to predict this, but let me give an example. If you building a mobile video startup that’s like Periscope and users have to upload short videos and put up on Twitter (core actions), your good first users are the ones that have a lot of highly engaged followers on Twitter. The bad users are ones that just have passive followers or no followers on Twitter.

If you know that the customer is not a representative sample of a large monetizable (or servable) market, you would be wise to avoid them.

Conclusion

In summary, be very judicious about picking your first few customers.

• Take your product to those customers that have a very high chance of success when they use your product.
• Choose those customers whose industries or problem spaces you know very well.
• Avoid customers for whom you’ve to put a lot of additional resources to make the pilot work.
• Pick customers who’d have a need for your future product, not just the current version.
• Choose those customers who are representatives of large enough segments that you can go after.
• And finally, don’t do your first few deals with friends who are doing it just to make you happy.

If you follow these principles, your customer base would be completing the core actions in your product at a rate that’s healthy. You’d have better insights and better demonstration of stickiness with your early stage investors and you’d have set the right base for acquiring new customers. The return on your learning will be high.

About the Author: Ashwin Ramasamy is the founder of PipeCandy – an intelligent prospecting tool auto-discovers new prospects & helps you reach out to them with the right message at the right time. PipeCandy is currently in private beta & the essay above is based on our experience with onboarding customers.

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How B2B Marketers Can Get Better Targeting and Deeper Insights

Knowledge about your customers’ preferences at specific moments is critical to unlock the marketing potential of contextual intelligence today’s digital marketplace provides. By studying and applying buyer personas and qualification to marketing processes marketers can learn more about customers’ preferences. Personas can be leveraged across several departments such as sales, marketing, advertising, and customer service. But the task of actually creating the ideal buyer personas for your business can be a daunting one.

However, B2B marketers are faced with the uphill task of making sense out of data from several systems, both online and offline, internal and external. They are grappling with the fact that the always-connected buyer’s behavior and preferences are constantly evolving, and marketers need to maximize the value of customer data in near-real time for better targeting and personalization, as well as to build lifetime value.

Identifying the right buyer persona requires the consideration of several attributes (demographic, psychographic, etc.) in order to make conversations relevant. Just like in the B2C environment where customer expectations of personalization and targeted content most relevant to them are now critical factors in accelerating their decision making, similarly B2B buyers also expect the companies or brands they interact with to know them well and identify their needs and goals. 

Technology to the Rescue AKA a Data Management Platform (DMP)

A data management platform (DMP) combines online and offline data from first-party proprietary systems, and second-party and third-party audiences to provide marketers with a central platform that stores and helps provide insight regarding audience and campaign data that is used for optimizing campaigns and media spend across channels. 

It is also deployed against cross-channel campaigns to better inform, for example, nurture programs within an organization.

With the help of a DMP, a marketer can manage and analyze audience profile data to better inform ad targeting through modeling, implement retargeting campaigns for better direct response, and optimize site performance using customer behavior data. It also enables marketers to add analyzed audience data into marketing automation systems, for example, to help B2B marketers receive a more informed view of their customers. 

Download Audience Data Management: Driving Top-of-Funnel B2B Prospects Through Digital Advertising and learn more about how B2B marketers can get better targeting and deeper insights by utilizing a DMP.

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