There’s a change afoot in the B2B marketing camp, at the heart of which is demand for a more nimble lead-nurturing mechanism.
Bizo, a provider of online ad targeting solutions for B2B marketers, released Monday Multi-Channel Nurturing, designed to incorporate a wider swath of lead generating channels, from email to display and social advertising.
The problem many B2B marketers face, said Bizo CEO Russ Glass, is an inability to follow and nurture leads as they cross channels.
“They’ve historically used controlled circulation, bought email lists and have generally been about 18 months behind where consumer technology is,” said Glass. “We have seen that on a good day, only 5% of anybody who comes to a marketers’ website is submitting an email address.”
Bizo looked to combat that problem through last fall’s release of Bizo for Marketing Automation. But as cross-channel interactions have fundamentally changed the lead- nurturing process, Bizo wanted to provide a solution that went beyond email, thus precipitating Multi-Channel Nurturing. The goal, said Glass, is to provide marketers with a toolset that can allow them to push prospects further down the funnel when they’re on Facebook or simply surfing the Web.
This functionality mirrors Web retargeting, but Bizo claims its system sequences display ad creative in a way that nurtures prospects based on business demographic segments and online behaviors.
“We take intelligence we have about all these anonymous people – how senior they are, what industry they’re in – and combine it with all the digital body language we’re able to learn based on what content they’re consuming, pages they’ve viewed on a marketers’ site, and create nurture flows,” Glass added.
Some B2B marketers validate Glass’s argument around the importance of social ad targeting. For example, Twitter ads customer TenXer, which develops a productivity analytics tool, mostly sells to software engineering teams and is constantly looking for new ways to target its audience more effectively. The company primarily uses Twitter ads for B2B lead generation.
“When we launched a new product in January, we experimented with Twitter Promoted Tweets against our normal reach on Google AdWords, Facebook and LinkedIn,” said JP Patil, VP of business development at tenXer. ”From our data, we saw Twitter totally crushed it compared to the other two. With Twitter, because we were targeting specific people, we were able to get better quality leads to our site, which got better sign-ups and conversions.”
As to why tenXer didn’t use a more standard enterprise marketing automation system to source for qualified leads, Patil said the core reason is cost effectiveness. “If we were able to generate leads for less than $50 per user [using one of the enterprise platforms] it starts to make sense, but in doing the math we determined it’d take an entire year to win back that revenue from that one user.”
