Most targeting data addresses consumer marketing needs. Finding people who want to buy welding machinery or business software in a market full of data segments about new moms or golfers is tough.
It’s a void that B2B marketing company MultiView intends to fill through its expertise serving B2B advertisers.
Because many of its clients don’t use agencies, MultiView acts as one: producing banner creative, buying media and handling account management.
“We bundle it and sell it as a service,” said Ben Maitland, the company’s executive VP of sales and marketing. Most clients haven’t run digital media, let alone anything programmatic. “Programmatic is dying quickly as a stand-alone technology,” he said. “We have to sell services to help people who want to buy online advertising, not programmatic.”
MultiView’s historic business has been B2B email newsletters and online directories. It helps create content for industry associations – niches like EMS pilots, Indianan real estate agents and Canadian recreational canoeists – and shares the advertising revenue with the associations.
Its programmatic service allows advertisers to create highly targeted or highly scalable campaigns by looking for potential customers across the web. It uses three primary data sources: the brands’ first-party data, third-party partner data that they source (like a pixel on a relevant website) and keyword data.
Because MultiView knows, from its history managing online directories, that a keyword like “pneumatic tube systems” signals a certain prospect, it feeds that data into its demand-side platform (DSP) Simpli.fi, which was initially built for search marketers and specializes in leveraging unstructured data.
MultiView’s programmatic offering is friendly to small B2B budgets, with services starting at $12,000 and expanding up to $250,000. Most fall in the $15,000-to-$50,000 range.
Those small budgets add up. In 19 months, MultiView’s revenue for this offering has gone from zero to $50 million, Maitland said. Its sales force is over 400 strong, with 150 employees focused on selling programmatic services.
Marketers receive reports showing who visited the sites (with PII removed), including attribution back to the served ad. It’s done with a B2B angle, tying in features like lead-scoring for the marketers.
But MultiView doesn’t reveal its margins, and clients won’t know how much was actually spent on media. It shows clients impression volume, but not the CPM.
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This precludes them from applying attribution to some common marketing metrics, like cost per lead, but perhaps that doesn’t matter. For these marketers, “an inbound lead summary is priceless,” Maitland said. “The impressions are the heart of the deliverable, but we’re doing so much for them that you can’t isolate the cost of the impression or click.”
Those extra offerings distinguish MultiView’s offering from, say, a Google Display Network campaign.
MultiView encourages its clients to invest in search marketing, but not self-serve display. “We will always beat a self-service campaign, because they don’t have the efficiencies we have,” Maitland said.
