B2B vendors have a wealth of white papers and other content marketing materials, but often struggle to find the right readers.
Distributing B2B content usually requires direct deals with individual publishers, which can limit scale for advertisers when those publishers have small footprints.
To address this issue, B2B content marketing company NetLine created a marketplace for B2B white papers.
Publishers pick, track and manage campaigns through RevResponse, its publisher-facing platform. The advertiser content appears on the site, but also in publishers’ email newsletters or social media accounts.
The marketplace numbers 15,000 B2B publishers, who distribute 5,000 pieces of content marketing to 100 million visitors a month. That content includes case studies, tips and tricks, webinars and, of course, white papers.
One of the publishers using RevResponse is MakeUseOf.com. The site attracts 12 million tech enthusiasts and tinkerers – many employed in tech-related jobs – who want to learn about how technology improves their lives, with content ranging from general to technical.
The site often includes links to download relevant white papers in its email newsletter using RevResponse. The content links function “as an alternative revenue stream, and lowers our dependence on display advertising,” said MakeUseOf.com CEO Jackson Chung.
The content is then optimized through recommendations tailored to the audience.
“Every visitor engaging with our content will see fundamentally different content recommendations based on their job function, location, job level and additional persona-related attributes,” explained David Fortino, VP of audience development for NetLine.
Advertisers pay only for qualified leads – determined by a short questionnaire filled out prior to the download.
“Since it requires the user to perform an action, it doesn’t contribute [to] a large portion of our revenue,” Chung said, but noted the strategy does help monetize its growing email subscriber list
It also helps publishers understand the demographics of readers downloading marketer-produced content, giving them insight into readers’ professional titles or the types of organizations they work for, among other data.
Chung finds value in RevResponse’s ability to gather data about his audience, since it’s able to tailor deals and sponsorships that benefit all parties involved, and curate content that’s more relevant.
“It allows [publishers] to change the editorial tone to speak to the nuances of their audience in a targeted fashion,” Fortino added. “They can package the audience in a way that’s monetizable outside of us, in a media kit.”
NetLine believes its lead-based, content-focused model differs from other B2B players out there, like Demandbase or LinkedIn-owned Bizo.
Targeted and retargeted display advertising on a CPM model “places all the risk on the client,” Fortino said, whereas he claims marketers pay only for qualified leads in RevResponse’s model. It sees more competition from tech media players like TechTarget, CBS Interactive and UBM, as well as individual publishers who peel off and pursue lead-generation services on their own.
Fortino pointed to the company’s growth as proof it’s on the right track. It says its revenue is projected to almost double this year by allowing content marketers to gather “super niche audience bases that are difficult to address at scale.”
