Behavioral Targeting and Large Populations

I'm a big proponent of marketing measurement and careful analysis, but it's worth a cautionary tale as sometimes measurements can lead one astray. The more finely tuned your messages are to the interests of the buyers, the more they can cause analysis confusion if not approached correctly.

The core of great B2B marketing communications is relevance. If your message is relevant to the audience you are communicating with, it will resonate, if not, no matter how well written it is, it will not resonate. However, the key to relevance is understanding the interests of each prospect so that a marketing message can be delivered accordingly.

Within your universe of prospects, there may be only a small percentage of them at any one time who are the precise buyer role and executive level, at the particular stage of the buying process that your marketing message ideally targets. However, many marketers fall into the temptation to broaden out their messaging to a larger universe in order to get an overall increased effect. Whereas this may seem like a good idea, as it increases the overall campaign results, it can have the unintended effect of alienating a large segment of your audience as we discussed recently in looking at the idea of neutral results in a marketing campaign.

Equally importantly, however, is the fact that a poorly targeted message can lead to highly inaccurate marketing measurements due to the overall effect of a larger population. For example, let’s look at two marketing messages, for comparison. Message one was highly relevant to VPs of Marketing at the Solution Discovery phase of their buying process (2% of your database), and achieved a stellar 30% response rate in that segment. Message two was relevant to Managers of IT at the Awareness and Education phase (10% of your database), but only achieved a 8% response rate in that segment.

For the sake of this example, let’s assume that the general population of your database, outside of the segment to which each message was relevant, responded equally poorly with a 1% response rate.

If this campaign was targeted to the entire database, you can see quickly how the results can show a counter-intuitive message. Message one, would show a 30% response rate in 2% of your database, and a 1% response rate in 98% of your database, for an overall response rate of just 1.58%.

Message two would show an 8% response rate in 10% of your database and a 1% response rate in 90% of your database for an overall response rate of 1.7%. If you look simply at the raw numbers, without diving deeper into the analysis, you can see how the final results will be misleading and will show the reverse of what is true. Clearly, it is the definition of the list, rather than the message success itself, that is causing these results to appear as they do.

Only by first looking at the targeting of your list, including both the fit of the individual, and the stage they are in their buying process, can you successfully show analytics that correctly reflect how effective each message was within that target psychographic or demographic segment. The results might be surprising.

Discoverable Messages and Direct Marketing

As marketers, we often think of there being a fundamental difference between the two ends of the media spectrum; on one end, direct, where an individual’s contact information is known and a message can be delivered directly, and on the other end mass media, where a broad audience is targeted based on demographics or audience characteristics. This has been an acceptable framework for a long time, as the difference in approach, goals, and outcomes has always been very significant.

This mental framework, however, disguises the fact that it is truly a spectrum. With recent advances in technology, and transitions in buyers, we are seeing a trend from both ends of the spectrum to progress towards the center. This means that the approach, goals, and outcomes of each media approach is becoming more similar, and the way in which we use them is also converging.

Mass Media and Precise Targeting

Mass media, historically, was extremely broadly targeted, based on high level demographics or audience profiles, and relied on your message being “discovered” by a small percentage of the viewing audience. Now, with online media, targeting of a message is growing ever more targeted. Ads can be targeted based on behavior, demographics, or firmographics, almost to the level of individuals, while search advertisements are targeted to the level of the query the individual is searching on.

No longer are these purely mass audiences. While they are not truly "direct" marketing in the sense that an individual's contact information is known, the precision with which the messages are delivered to specific segments makes them almost as precise.

Direct Marketing and the Challenge of Attention

On the other end of the spectrum, with the exponential growth in all forms of direct communications, especially online forms such as email, the challenge is no longer the delivery of the content. Now, the challenge is having the message within it “discovered” by the recipient, rather than ignored, thrown away, or deleted.

An email or direct mail piece may arrive (assuming things like good email deliverability, of course), as intended, at the recipient, but unless the recipient either trusts that the message will be of interest based on knowing the sender, or finds the subject line or teaser copy interesting, the message will be ignored. This is not unlike a television commercial or online banner ad that fails to attract the interest of the viewer.

Shared Challenges

The challenge that marketers now share, whether approaching this from the perspective of mass media or direct marketing, is that content must be both precisely targeted and highly relevant. The exact demographics, and most importantly psychographics, of who a buyer is and where she is in her buying process must be understood so that content, when presented, is "discovered". In the direct world, this can be measured by the rates of content interaction vs emotional unsubscribes while in the advertising world, it is measured by clickthrough rates on ads.

The more well targeted a message is in either approach, and the more relevant the content, the better a message is "discovered". It is only through having a message "discovered" and read that we as marketers are able to change the perceptions of our buyers.

How are you thinking about your messages? Are you seeing the difference between "direct" and "mass" media decrease?

Is B2B Content "Likeable"?

With all the discussion about Facebook's new "Like" (or "Recommend") button for the web, I thought it would be worthwhile running a small experiment to answer the following question:

Do the readers of B2B content share more on Twitter or Facebook?

I will admit that I have certain biases, and I don't think that the human brain is very well adapted to truly merging business and social relationships as I wrote previously. However, in the interest of science, I thought the experiment was worthwhile.

I have reduced the automatic "sharing" options on each post to two - one that shares on Facebook, and one that shares on Twitter. I have historically been sharing content only on Twitter, so it has a bit of an advantage, so in order to somewhat compensate for that, I have added the Facebook sharing bar to the top of the post.

I could be proven wrong, but I suspect that, when I tally the counts a month or so from now, we'll see very little activity on Facebook in comparison to Twitter.

What have you seen for B2B content? Does it become shareable on Facebook?