Bizographic Targeting – a new way to reach the right audience
I’m on a flight from SF to
As someone who has marketed products to multiple industries, my job has been figuring out how to get the right message in front of the right people – all while delivering positive returns. ZoomInfo’s new bizographic targeting platform would have made this 10x easier, and I believe can significantly increase the effectiveness of online marketing.
In my former role as head of marketing for ZoomInfo, my most effective means of marketing was always through targeted email and direct marketing lists because they were so highly focused on the audience I was trying to target. If, for example, I wanted to reach recruiters, I would pay to send my message to the Electronic Recruiting Exchange, or HR.com; both organizations that provide information to recruiters. My messages and positioning were focused on the audience, and thus my response rates and returns were always much higher than other forms of marketing because the content was highly relevant to the audience.
However, I was never able to figure out how to cost effectively use display or search advertising on the web – primarily because I couldn’t segment the audience effectively and deliver messages that resonated with enough users who were viewing my ads. Today, most successful display advertising is done by companies that have a broad consumer appeal, and thus don’t need to target very deeply, more often using basic demographic targeting: their age, household income, location, sex and often race.
Most advertisers understand demographic targeting concepts because they have been doing it for decades on radio and television, attempting to get messages in front of certain demographics that watch certain programming. Thus for marketers that have a product they want to get in front of the 18-25 demographic, MTV is a good choice because their programming tends to attract the 18-25 demographic. Although expensive, this is simple and fairly effective for targeting broad audiences.
Bizographic targeting is demographic targeting with a twist, and provides marketers the ability to reach out and target people based on their bizographics, or business demographics. A person’s bizographics are a combination of his or her industry, company, title, seniority, education, and functional area, in addition to traditional demographic information such as location and sex. And importantly, bizographic targeting is able to maintain the same privacy aspects of demographic targeting: maintaining the privacy of individuals unless they decide to identify themselves.
Bizographic targeting simply gives advertisers much deeper targeting. For example, let’s say American Express wants to put a new “platinum” credit card on the market that is entirely focused on senior executives. With bizographic targeting, they would have the ability to place advertising in front of users that fall within the “senior executive” bizographic, and focus messages based on this targeting – i.e, “CEOs now hear this….” This is a much more efficient allocation of budget, and gives the marketer the ability to test different messaging based on the audience, all with the end goal of increased conversion rates.
As another example, marketers at salesforce.com looking to reach sales professionals in the software industry would be able to segment that audience and place advertising on the web to target those users wherever they traverse. Today, a marketer is forced to guess where sales professionals would hang out based on the content of the site. Bizographic targeting takes the guesswork out of reaching a segment of users.
Finally, as someone that once focused on marketing to
recruiters, a bizographic targeting platform would have enabled me to
successfully deliver my product messages to recruiters around the web,
significantly increasing my reach and effectiveness in advertising spend. Making my marketing (and life) at least 10x
easier!
Can’t wait to get this one out there!
Recent Comments