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List buying is easy. And there are good and bad sources based on your budget. In business-to-business (B2B) sales and marketing, working the list is hard because the contacts are “cold”, they don’t know you’re coming, and the typical buyer doesn’t like to be spammed. If you’re a realtor who blankets a specific geography or a provider of consumer goods and services, we could have a different discussion. Nonetheless, you can spend good money on lists and yield very little.
TARGETED MEDIA BUYS
If you’re already budgeted to purchase lists and you have valuable content that would attract new prospects, consider digital marketing media buys through trusted sources who have built-in and opted-in audiences relevant to your industry, product, or service. This could be horizontal and vertical publications, member-based professional organizations, and online resources with vast networks to reach buyers. In the world of technology, Tech Target and Spiceworks are examples of online resources. Essentially, some places where buyers hangout.
MEASURABLE CAMPAIGNS
The media buys that we are suggesting are those that can be measured against an actual contact, like an email address. The strategy is to let the media sources drive conversions of your content. Most media sources can offer projected expectations of leads as well as comprehensive reporting and intelligence. For those contacts who go to your landing page and don’t convert are showing interest but are simply not ready to raise their hand—so, while your brand is now getting noticed you could do separate campaigns to draw them closer.
CAMPAIGN EXAMPLES
Sponsored and exclusive e-blasts that are sent to your landing page. This is typically good for promoting your expertise and thought leadership with an epic piece of content like an e-book, solution guide, trend report, research findings—essentially any educational content that requires a person to complete a form.
Sponsored webinars where the publication, professional organization, or online resource promotes the event and manages the registration. You provide input for the Evite and show up to present your topic and interact with the attendees and follow-up on the leads. With some sources, a minimum number of registrations are guaranteed. Many companies will re-purpose a compelling webinar which saves a lot of time.
Topical newsletters whereas the publication, professional organization, or online resource displays your ad within specific news and information blasts to a segmented and opted-in list. For example: digital engineering, business continuity, urban air mobility, data center analytics, healthcare IT, government contracts, etc.
Content syndication of e-books and many of the items defined above under “sponsored and exclusive e-blasts” can be promoted mostly via publications and online resources and across their vast networks. They can often control the visibility of your content and the frequency of your download reports based on your budget and the bandwidth of your sales team.
Some publications and online resources can also offer visibility to your content through sponsored blogging and their other social media channels.
If you sell a B2B solution to a niche market, we encourage you to entertain the idea of using 3rd party media buys to expand your content marketing and let me know how you make out.
If you need help sorting it all out and/or help developing the content and promotional materials, give us a shout. It starts with some research.