BtoB Media Business - October 2010 - (Page 8)

COVER STORY The demand generation Marketers want media companies to provide more data-driven products to help them get closer to customers BY SEAN CALLAHAN S oftware giant CA Technologies still runs print ads in trade publications, but that line item is a slowly shrinking element of its marketing budget. Like most b-to-b marketers, CA is looking for much more from b-to-b media companies these days. ¶ Here’s how CA recently worked with technology media company TechTarget: CA planned to host a targeted custom event and wanted to attract 15 to 20 potential customers. It didn’t want just any prospects, though. It wanted them to be far along in the buying cycle. chief practice officer of global marketing agency GyroHSR. In his conversations with C-level executives at b-to-b companies, he’s finding dissatisfaction with traditional marketing methods that are no longer “moving the needle” like they once did, he said. “I can tell you that the common theme that is emerging among all of them is ‘bring me something I’m not doing, bring me something unconventional,’ ” Segal said. “It’s gone way beyond the monthly ad,” said Tom Gaudreau, VP-marketing at PureSafety, a health and safety software company. With Penton Media’s EHS Today,PureSafety developed a customized marketing program that includes sponsorship of the America’s Safest Companies awards program and a Future Leaders scholarship initiative begun this year that will award $5,000 to a student studying work force safety and health. “Thought leadership is a big piece for us,” Gaudreau said. Thought leadership was also a critical component of a new marketing campaign from Quintiles, a bio and pharmaceutical research company. “They wanted to be seen not just as a vendor who could conduct trials but a strategic partner who brings new insight,” said Allison Womack, managing director at Doremus, New York, Quintiles’ agency. Working with Doremus, Quintiles “We wanted to get in front of the right buyers at the right time in the right way,” said Michael Paradiso, VP-area field marketing-East at CA. Together with TechTarget, CA identified prospects who had read a relevant white paper or watched a specific webcast. “We were able to market to those people with a little bit more of a targeted message [about the event],” Paradiso said. “In my mind, as a marketer, it’s worth the time and the effort to be a little more accurate on who you’re going after.” Late last month, TechTarget introduced its Activity Intelligence platform, which is designed to help serve even more relevant content and marketing messages to users based on their online behavior. “It’s like when Amazon or Netflix makes a suggestion based on what you’ve already done,” said Greg Strakosch, TechTarget CEO. “We’re basically doing the same thing.” This new platform and CA’s program with TechTarget illustrate what marketers want these days from their b-to-b media partners. They want customized programs, and they demand one-on-one, specialized attention from media companies. At the same time, marketers such as Paradiso want the program itself to be targeted—to be as close as possible to having a one-on-one conversation with a customer or prospect. Rick Segal is worldwide president and recently introduced a campaign with the tagline “The new health.” To emphasize the thought leadership aspect of the effort, Quintiles approached Scientific American about producing a special issue focused on the idea of “the new health.” Scientific American agreed on the condition that it would have complete editorial control over the special issue. There would be no advertorial, and Quintiles would be mentioned as the sponsor only in a cover note explaining the issue. In September, Quintiles mailed what ultimately became a 120-page special issue of Scientific American to 150,000 bioscience and pharmaceutical executives around the world. “We focused on Europe, Japan and the United States,” Womack said. Quintiles used its own database to reach the executives, but many b-to-b marketers are asking to mine the audience databases of media companies in hopes of precisely targeting buyers currently in the market. “They want leads,” Rich Reiff, CEO of Advantage Business Media, which publishes Drug Discovery & Development,said of b-to-b marketers. “What goes around comes around. You remember the bingo card? That’s what this business was all about, and that’s where this business is going.” Reiff said lead generation has grown more sophisticated and has moved online for the most part. Much of Advantage’s business is moving there as well, and Reiff said he expects the company’s revenue to be equally split between print and digital next year. John Whelan, exec VP of Summit Business Media, which publishes National Underwriter Property/Casualty, said, “There’s a lot more demand for custom solutions driven by data, preferably proprietary data.” Whelan is finding that marketers now have much more in-depth questions about Summit’s audience. “They’re looking to us for answers about our audience as much as [for] vehicles to reach them with a marketing message,” he said. EE Times Group is finding the same demand among the marketers it serves. The United Business Media unit last month debuted EE Intelligence, an online research panel of EE Times readers that electronics manufacturers can survey. “The invitation-only community of professional engineers will share views 8 | Media Business | October 2010 | mediabusinessonline.com http://www.mediabusinessonline.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of BtoB Media Business - October 2010

BtoB Media Business - October 2010
Contents
Media M&A Activity Shows Signs of Life
What Marketers Want: 1-On-1 Attention
Webinars have Become a Hot Commodity
Sales & Marketing
Audience Development
M&A
People
Benchmarks
The Rise of Peer-to-Peer Communication

BtoB Media Business - October 2010