BY KAREN J. BANNAN
IN THE PAST, commercial real estate agents had to count on their prospects for answers when determining where leads originated. They had to ask those prospects if, for instance, they’d picked up the phone book and called the first person they’d found or if they’d dialed a number they’d seen in an ad. Today, however, Tout Media’s real estate clients are using methods such as text messaging to help them gauge how effective their marketing is and to target prospects based on their actions.
“We have signs out there that say, ‘For more information, text this word to this number,’ ” said Morgan J. Moran, president of Tout Media, a behavioral marketing company. “The person texts the Realtor and gets a photo and an asking price. But that text message also gives the Realtor some important information. They know your approximate price range, they know what area [you] were looking at; they know the time and day you were out looking at properties. They can combine different text messages and figure out what other properties you might be interested in and text you new suggestions and ads.”
Tout Media has taken behavioral marketing to the next level. Yet the majority of marketers are just getting started, said
Emily Riley, an online advertising analyst at JupiterResearch.
Behavioral marketing is definitely taking off, she said, but it’s still an emerging tactic.“It’s most popular when you’re talking about massive amounts of not-very-valuable inventory,” she said. “On larger sites, you can observe behavior, ‘cookie’ someone and find them again later. But if you’re smaller, it’s going to be very difficult for you to do. That’s why you need to be a part of a [network such as] Tacoda or Revenue Science.”
Behavioral targeting can mean different things to different marketers. For example, the process of simple retargeting—using Web analytics to serve up a particular ad to someone who has been to your site before—is considered a type of behavioral marketing. On a larger scale, behavioral targeting looks at how people behave across many sites over time and lets marketers target them based on that behavior, using services such as DoubleClick’s Boomerang or the ever-growing behavioral targeting networks such as Revenue Science and Tacoda.
“The essence of behavioral marketing is hitting people, not places,” said Monty Hudson, VP-media development at Revenue Science. “You want to track down someone’s intent.”
Being able to look into someone’s daily movements is both a blessing and a curse; it often tricks marketers into missing the forest for the trees. For example, one of the biggest mistakes marketers make when embarking on a new behavioral campaign is trying to be too granular, said Curt Viebranz, CEO of Tacoda. “The immediate knee-jerk reaction is to target very finely, but then you end up with segments that are quite small,” he said. It’s better to look at multiple behaviors and combine them to find your perfect customer, he said.
Another mistake: assuming multiple visits to a site means someone is a good prospect. That isn’t always the case, said Eric Porres, a partner and COO at Underscore Marketing. “Behavior can take many forms. A visit to a marketer’s Web site and visiting three b-to-b sites over 30 days might define one behavior—a casual observer—while visiting three sections of the marketer’s Web site plus downloading a white paper and posting to a blog could indicate another behavior—an active participant,” he said.
Riley agreed that marketers can get into trouble if they read too much into a behavior without linking it to other actions. “If I read an article about golf, that does not [necessarily] mean that I’m in the market for new clubs,” she said. “But it might if I read the article and then go check out golf club prices.”
THE FOLLOWING Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) lead generation best practices were developed with input from a broad cross section of the lead-generation industry and cover several important areas of publish-er-agency-advertiser relationships. The full document can be found at www.iab.net/ lead_generation.
■ Unless permitted in the contract by the advertiser or its authorized agency, a publisher should not broker a campaign to any other publisher, network or agency.
■ If the advertiser does permit a campaign to be brokered, the campaign’s terms and conditions offered by the brokering party to the third party should be absolutely consistent with the contractual terms and conditions stipulated by the advertiser, unless the advertiser provides written approval for any changes to those terms and conditions.
lead, regardless of whether the campaign is hosted by the publisher or advertiser.
■ If the advertiser does permit the publisher to offer incentives in return for submitted leads, it is the publisher’s full responsibility to:
Completely and plainly disclose the terms and conditions of the incentive opportunity, fulfill the incentive if earned, and promptly and professionally handle any customer service issue relating to the terms or fulfillment of such incentive.
■ Publishers should not preselect offers without written approval by the advertiser or its authorized agency.
any information contained within the lead data for its own purpose or interest, or for the purpose or interest of any third party or itself, except as specifically authorized or agreed to by the advertiser.
■ In order to maintain the integrity of the data, the publisher should authorize the advertiser to seed the leads.
■ In order to validate any lead filtering conducted by the advertiser as part of accepting leads from the publisher, the publisher should seed the leads.
■ Unless permitted in writing by the advertiser or its authorized agency, a publisher should not offer incentives to consumers in return for submitting a
■ Publishers should assume that additional data gathered as part of an advertiser’s campaign—beyond any data collected in the publisher’s registration process—is owned solely by that advertiser.
If the publisher intends to sell a lead it generates to multiple advertisers in the same industry vertical, the publisher should notify the advertiser(s) in writing, in the publisher contract, in advance of any such sale.
■ The publisher hosting an offer should not duplicate or otherwise use
■ The advertiser should provide each publisher with a source code that is unique to the campaign and should be appended to each publisher’s leads.
■ The advertiser should provide the publisher with clear information regarding the specific source(s) that are approved for the campaign.
■ A source code should only be appended to those leads that originate from the advertiser-approved sources for a given campaign (see “Brokering” section).
■ Ad networks should provide a unique source code to each affiliate and track placements at the affiliate level throughout the network, if requested by the advertiser.
BY JON MILLER
Question: How does one best track lead behavior to achieve the best results in an e-marketing campaign?
Answer: The Internet has fundamentally changed how people research and buy b-to-b solutions. Buyers today keep tight control over their buying processes and expect to be able to get the information they want without talking with a salesperson. They use search and other online tools to identify their requirements, build short lists and evaluate vendors.
As a result, b-to-b marketers meet prospective buyers earlier in the buying cycle than ever before. This means that most leads (as high as 95%, in fact) from e-marketing campaigns are still in the research phase. Prematurely passing these early leads to sales can lead to disaster since it annoys the buyer with an unwanted interruption and makes the salesperson even less likely to follow up on future marketing leads. That’s why lead nurturing, the art and science of building relationships with qualified prospects regardless of their timing to buy, has become such an important topic in the last few years.
At the same time, if and when someone is actively looking for a solution, you want to be sure to identify them and pass them to the right sales rep as quickly as possible. Lead JON MILLER scoring lets you find the hottest leads, but too is VP-marketing many companies use only basic demograph- and co-founder ic data (e.g., title, company size, etc.) in scor- of Marketo. ing. This is useful, but demographic data only He can be tell how interested you are in the prospect— reached at jon@ and nothing about how interested the marketo.com. prospect is in you.
Even BANT criteria (budget, authority, need and timing) have limited usefulness since buyers’ answers to those questions are notoriously inaccurate (only 29% of respondents always fill that information out accurately, according to MarketingSherpa). In contrast, as we all know, people’s actions speak louder than their words. This means you should also track and score a lead’s behavior so you can measure their interest and engagement in your solution.
By setting a cookie for everyone who comes to your Web site (not just known visitors), you can track behaviors for anonymous visitors as well as for known contacts in your lead database. This is especially useful when a prospect does eventually register. At that point, you will already have more complete information on who is hot.
For example, say that two prospects fill out the “contact me” form on your Web site. The first has never been to your site before and found you today by clicking on your ad offering a free white paper. The second found you three weeks ago from Google Ad Words; they didn’t convert at the time but have since been back three times, spent time reading your blog and today got to your site by searching for your company name. Without the ability to track prospect behaviors, the two prospects may look identical, but add the behavioral dimension and there is a clear difference.
By monitoring and tracking online behaviors such as e-mail responses, completed forms and Web site visits, you can develop much more accurate and actionable lead scores. Assign a point value to each behavior, just as you would assign a value to each job title. Certain behaviors—such as using your company brand name in a search, visiting your pricing page or returning frequently to your site—indicate higher readiness to buy, so assign even higher weights to those behaviors.
Since b-to-b purchases typically involve six to 21 people, add up the scores for each contact at a given company to measure the total level of engagement for that organization. If you have more than one product line in your organization, consider creating different scores for each to track prospects’ level of interest in each. Finally, be sure to lower the score over time if engagement goes down—or consider tracking recent engagement as well as total engagement.
Lastly, review the point values with the sales team and decide which scores indicate sales readiness. Be sure to also create “fast tracks,” that is, specific behavior paths that indicate a lead should be contacted immediately regardless of score. If the sales team determines a prospect is not yet ready, recycle the lead to marketing for additional nurturing. Finally, be sure to close the lead and refine your scoring rules and point values over time for continuous improvement.
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