I was reading a great article in MediaPost this morning and it reminded me of the concept that the true cost of the media you buy isn’t the CPM, CPC or cost per message. The real cost of those media investments include the cost of forcing your audience to ignore you – adblocking technology, declaring your email as SPAM, and ultimately not registering to your marketing call to action. Irrelevant, untargeted, low-value and intrusive – does this describe your media and messaging approach?

Applying B2C Learning

Let’s take display ads. From the earliest days, 1995, advertisers would commonly see click-through rates in the 50% to 90% range. Wow! Today, that number has dropped to about 0.1%. In response, investors flowed in to support new ways to make the underlying media cheaper, think RTB, or create new media forms and channels.

The issue is that most marketers rely upon irrelevant, untargeted, low-value and intrusive media. Sad but true. Why? It’s hard to create and deliver high-value, targeted and relevant advertising.

This concept is getting a lot of attention in the B2C world, largely due to its’ shere scale. Here’s how it plays out in one of the largest media sectors for digital marketing, display ads: 200M people around the world now use adblocking technology. This number grew by 48% in the US during the last year – 17% of all Internet users! In the UK, it grew by 82%!

The article summarizes the situation as… “The best advertising catches the consumer when they’re open to ads, adapts based on past behavior or profile, and demonstrates a connection to the content they are consuming. Old-school mass media buying for scale no longer cuts it.”

Applying this to B2B Marketing – new ABM research

We’re working on finishing some brand new research on Account Based Marketing deployments, defining the path to high-performance application of this new strategy. By its nature this strategy targets specific organizations making it painfully easy to target messages. Right? Would it shock you to know that approximately two-thirds of lower performing ABM programs don’t make the effort to even create content that could talk to specific needs of those accounts? Conversely, high-performance ABM deployments not only create content that addresses specific target account needs, a large number take this concept of relevant messaging to the point of creating an entire library of content that can be applied to the transitions, changing needs of each account.

Next week we will be releasing this new research that will discuss the path to high-performance ABM and I invite you to attend the coming out party, a live webinar on Tuesday December 8th @ 9AM Pacific. C level executives from Engagio, Demandbased, Vendemore, Freya News, MRP and Azalead will share their insights and client experience… helping to further define the path to high-performance Account Based Marketing!

Please join us for this live and free webinar, and you will receive a copy of this new research report!