Basic/ Excerpt...

Event revenue, reported to ABM by the Center for Exhibition Industry Research, rose 2.7% to $5.87 billion in the first half of 2013 compared with the year-earlier period. Business information and data revenue for b-to-b media companies grew 7.1% to $1.31 billion in the first six months of the year, according to information provided by consulting firm Outsell, supplemented by publicly available data and ABM estimates.  Print advertising revenue continued to decline, falling 4.3% in the first half of the year compared with the year-earlier period.

__________________________________

► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert directly to your inbox. To subscribe, please go to http://ineomarketing.com/About_The_MAR_Sub.html  (your privacy is protected).

While many B2Bs focus on Facebook for organic interaction with customers, B2Cs often look to advertising on Facebook to drive sales.

Digest...

Morud followed up with the following tips for B2Bs:

• Mine "interest" targeting for job titles, for example, "logistics specialist," "restaurant owner," "cardiac surgeon," "hardware engineer" and "manufacturing specialists"
• Create a custom audience. Have an email list that has never converted? Create a Facebook custom audience in "Power Editor."
• Use category and partner targeting. We love using category target, for example, "small business owner," or partner target, for example, "international business traveler," as qualifiers to our interest segments.

"Smart, focused Facebook targeting is the foundation of your success," Morud said.  Morud said don’t forget to customize the landing pages you drive Facebook users to, as well.

You agonize over the details of your marketing, yet your audience cares about it less every day. The problem? Marketing teams approach it wrong.

Digest...

Meanwhile, your audience runs by. Your ad briefly passes through their peripheral vision. It doesn’t matter anymore what you think. All of this was for them, not for you.

• Did it capture their attention?
• Did it draw them in?
• Did it make an impression?
• Or did it just pass by, part of the ambient busyness they filter out every day?

Solution:

1. Get attention
Without a brief moment of attention, nothing else matters. Your audience has no intention of giving you their attention, you must earn it with everything from design to headlines.

2. Agonize over the first impression
If they see it for 2/10ths of a second, what are they left with? Do you hold their attention, or is it gone?

3. Then perfect your delivery
If you don’t already have their attention, you will not be seen. And marketing that is never seen is like the proverbial tree falling in the forest.

Social media advertising is one way to engage with prospects. LeadFormix help select the social channels advertisers should consider in their advertising mix.

Condensed...

Here is our pick of the social channels B2B advertisers should consider in their advertising mix:

1. LinkedIn: With 200 million users in over 200 countries, LinkedIn is a powerhouse for B2B advertisers. Its ability to target niche professional groups, who actively maintain their profiles and its granular targeting options make it an excellent advertising and lead generation platform. Companies can track conversations and identify warm prospects that are discussing a potential purchase related to their line of business.
2. Facebook: The reach of Facebook is phenomenal. It has 1.11 billion users, 50% of whom log in at least once a day. Facebook’s ad platform is a low-cost opportunity for B2B companies to advertise their brand and products. Facebook ads can take the form of display ads, sponsored stories, promoted posts or sponsored apps. Companies can target their ads by geography, age, gender or most valuably by interests.
3. Twitter: A recent study found that Twitter users visit B2B tech brand sites at a higher rate (59%) compared to average Internet users (40%) and that their conversion rate is higher. Also B2B brands who invested in Twitter ads saw an average of $14 CPL (cost-per-lead) for quality conversions.

Key excerpt...

While the ultimate framework that you use may be different from this based on your industry, seasonality, account volume, or sales cycle, the bottom line is that the process should be a systematic one that is followed as religiously as regular reporting activities.

Daily Activities

• Refresh any dynamic data that would render ads inaccurate if not updated
• Check the status of any ad tests currently running
• Stop any tests that have reached statistical significance and apply winning ads across those groups

Weekly Activities

• Introduce new ad concepts into rotation
• Review promotional calendar for any active offers that could be implemented
• Review best sellers so that popular items can be promoted in ad copy

Monthly Activities

• Check your competitive landscape to inform new ad strategies
• Review query reports to determine any changes in consumer intent that would drive structural changes to account
• Create a set of hypotheses about ads that can be implemented over the next month

Seasonal Activities

• Introduce seasonal promotions into ad rotation where possible
• Refresh how product inventory is implemented in ads to capture any major updates

Annual Activities

• Test new core brand messaging in ad copy
• Revisit winners from previous year to ensure optimization roadmap is driving long term results

This test can help you better target your ad investments.

Originality: An original ad comprises elements that are rare, surprising, or move away from the obvious and commonplace. The focal element here is uniqueness of the ideas or features contained in the ad.

Flexibility: Flexibility is seen in an ad's ability to link a product to a range of different uses or ideas.

Elaboration:  Many ads are creative because they contain unexpected details or extend basic ideas so they become more intricate and complicated.

Synthesis: An ad that is creative along this dimension blends normally unrelated objects or ideas.

Artistic Value: Ads with a high level of artistic creativity contain aesthetically appealing verbal, visual or sound elements. Their production quality is high, their dialog is clever, their color palettes is original, or their choice of music is somehow memorable.

Combining elaboration with originality had almost double the average impact of a creative pairing on sales, closely followed by the combination of Artistic Value and Originality (1.89, accounting for 11% of all combos). The weakest combination was flexibility and elaboration, which had less than half the average pairing's impact on sales. Yet we found that in terms of usage there was little difference between them: advertisers did not seem to favor any one combination over the other.