Innovative Strategies for B2B Marketing | Jonno Burden

David McBee: Hello and welcome to Simpli.fi TV, the web series and podcast for agencies, marketers, media buyers, and business owners. I'm David McBee. Our guest today is Jonno Burden, Senior Sales Director right here at Simpli.fi. Jonno began his digital marketing career in the mobile space back when the iPhone first came out, long before cross device matching and identity graphs. About 10 years ago, he moved from London to San Francisco when Quantcast acquired Struck, and after that he was at Drawbridge when it got acquired by LinkedIn. And more recently, Jonno came to Simplify via our Bidtellect acquisition. Jonno, welcome to Simpli.fi TV. Jonno Burden: David, thank you so much for having me. David McBee: All right, so today we are going to talk about B2B marketing. And that's a struggle for a lot of B2B businesses, so why don't you just set the foundation of our conversation by briefly explaining the concept of contextual targeting and how it differs from traditional audience targeting in B2B advertising? Jonno Burden: Yeah, of course. So for those in the know, obviously contextual targeting is a manner in which you can get in front of for any advertisers in positioning them as thought leaders at moments of intent in specific categories that you want to be in front of. So for B2B leaders in the tech space, it might be appearing in an article about future technologies or artificial intelligence. For retailers, it might be appearing in fashion blogs or other bits and pieces. So for us, the traditional contextual targeting is making sure that your brands that you're working with are appearing in contextually relevant environments, whereas in the B2B space where the majority of our partners are using account-based marketing. So what we're doing is we are working off a long list of approved targeted users and potential clients and making sure that we deliver ads to those users who sit in Chief Revenue Officer positions, CIO positions, or developer positions, and making sure that we're getting in front of them in whichever manner possible, making sure that we're delivering the messaging to them. The great news is that you can combine the both of them together and have this account based marketing capability and layer on contextual targeting as well. So contextual targeting is ads based on content relevance and ABM is ads targeted at specific high-value companies with personalized campaigns. David McBee: Then we throw native ad placement in there to enhance the effectiveness of B2B advertising, particularly when it's combined with contextual targeting. How does that work? Jonno Burden: Yeah, so native ad placement enhances the effectiveness of B2B advertising by blending seamlessly with the contents of a web page. So if you think about ad placement, it's essentially designed to have seamless integration so it appears more naturally as owned media. So if there's a tech blog or a B2B article or anything about future technologies out there, we help partners, our partners, position themselves within that article looking as if they're naturally appearing articles within the space, which ultimately delivers a super much more highly relevant experience for the people reading it. And overall, what we found is that it delivers increased trust and credibility because you naturally have a natural flow to the storyline that you're having a peer from when the user is reading an article of something they're interested in, and then naturally they click on this article and it takes them to the relevant page. And what we're seeing as a whole is that it delivers really a much and better natural flow versus, say, broadcast ads such as display or video or those which are much more focused potentially in other social media channels. So the storyline that we're hearing from our partners by utilizing native within the B2B space is that it delivers higher engagement and higher time on site versus those that are less so. And then from that it delivers overall a much more enhanced brand perception for each of our partners that we work with. David McBee: Love hearing that. So what advantages does the Simpli.fi platform specifically offer businesses looking to implement programmatic media buying for their B2B advertising needs? Jonno Burden: Yeah. I think the key ingredient to think about is that we are different to other B2B advertisers in how they're doing stuff, whereas most partners will mostly be working with a strict account-based marketing list or potential audiences that they're going after, there's a much more focus towards getting in front of these users in whichever manner possible in wherever they can be reached. How the Simpli.fi platform differs is that we offer placement-level optimization, which is a key ingredient to understanding not only what types of articles these users are appearing in, we are understanding what kind of keywords of storylines are resonating best, what kind of storylines and publishers are working really well, but also looking at several other factors like time of day, day of week, any kind of cookie list ingredient that we are looking at. Because if you think about it, these people were going after, these chief revenue officers, these CIOs, CTOs, these developers, traditionally, you look at them and you think we should get in front of them in their workday. But what we've been able to find is that there are huge trends in actually getting to these users in their downtime at weekends or in evenings and delivering them storylines which are engaging to them like the future of AI or whatever it might be, is that by finding these users and finding them in the publishers that they're most interested in, it's delivering higher engagement as a whole. So to be transparent, other DSPs are not really focusing on this, and we are more focused towards capturing users wherever they can drive high engagement on the page and high readership. Jonno Burden: Yeah, I have several, I have several. I mean, we've had our partners who are looking to go after several verticals. It could be in the retail space, it could be in the tech space, it could be in several others. But as a whole, we've had our partners who are utilizing a large media mix. They're utilizing the likes of social media channels, they're utilizing other DSPs. And we've had several of our partners come back to us and tell us that we've been able to deliver not only the highest engagement on the page, but highest conversions following that. What they've told us is that there's a direct correlation, and what we've seen again and again is there's a direct correlation, between engagement, people who are being clicking on the page, reading articles, building a bit of a synergy with the brand and those that go on to convert as a whole. And that's been applicable across several verticals. It's been the tech space, the B2B space, the finance space, all where we're going after specific decision makers. David McBee: So that leads to a question about attribution. Obviously conversions are a big part of what B2B businesses measure, but are there other things that they are using to determine the effectiveness of these programmatic media and contextual targeting ads? Jonno Burden: Yeah, I mean there are several KPIs. I mean, the key one that always comes up for us is engagement. Because if you think about the B2B space, some of these partners are looking at selling products which are $1000, some of these products are a million dollars. So it's different for each of our partners that we work with. And so the key running theme that we've seen is that they're looking to drive these business decision makers to their page, but also not only to just drive a click, but ultimately an engagement. So CPE is usually the main goal that we're going after. But what we find is that once those users are taken to the page, then very often quite sophisticated CRM models are kicking in. They're able to track how long it takes, because very often the attribution can take up to nine months from the initial engagement on the page all the way through to the convergence. We're always tracking conversion metrics with our partners, but also we are also looking at those who initiate form fills, such as filling out a form for a white paper, or those who are initiating initial conversations on a chatbot that lives on the page. So any form of data collection is obviously very much a goal, and we're very much focusing on those two as the main two right now. David McBee: Okay. So what trends are you seeing emerging in the realm of B2B advertising? Jonno Burden: Yeah. I think that the huge trends that we're seeing is that there's not only account-based marketing is continuing to grow, but also people are innovating on that as well. I think that that's been a huge part because obviously with the stuff that's been going on with the cookie list place, people have been figuring out new manners in which they can test out ABM audiences. Content marketing has been a huge growth area. Now a lot of our B2B partners that are clients now didn't have a blog page two years ago, and now they figured out that this is the way to win customers. And so content marketing, if there's a partner who hasn't got it now, they should be evolving their content strategy very quickly because it's the best way to educate a partner on their brand and to ultimately deliver conversions. But then also we're seeing a lot of growth in AI and machine learning, how to utilize that in your marketing strategy. We're also seeing a lot of stuff around video marketing coming out. So a lot of our partners that we're talking to now, although they were traditionally using say native as a tool, they're now looking to use connected TV and video as a manner to win users and to close users. And there are several other areas as well from sustainability to voice search and AI assistance as well. So there's a whole long tail of bits going on as well. David McBee: Yeah, I feel like we could go into that question for another hour, but we're running out of time. So final question, what advice would you give to B2B advertisers who are interested in leveraging programmatic media and contextual targeting? Jonno Burden: I would say there are a few bits. I'd say definitely understand your audience. Who's going to be the buyers? Who are the influencers? Who are the ones who are going to be taking the cool storylines to their bosses as well? So don't kind of rule out just the CEO's, the decision makers, you've got to be targeting everyone company wide. The second one would be obviously don't put everything into one basket. Choose the right platforms. There are going to be social platforms, there are going to be DSPs which are right, but test, test, test. Always make sure that you are testing whoever has the capability and then optimize your budgets into whoever is the top performer. I would say test out contextual targeting on top of just your account-based marketing solutions if you're doing that, because it's what we've been able to prove with our partners we work with is there's a huge amount of incremental conversions that come from contextual, particularly with cookie blockers at play in this day and age. And then obviously just leverage data and analytics, utilize your real-time analytics and don't be open to doing AB testing to continuously test different ad creatives, different formats and placements to optimize to best performing media. David McBee: Perfect. All right, well, what is the best way for viewers to get a hold of you or follow you on social media, Jonno? Jonno Burden: Yeah, the best way to get to me is usually via LinkedIn. It's Jonno Burden, which is J-O-N-N-O, short for Jonathan, which is my full name. But yeah, that's usually the best way to reach me. David McBee: Awesome. Thank you so much for being my guest on Simpli.fi TV. Jonno Burden: Thank you for having me. David McBee: And thank you guys for watching Simpli.fi TV. Please help us out with a like, a comment, a share, a review. Be sure to follow or subscribe to be informed about new episodes. Simpli.fi TV is sponsored, of course, by Simpli.fi, helping you to maximize relevance and multiply results with our industry leading media buying and workflow solutions. For more information, visit Simply.fi. Thanks for joining us today. I'm David McBee. Be awesome and we'll see you next time.