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The “Good”– shifting from “push” marketing to “missing link” marketing – meeting the modern customer’s expectation of finding the right information at the right place at the right time.

Check out the article “Beyond Targeting in the Age of the Modern Consumer” by Augustine Fouin ClickZ.   It focuses on consumer advertising and targeting but the lessons definitely apply in the B2B space.   Fou points out the futility of the push or interruption model, even when the target is very narrowly defined. 

“So in a simple game of odds, if the advertiser starts with a small target and intersects that with near zero recall or very low response rates, the probability of success (driving the sale) is a rounding error to zero.”

This point really hit home with me since a while back we realized our team’s traditional direct marketing model was no longer working.  We sell enterprise security to a very select group of IT executives in F1000 companies (e.g. CIOs in top banks).  While we created some very strong integrated marketing campaigns to reach these highly sought after customers, the messages were probably never received  since our targets have stopped reading emails, answering calls, attending events, reading trade journals and opening mail.  Even in the few cases where we did get their attention, I’m sure we were quickly forgotten in the crush of other marketing messages.  Given this new market reality we shifted the majority of our marketing efforts from traditional direct marketing to what Fou calls missing link marketing— delivering the right bit of information to the right person at the right time through the right medium (when they're searching for it). This solves many of push marketing’s shortcomings since the customer finds information that is relevant to them at their particular stage of the buying cycle. 

For example, we put this approach into practice in our marketing efforts to the aforementioned IT execs in large banks.  One of their primary pain points is compliance with identity theft regulations (FFIEC, Red Flags, etc.).  Rather than bombarding them with direct mail/email/calls about our products, we created unique content for each stage of the decision-making process:  a whitepaper on the issue, a podcast, a buyer’s guide to help customers write their RFP, and a webinar with a customer testimonial.  We placed that content on our websiteand on key banking industry portals.   Of course we drove visibility of the content with PR, blogging, SEO, Google Adwords and sponsored links on keywords associated with those regulations.

Now we aren’t hitting every single prospect over the head with our messages, but instead are getting the right information to the few who are actively researching solutions in our space.  And I’ll take quality over quantity any day!