It’s not often that we report encouraging news from marketing. Actually, it’s not often that we report news from marketing period, but leave us not pick nits.

Instead, let’s look at two stories, unrelated, that point to an encouraging new direction for marketing.

The first is a MediaPost story suggesting that keyword marketing may be on the way out. The second, also a MediaPost story, documents the rise of account-based marketing.

Taken together they represent a “but, of course!” moment in marketing, but even the obviously logical can be hard for some marketers to bring to the table without outside reinforcement.

Let’s unpack these two pieces and examine how they could change what you do in 2019.

Keywords

The keywords story does not suggest that keyword-based marketing is dead. For some companies operating in some verticals it makes sense.

However, the story notes, “Companies like Yelp, as well as traditional search platform companies such as Google and Bing have slowly begun to rely more heavily on building audiences rather than keywords to target consumers.”

The piece goes on to note that, “Jon Kagan, senior director of search and biddable media at Cogniscient Media, believes the use of keywords for paid search will vanish in about four to five years. He and his team are so ‘hyper focused [sic] on audience and demographic data – first, second and third – and the recipient of the ad that no one really cares about the keyword.’”

In other words, marketers are more concerned with the attributes of the people who might (or might not) type in a keyword than the fact that they typed in a keyword.

Here’s why that’s such a good idea.

Because I do competitive-intelligence work for a variety of consumer products, I search for tons of keyword phrases related to products or services that I have no intention of buying.

Sometimes my search will lead me to a white paper that I want to download, so I go through the modern vending-machine rigmarole of feeding them my data and getting a white paper spit out into my waiting hands.

The fun part comes when someone follows up and tries to sell me on their product or service. My standard response is, “Oh, I work for your competitor, and I was just collecting some competitive intelligence.”

That’s a conversation-killer, let me tell you.

But do you understand the lesson? People type in keyword phrases and click on paid-search links for a multitude of reasons. Paid-search marketing puts an arbitrary dollar value on that ill-defined behavior.

It’s fishing, where you’re dangling a hook baited with keywords. And you’re paying for everything that feels like a nibble.

Customer characteristics are more or less immutable, on the other hand, and creating an audience of potential customers with similar characteristics and then marketing to that audience is an exceptionally solid, common-sense way of marketing.

And here’s the real key: Somewhere within those characteristics is a trigger; find it, and you’ve unlocked the key to one of marketing’s holiest of holy grails – cheap customer acquisition.

A keyword-buying strategy will never get you anywhere near that, because the more effective a keyword is, the more expensive it gets.

There’ll always be a place for organic SEO, as it relates to getting the customers and collecting their characteristics in the first place.

However, keyword-buying as a shortcut to page one is on its way out, and I say to it, in the words of one of my all-time favorite customer-service reps, don’t let the door hit you where the good Lord split you.

Account-based marketing

Which brings us to account-based marketing.

Basically, account-based marketing means you’re looking at the characteristics of the organization you want to sell, and tailoring your pitch to address their challenges and meet their needs.

Well, isn’t that revolutionary.

You can tell from the dripping sarcasm that it’s not. Any B2B organization with a significant share of a well-defined market practices account-based marketing all the time.

Identify the big fish, find out what makes them tick, create a proposal that salves their pain points, collect the dough on the way out: It’s such a Marketing 101 approach that you wonder why everyone doesn’t do it, or why there has to be an article in 2019 touting this as the way to go.

The answer is technology.

Account-based marketing has traditionally required share and market definition, and few organizations have both.

For instance, ABM worked great at Delta Dental of Wisconsin because DDWI could only operate in Wisconsin, and only sell to businesses domiciled in Wisconsin. Even in the pre-data-warehouse days, it was no big deal to find all the employers with 1,000 or more employees, their current dental carriers, and their CFOs.

However, according to the article, “With advances in data science and artificial intelligence … account-based marketing acquires the reach, muscle, and targeting capabilities needed to bring science, system, and scale to selling success.”

Big Data and AI are going to define your key market characteristics, in other words.

If you think Big Data and AI are great, this is truly a watershed moment for any customer who doesn’t want cookie-cutter solutions, and any vendor that doesn’t provide them.

On the other hand, if you think of AI as the Bronze Age tool that created a paint color called “Turdly,” you may be a little less optimistic.

But don’t despair. Hang tight just a few more paragraphs.

Photo by Robson Hatsukami Morgan on Unsplash.

The two together

Audience marketing and account-based marketing are really two sides of the same coin. One uses common attributes to direct more impactful marketing messages to groups of consumers; the other uses attributes to direct more impactful marketing messages to like-minded organizations.

The logical extreme of these two developments is that marketing is going to get hyper-personalized, and where marketing goes products will hopefully follow.

And hyper-personalized products and services are something we can all get behind.

More good news

The good news for organizations of all sizes is that your data doesn’t have to be BIG to be Big Data, and all your intelligence doesn’t have to be artificial.

Large organizations can leverage several key attributes found in their customer data to create audiences. Smaller organizations can do the same using multiple measures spread across their operation – everything from social-media metrics to customer-service data.

As an example, DDWI aggregated small measures like broker retention percentage and local dentist-network penetration to build an eerily accurate model that predicted future purchase likelihood, and used human intelligence to normalize and score the data, and create user-friendly reports.

So here’s the last piece of good news: Common-sense marketing doesn’t have to be expensive, or cause a huge upheaval in what you’re already doing. And we have the knowhow to bring this sort of audience marketing to your organization.

Contact us to learn more.

Good News About Marketing! (For A Change)