The Value Of Audience Access

Being a successful B2B marketer hinges on getting your content in front of an engaged audience of your buyers.

Buyers are less willing to talk to suppliers than ever before. B2B buyer’s journeys are up to 80% complete before suppliers know about a prospect's intent to purchase. Suppliers don’t know when a new buyer’s journey will begin.

So how can suppliers engage early enough to have a fighting chance? Our answer to that question is audience access.

Audience access is the foundation of our content syndication program. Your content gets in front of our audience when it is hosted on our website and pushed out through our newsletters. First, we help you identify a target audience. Then, we help you select your most impactful content to share with our audience (or we work with you to create that content). Your content is included at least 2x per month in the Industry Insights section of our newsletter, where thousands of readers can access your thought leadership alongside our editorial.

Being a successful B2B marketer hinges on getting your content in front of an engaged audience of your buyers. To do this, you can’t just buy a list of names or hope buyers will come to your website. It’s a time-consuming, resource-intensive endeavor to build, maintain, and grow an active, high-quality database. The price of audience access covers our cost to do this for you – that way you can focus on increasing revenue instead of worrying about things like data integrity, compliance, email deliverability, and list cleaning.

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FAQ

What kind of data comes with audience access?

When a reader accesses your content on our website, we automatically capture contact information and data about that content interaction. This data doesn’t just get dumped in a spreadsheet – our business development team helps you to understand and act on it.

For each contact interaction, you'll be able to see:

• First and last name
• Title
• Company name
• Company type (varies by market)
• Email
• Phone number
• Address
• Document title
• Document type (white paper, e-book, case study, brochure, etc.)
• Buyer's journey stage of the document (early, middle, late)
• Interaction type (content download, share, web search)
• Interaction date and time

How do you capture data? Do readers hit a gate for every content download?

Our readers have registered user profiles. When readers access a piece of your content, we capture this activity based on their user profile (according to strict privacy standards that exceed the requirements of GDPR, of course). Readers are prompted to log in to their user profile, or they can access the content directly from a newsletter.

Our proprietary technologies connect readers to content that helps with their buyer’s journey and then tracks their engagement on the back end. Or, in simpler terms, when a reader clicks on your content, we’ll tell you about it.

Why can't audience access be purchased on a month-by-month or trial basis?

Even the best content strategy can’t magically shortcut B2B sales cycles. It takes time to be an effective B2B content marketer. It takes time to spot behavior trends and purchase intent from our readers. We believe the minimum amount of time needed to evaluate the effectiveness of your content is 12 months. This timeframe allows us to help you identify engagement trends to understand the buyer’s journey. This 12-month timeframe also benefits our readers. We constantly add new readers to our audience. And those readers are constantly starting new buyer’s journeys. Your best chance to reach as many of these readers as possible is to be in front of them for an extended period.

Why is audience access required to purchase other custom marketing services?

You can increase your share of voice and elevate your status as a thought leader if your content is where readers search for information (on our websites and in our newsletters). Some readers only access content through our regular newsletters, and some find your content on our sites through organic web search. Audience access allows you to continuously capture high-quality leads through newsletters and organic search. At a minimum, you need to have this constant presence to build trust and awareness among our readers.

Think of it like buying a car. The car only works with an engine, which is an engaged audience. That engine only runs if it has fuel, which is your content. You can’t buy the leather seats, the sunroof, and the chrome rims unless you first buy the car itself and start driving down the buyer’s journey path with your content.

Why do I have to purchase audience access for each site?

Think back to the good old days of buying B2B advertising via print magazines. If you wanted to be in magazine A, you bought a full-page ad. If you wanted to be in magazine B, you had to buy a different ad. You can use the same creative, but it's still two separate purchases. Those ads are how you gained access to those print audiences. Think of each of our websites as its own "magazine." BioprocessOnline.com has a different audience than OutsourcedPharma.com than CellandGene.com. Different audiences mean different audience access programs are required for each community.

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Audience Access: A Case Study

Background: A reader, in this case, a $2 billion pharma company had an active buyer’s journey to award a multi-million-dollar contract to a contract research organization (CRO) for a rare disease phase one clinical trial.

Reader Info: Over six months, a total of 5 people from this pharma company engaged with content on a Life Science Connect publication (ClinicalLeader.com).

Supplier Info: The CRO that was awarded the contract partners with the ClinicalLeader.com platform. We reverse-engineered the sale to take a closer look at how this reader company engaged with supplier content.

Marketing Activities: This CRO had an audience access program and a custom newsletter on ClinicalLeader.com.

Content Engagements: From January through June, this supplier’s six-month audience access program generated nearly 1,500 engagements from 12 content inclusions in our regular editorial newsletters. This was in addition to 110 content engagements generated by organic web searches that found supplier content posted on our site. During that same six-month period, this supplier also ran one custom newsletter that generated more than 700 content engagements. On the surface, it seems like it’s better to generate 700 leads with one activity compared to generating 1,600 leads from a dozen activities over a six-month timeframe.

But let’s look back at the reader company, a $2 billion pharma company, with an active buyer’s journey to choose a supplier for their phase one clinical trial. In that same six-month window, 5 different people at that pharma company engaged with this supplier’s content.

If the supplier only had custom newsletters instead of the audience access program, this reader engagement would not have indicated an active buyer’s journey. Instead, it would have looked like chart #1 (only one person from the $2 billion pharma company engaging with one piece of content).

Fortunately, because of the continued engagement generated from the audience access program, the buyer’s journey actually looked like chart #2. A total of 5 people at that $2 billion pharma company had 17 engagements with 6 different pieces of content during these six months. All but 1 of those engagements were attributed to the audience access program.

Originally published on Follow Your Buyer on 9/22/20