3 Mistakes That Crush Sales – #2 Advertising to the haystack and not the needles

The internet of things, the huge amount of behavioral data, when combined with identity resolution, allows you to dramatically improve the efficiency of your sales process by getting the right message to the right person at the right time so they take an action you want them to take.

Tailor your advertising to the individual.  

Mass marketing is irrelevant to all but the biggest brand and consumer goods firms. If you are managing a middle market firm or even a large firm, the waste of marketing to everyone is crippling. Even if you could limit your marketing to just the people who fit your demographic profile, you will still be wasting precious resources versus your competitor who is only advertising to target prospects who are also exhibiting the behaviors we know indicate they are actively pursuing a purchase of what you sell.

And it is not only the raw advertising or marketing resources. The efficiency of your entire campaign will improve with better targeting. Your relevance goes up and your advertising costs go down. Practically all digital marketing runs on a relevancy engine so the more relevant you are to your audience, the lower your costs.

While most already know this intuitively, the question is how do you execute this? That is where Identity Resolution comes in. By knowing specifically who to market to, you can tell your story to them wherever they are online or offline.

Own and control your data

Some of this can be done on individual networks now like Facebook. If you use their pixel, you can have them fine tune who sees your advertisement. But this limits you to just that platform. Same with Google, YouTube, Pinterest, Amazon and all others. Taking your behavioral based targeting data from one platform to the other means you must own it. The actual first party data. When you own and control it you can take it to all the platforms you use and gain leverage by having your message seen by the ideal target audience wherever they are online, in print, on the radio, even on TV.

Platform agnostic and prospect centered

The point is to use this information to create prospect centered marketing campaigns.

Three big reasons for this:

1. Everyone is different. I may be on Facebook all the time and read my email religiously, but you are someone who enjoys watching YouTube videos and listening to podcasts. If only advertise on Facebook, then you will never see my message and others will only see it when they are on Facebook.
2. We are inundated with advertising. How many ads did you see yesterday, can you name one? The point is that we can’t act on things we don’t remember, and everyone’s attention span is very short. I may have been interested yesterday but I’ve already forgotten about you today.
3. The network effect – Metcalf’s Law. Robert Metcalf showed how as networks grew, their utility increased exponentially. The power of any network goes up with the square of the nodes. We can apply this to marketing by recognizing the power of your message with increase with the number of places your message is delivered.
   1. One message on one network has a power of one (1 X 1)² = 1.
   2. Two messages on three networks has a power of (2 X 3)² = 36.
   3. The power or impact of two messages on three networks will be 32 time the power of one message on one network.

Learn more –

Mistake # 1 Ignoring AI in your sales process

Mistake #3 – Missing the shift to People Based Marketing.

Don’t think in terms of advertising campaigns or “driving” traffic. Rather, think about conversations. We develop know, like and trust by engaging in conversations with people about the problems they want to solve and the results they want to achieve. People based marketing is the key to engaging your audience in digital conversations that are important to them.