From leads to data: how changes in the media business affect B2B marketers

For B2B demand marketers, media has until recently been synonymous with impressions, maybe clicks and hopefully, leads. Historically, marketing pros have turned to media companies to generate awareness and create demand. The focus over the last several years, however, has shifted to: “Impressions are a bonus; I expect leads.”

Moreover, the definition of a lead and how it’s generated varies widely. Leads are good, especially when they engage with your brand(ed) content.

Well, the bar and expectations are being reset. The next evolution is being driven by B2B marketers’ mandate for driving a predictable sales pipeline and media companies’ need to transform their business and value prop. If these two groups can work together, this formula is good for both parties.

Let’s take a deeper look at how media companies are changing and what this means for B2B marketers’ need for rich, actionable prospect data to create a pipeline.

Technological developments in the ways audiences engage content and how media companies track that engagement have had an unintended result: Media companies are sitting on treasure troves of insightful data. Key phrase: sitting on it. That is changing.

Think about it this way: A larger B2B-focused media company may generate millions of engagements and leads annually, all of which remain in the company’s database long after being sent to the marketer. Now on top of the static lead/contact info itself, think of all the added insights aggregated through the analysis of this data:

All metadata such as this has value… a great deal of value. And the smart media companies are rightly set on monetizing it.

The major takeaway here is that media companies are no longer chained to top-funnel activities. The metadata they collect is valuable to the entire customer life cycle.