Speaker 0 00:00:00 At qualify. We are here to create a scalable B2B advertising platform that combines world class data, audience intelligence, and advanced targeting to bring to the B2B world.
Speaker 2 00:00:19 Welcome to the robot industry podcast. I am thrilled to have Peter keen from qualify and he's outta Clearwater, Florida to talk about something a little bit different today. Peter, can you tell the audience a little bit about yourself?
Speaker 0 00:00:30 Sure. Jim, and, and thanks for having me on my background is really in advertising technology, you'll hear called ad tech and media. I spent my entire career helping build companies using the advanced ad tech platforms that are available today
Speaker 2 00:00:47 And there's a lot going on today. So I think it's gonna be really interesting. It's really interesting for me. And I think it'll be really interesting for the audience. So can you kind of just give us a little bit of an idea, like what is qualify and then who is informa markets?
Speaker 0 00:01:00 Sure. Let me start with the latter. Uh, informa markets is a global events company and we run under some major categories, but within those categories, there's a lot of other what I call subcategories and businesses. Let me give you an example. So obviously in the engineering area, we capture a lot of various categories. We do advanced technology design and manufacturing, medical device and manufacturing. We do battery and EV plastics, but we also carry a lot of other categories and divisions. We're very big into the construction area, agriculture, aviation, pharmaceutical, and on and on. So very much a global events company reaching out to most major categories of business. Then when it comes to qualify, informa markets has developed what I would call a digital operations agency within informa. And this is a way for these event, show people exhibitors to reach their audiences online.
Speaker 2 00:02:11 Thank you for that. And I'm just gonna put in a little bit of disclosure here that I have been involved with in informa and its previous iterations, UBM and can communications around the trade shows and Canada here, and some webinars for design news and some strategy work. So I'm gonna now ask you a little bit about what is first party data.
Speaker 0 00:02:30 First party data is data that is owned by the company who's using that data. Think of it from, in terms of all the people who are signing up for these shows, both live and virtual tending webinars, downloading white papers, anyone who is interacting with informa and giving us their information that we own is called first party data, as opposed to third party data, which is data that's bought and sold for marketers.
Speaker 2 00:03:01 And so why is first party data important?
Speaker 0 00:03:04 Well, it's really about control so I can give you an example if I'm a marketer and I'm trying to reach a certain type of audience, when you come to qualify, we own that data. So we know exactly where the data is coming from. We know how old the data is, how accurate the data is. If you went to a marketer who was going out on the exchanges to buy third party data, to do a program, to reach a certain audience, there's no visibility into the data. I call it a black box data. You don't know how old the data is. You don't really know where it came from. And that transparency, that first party data brings is a big advantage when you're trying to market.
Speaker 2 00:03:45 And what does qualify do with the first party data?
Speaker 0 00:03:47 What we do now is we have created a system. We call it a consumer data lake that brings in all this data and it's, we now have the ability to find that person's digital footprint and target them online. So we're building custom audiences that we can now create programs to reach these people online.
Speaker 2 00:04:11 And of course, I'm kind of thinking about custom audiences and I'm thinking about, say this podcast, right? My custom audience would be people in the robotics industry, people in the automation industry, people, uh, affiliated to that. And these are the people that come to the trade shows. Right?
Speaker 0 00:04:25 Correct.
Speaker 2 00:04:26 There's a term that I think would be really interesting to have you explain and what's it lookalike audience and how does it relate to the first party data?
Speaker 0 00:04:34 So lookalikes are the ability to expand the reach of a certain type of audience. So we work with marketers, they give us the type of person they wanna reach. We call that a persona. So we ask for the personas of their target audience. Our data team comes up alongside them to help build this custom audience, exactly the people who you wanna reach. But then we go into our database, which is quite fast and we can go to them and say, look, you gave us a type of persona, say a type of engineer you wanna reach and the type of companies you wanna reach. Well, we have found that we have another 40 companies and another 10,000 people in our database that match exactly to the persona and type of businesses you wanna reach that you don't have. Would you like to add that lookalike audience to your existing audience to extend your reach? So lookalikes is really the ability to go into our first party data and find other companies or people that match the target audience of the marketer.
Speaker 2 00:05:43 And this is still first party data.
Speaker 0 00:05:45 Correct.
Speaker 2 00:05:46 And can you talk a little bit about audience intelligence?
Speaker 0 00:05:49 Yeah. We're pretty excited about this. So audience intelligence is taking advantage of a lot of the new capabilities that are out there in marketing technology or the short term is MarTech. So once we have built an audience and have figured out the type of companies that a marketer wants to reach, we wanna let them know a little more about that audience. And what I mean about that is when you talk to marketers, most of the time I find out two things. Number one, they're always at what I call the bottom of the funnel, right? They're always like, how do I get leads to convert into sales? And they don't spend the time maybe for budget reasons or whatever, to really understand what their audience is really into at the moment. So what we do is we say, let us help you solve these issues about where your audience is in the buying funnel and what they're interested in at the moment, they give us a list of topics or keywords that they know when their audience is searching or reading about these topics or keywords shows intent, whether it's the beginning of intent or whether it's way down below in the funnel high propensity to buy, we can track these companies and understand the topics that they're reading about and bring to a market or a report that can help them understand where their audience is in the buying funnel.
Speaker 0 00:07:16 So they can do better messaging or build better content to the deliver to the audience.
Speaker 2 00:07:22 No, that's very cool. Let's talk about the funnel. Like you're talking to a lot of different companies in the B2B world, especially in automation and such is everyone after leads
Speaker 0 00:07:31 <laugh> well, yes, everyone is after leads. But what we find is the smart marketers understand they need to spend a little money upstream, cuz everyone comes into the funnel at some point. And the, the smarter marketers are the ones who are taking advantage of this technology are starting to realize that we can start messaging and building a relationship earlier than when they're down at the lead section. So at qualify, we can build programs that yes can start with a brand awareness, but then quickly drive those people down to that lead or conversion.
Speaker 2 00:08:07 You know, I'm thinking Peter, like I, applications, engineer say I'm a manufacturer of conveyor systems and I really need applications engineers. And what you're kind of talking to me about, I think, as a marketer myself, Hey, maybe I should come up with an ebook on the best way to install conveyors or buy conveyors or whatever that thing is. Is would that be an appropriate use?
Speaker 0 00:08:26 Yes, absolutely. And what's nice about the audience intelligence is we can start telling you what companies that you need to direct these messages to because at the moment they're really involved in that type of content.
Speaker 2 00:08:39 So let's talk a little bit about activation and programmatic. And if you can explain programmatic to our audience.
Speaker 0 00:08:46 Absolutely. So programmatic media buying has been around for about 15 years and think of it as a technology very much like a stock market technology. I wanna buy a certain stock. I put my order in with my stock broker. He puts the order in to on a buying platform and in milliseconds, right? People are bidding for these stocks and buying them that same technology years ago, transferred over to the media business from a fundamental technology standpoint, there are companies called demand side platforms where we put our digital audience on top of these technology platforms are connected to publishers. So when the person we track goes to a publisher site, the publisher alerts this buying platform and says, Hey, that person that you wanna reach is on our website. Reading about this page, would you like to serve an ad? We say, yes, we bid for the buying of that display banner space.
Speaker 0 00:09:48 We win it. And literally this is all happening. When that person we wanna target is clicking the website and it's loading. This is all within milliseconds. So when the page loads, your ad is right there in front of them. So the key to programmatic is all about data. The better data you have, the better insights into the data you have, the better you can optimize and the better you can target and reach those people. So the technology is sort of flat, right? Anyone can buy media like this, but the people who really take advantage of it, understand that the data they have, the quality of the targeting to get to these people is the key.
Speaker 2 00:10:29 And so what kind of media are you delivering?
Speaker 0 00:10:32 Well, most of the time, it's what we call display banner advertising, but we can do video advertising and we can also reach them on just about any device they have, right? Their mobile device, their laptop, their desktop, their tablet, and we can reach them pretty much wherever they go on their digital journey. And you need to think about yourself when I'm talking like this. Everyone has their own digital footprint. Every day you get up, you have your cup of coffee before you get into your work. Maybe you go on your favorite news site, your favorite sports site, your social site, wherever it is, everyone has a sort of grouping of sites they naturally go to and do. We're able to follow these people on their digital footprint and when appropriate we serve them and add wherever they go. So it's more people based marketing as opposed to account based when you're really going to a publisher. Cause they have the right content. We follow the people around. So when they're on their favorite Fort site, news site or wherever they are, we have the ability, whether it's on their B2B profile or B2C profile to deliver an ad.
Speaker 2 00:11:41 If I'm a marketing person in the, in the B2B industry, I would ask you how effective is programmic advertising.
Speaker 0 00:11:48 I think it's very effective when it's done appropriately and done with the right mix and expectations. Cuz think about it now you don't have to worry about inventory and reach because the ecosystem of programmatic is really limitless. It's billions and billions of ed impressions seen across the whole ecosystem of publisher sites. So it's never a question about being able to reach this person. Once we've got their digital footprint, we can see them wherever they go. So now it's a question of just matching up your goals and expectations for the campaign.
Speaker 2 00:12:25 So it sounds a little bit too good to be true. Is this all legal? Have I opted in for all this?
Speaker 0 00:12:30 So we as a public company, based in the UK, being in pharma, very strict guidelines that we follow that because of European and us and Canadian regulations that we collect personal identifiable information or something called PII. We tell marketers straight up front, we will never ever give you that personal identifiable information. We keep that encrypted, but yet we can still reach these people because it's our data. They give us the data, knowing we protect their personal identifiable information by law, but yet they also allow us to market to them. So it is first party permission data. I think what people hear about and what's going to happen is with the third party data or third party cookies. And again, this is what I mentioned earlier in the show in that if I'm a marketer and I go to an agency and they say, oh yeah, we can reach that audience. And they go out and go buy the data from data brokers. You don't know where that data's coming from. You don't know the permission levels. And that's where the focus on regulating and trying to eliminate that kind of data is heading.
Speaker 2 00:13:43 So who's this program good for?
Speaker 0 00:13:45 Well qualify. You know, we spend a lot of time looking at the markets we serve, which are vast. And while you can hear this podcast and think, well, you know, this is, this sounds real advanced and this is probably gonna be hundreds of thousands of dollars. I can't afford it. We recognize that we serve a huge variety in the marketplace. You know, we talk to some of the biggest companies in the world, but like for instance, in the medical device and manufacturing area, we understand that these are very small, highly profitable, but small ingredients companies that may make one little molded device, right. That would go into a medical device. So these people don't have used budgets. Yes, they have a marketing person, but it's usually a one or two man shop. So we have built our program to address the needs in consideration of the budget for the small advertiser who maybe only can spend 10, $20,000 as well as some very big and advanced programs that could run 50 to a hundred thousand dollars for the bigger marketers.
Speaker 0 00:14:56 The thing to know is that we are truly a turnkey operation. So when you come to qualify, almost think of us like a in-house digital ad agency with an informa. So the only thing we really need from a marketer is the creative, highly important. They should spend a lot of time on it, but once they provide the creative, we do all the rest, all the heavy lifting, the running, the optimizing, the reporting on the campaigns. So we, we bring everything that's needed to run these type of campaigns and we can run campaigns that can be as short as one month. So you may have a big show coming up in April for the engineering group is in Anaheim. And a lot of people spend a lot of money at these events and they wanna promote their presence. And we have a quick 30 day program that can promote their presence to the show. And we call that qualify, select others, you know, want more sophisticated targeting, wants the audience intelligence. And we build longer programs for them as well.
Speaker 2 00:15:59 Cause that's kind of an asset, right? If I could build a program and I could actually have an audience and then I could keep retargeting that audience through, through the program.
Speaker 0 00:16:08 Exactly, exactly. We have abilities. So you can have learnings throughout the year, targeting media in and out. When you're either going to an event, announcing a product or a new feature set, all those things. You're gonna be able to reach exactly the people you wanna reach,
Speaker 2 00:16:23 The companies that wanted those advanced targeting and they want more accuracy, less waste. Cause I know a lot of companies that will go to Google AdWords say, and will blow lots and lots of money for very low ROI. And so that would be, uh, another opportunity. And, and plus they have you who are experts in this?
Speaker 0 00:16:41 Yeah. I always look at Google AdWords as sort of foundational. When it comes to digital marketing, you should always have a good, robust, uh, AdWords campaign, but the marketers who are doing well today are building on top of that. And the whole programmatic space is a great feature set to build on top of that. Think about it. When someone is searching for products and services that you offer, if they're on Google AdWords and they don't click your link, you've lost them. So how do you stay in front of them when that tactic did not work for you? Well, if you've built other programs like with the qualify team, you'll have another chance to get at
Speaker 2 00:17:22 Them. Nice. And do you have any kind of success stories that you wanted to share as well?
Speaker 0 00:17:27 Well, yeah, we we've had some people within a variety of the categories, right? We've, we've done with the, um, the advanced technology groups and medical device. We've also had some very good successes in fashion and we have been able to increase. So there's something called click through rate in our industry. And these are the people who click on the banner ads, but there's also something called view through and view through means they've seen the banner, but they've decided not to click on it because they're not sure if the banner is legitimate, right. Everyone's worried about malware and viruses. But what they do is they go open a browser and quickly go to that site. So we can monitor both people who've clicked and gone to the site. And then we can manage, uh, monitor the people, uh, who go through via view through they don't click.
Speaker 0 00:18:18 But we know we serve them the ad and they go to the site, well there's industry standards for that. And we have had campaigns that have exceeded those industry standards by, you know, hundreds of percent on an index basis. So we've been able to really bring more people because we're targeting better to their sites and get, we've seen monthly uniques rise dramatically. We've seen time on websites go up dramatically. So a lot of the, what I call soft branding metrics have been very successful for marketers. And then on top of that, we've seen some very increases in return on investments, in that a lot of the marketers, these aren't quick transactional type sales, right? They know that once a good marketing qualified lead comes in, they turn it to sales. It can be six months to a year. So the measure success there tends to be on the quality of the lead. Did it get through the marketing qualification stage to get to sales? And what we hear from markets all the time is yes, you may not be bringing us a lot of leads, but the ones you bring are getting it vetting through and working through the sales process.
Speaker 2 00:19:26 And they're exactly the people that they're after, right? Cuz you're kind of the sniper where you're saying, I want applications, engineers looking for conveyors and, and whatever that thing is, right? So you're giving them data too.
Speaker 0 00:19:36 Exactly. Exactly. We give 'em the data we give. 'em the learnings. And obviously we have a campaign that can reach, but I do wanna recommend for all the marketers listening out here is, you know, we're not one solution, right? In a true marketing campaign, you need to blend a lot of things together. And that's where the marketing expertise and the people that we've hired to qualify. We're truly marketers first. So when we come alongside you, it's more consultative. We wanna understand what you're doing and how we can fit into that and help make it better. We don't wanna be a standalone being judged that way. We wanna come into the mix and make what you're doing even better.
Speaker 2 00:20:16 So what's the typical length of a program you mentioned, Hey, there's a big trade show happening in Anaheim. And I wanna drive more traffic. That there'd be a fairly short program, right?
Speaker 0 00:20:26 Yes. So those programs are short. Usually one to two months, they'll either be a run up to the show, but a lot of marketers usually do it two months. Cuz what happens is once the show's over, they wanna stay in front of their clients while the leaves are being vetted out from the show, turned over the sales cause that can be a 30, 60 day process. So they want to keep their messaging in front of those people after the show. So typically those type of programs are, are uh, 60 days, but we can run 30. The typical programs we see on a test basis usually run for three months because we are talking about data. We are doing optimizations around the data in the audience. So it takes time in that first 30 days, right? To serve the ads, to find out what's working. What's not what the messaging is. And that helps month two become even more effective. And usually by month three, we're hitting our sweet spot and showing them the results they wanna see. So it, usually we recommend is three month campaigns and then some marketers even go out to six months, which is really optimal for a campaign.
Speaker 2 00:21:36 And so how do customers consider the ROI? What's it? What does that discussion look like with you, Peter?
Speaker 0 00:21:43 Yeah. So it's really all about driving quality leads. I was just talking to a marketer yesterday and they said, look, uh, I'm new at this company. And my one directive is to bring in quality leads. It wasn't the word leads. Uh, it was quality leads. And when I define that to 'em again, there's this process that I'm sure most of these companies have is I right? So a lead comes in from the marketing efforts. Then they have a series of, of ways to vet that lead out before they turn it over to sales. Or if they turn it over to sales, they're doing the quick vetting out. So there's always this process of like, okay, you're gonna bring me you. You're gonna to my landing page. And then from there we're gonna quickly vet them out to see if that was worth our spend or not. Um, and that really varies, right? Because if it's a longer term sale and it's a million dollar contract, right. One person who converts, you know, it could be a lot, but you know, uh, so the ROI has to be a calculation based on, you know, the marketing budgets and what they see if we bring in 10 good leads into convert, what does that ROI? So we kind of sit down and do a calculation based on their needs.
Speaker 2 00:22:57 And one of the benefits to like what we discussed before we come out, come on the air is, is project management because you're right. There's a lot of companies out there that, that just don't have the capability to do this. And so can we talk a little bit about project management on your side?
Speaker 0 00:23:12 Absolutely. We have built a, a team. We call it our client success team and it, and it continues to grow as, as qualifi grows and brings on clients. And these are people with a lot of experience in this area. And what they do is once sales brings in a customer quickly, we bring in the client services team and we have what we call a getting started meeting. And these people are experts and they'll come along and have a detailed meeting with the client and explain exactly what they're gonna do, exactly what they need from the client, which is always, you know, the creative specs. And you know, and then we talk about that. Give, give advice on best practices. Cuz what we'll see for instance is we, matter of fact, we just experienced this. A client said, oh I'm setting up a landing page. That's gonna have a white paper.
Speaker 0 00:24:00 And we said, that's great. Oh they have to give us all their information before they get the white paper <laugh> we had to advise them that based on all the campaigns we run, that's not a good thing to do because people will not give all their detailed information unless they understand what they're getting. And if you don't explain that they're gonna come to the landing page and leave. So we bring those kind of advices from all our campaigns, making sure that the landing pays doesn't set up a loan for instance, it it's gotta be part of the website cuz people wanna look around, read things, understand things before they're gonna give their information and want to be contacted. So these people are experts in this. They know what works, they know what doesn't work. And the beauty of it is, is just turnkey. They are gonna do everything. Think of it like again as a digital agency, all we're asking for is creative. Maybe put some code down on their site, very simple JavaScript code so we can do some tracking from them and metrics. But other than that, we are gonna handle all the details we are gonna advise. We are gonna set up. We're gonna run, optimize and give you a full accounting and report on those campaigns.
Speaker 2 00:25:06 So what do I need to get started?
Speaker 0 00:25:08 A simple reach out. Um, you can contact me directly and it's uh, Peter dot keen, K E a N E informa.com. And we can set up a, a quick overview and discovery call and, and see if our services can help your marketing efforts.
Speaker 2 00:25:28 Great, Peter. And uh, thank you again for coming on on a personal side. What do you like to do when you're not connecting buyers and sellers over the internet?
Speaker 0 00:25:36 Well, my wife and I love to travel, so we like to do a lot of that. We bought a little popup camper and nice. Uh, it's not what I call. It's not your dad's old popup camper. Uh, I'll give a shout out to this camper and, and it's it's hook, it's 2000 pounds. It's got all the wifi connections. As long as you go into a place that has that. You can, you continue to work and travel. And I did that for about a year, just living outta my camper and working, but love to travel and, and see and see the great country, both Canada and the us.
Speaker 2 00:26:06 Nice. Well, uh, let us know if you're coming up to, uh, uh, this, uh, London, Ontario area. We'd be glad to have you and you know what? We got a camper as well. It's uh, we're, we're uh, we've ordered it. It should, uh, be in, in a couple months. So we're looking forward to that as well.
Speaker 0 00:26:19 Well, we'll see you at a campground near you, Jim
Speaker 2 00:26:22 <laugh> our sponsor for this episode is Airhart automation systems. Airhart builds and commissions turnkey solutions for their worldwide clients. With over 80 years of precision manufacturing, they understand the complex world of robotics, automated manufacturing and project management, delivering world class custom robotic automation on time and on budget contact one of their sales engineers to see what Airhart can build for you and their
[email protected]. I'm gonna spell Airhart for you. It's E H R H a R D T. And ID like to thank our partner, a 3d association for advancing automation. They are the leading trade association in the world for robotics, vision and imaging, motion control and motors and the industrial artificial intelligence technologies. You can visit
[email protected] and I'd like to thank painted robot painted robot builds and integrates digital solutions. They're a web development firm that offers SEO, digital social marketing, and can set up and unify CRM and other E R P tools to unify marketing sales and operations. You can find
[email protected]. If you'd like to get in touch with us at the robot industry podcast and by us, I mean me, you can find me Jim Beretta on LinkedIn. We'll see you next time. Thanks for listening. Be safe out there. Today's podcast was produced by customer attraction, industrial marketing, and I'd like to thank my nephew, Chris gray for our music, my partner, Janet, a three painted robot and our sponsor Airhart automation systems.
