1.
PLANNING YOUR 2014 MEDIA BUDGET:
FIVE ESSENTIALS FOR HR TECHNOLOGY COMPANIES THAT
WANT TO SEE EFFICIENCY, ROI, AND THE BIG PICTURE
By Steve Smith &
Kristin Crosthwait

2.
INTRODUCTION
For many enterprise software and services
companies that specialize in HR,1 marketing
needs have gotten far more complex. What
worked before suddenly isn’t enough. It used
to be easy to rent some email lists, take down
a few webinars, and find yourself rolling in
opportunities. Now you’re seeing conversion
rates go down and cost of customer
acquisition go up. As you plan media for 2014,
you know things are different, but you may not
be quite sure what to do.
1
Now there are more channels and a lot more noise. Whether
you’re managing a company, an entire marketing operation,
or a demand generation effort, you’re feeling it. You’ve got
to answer to a board, a CFO, or a CMO who wants to know
where that money’s going and what they’re getting for it. You
can talk about cost per lead, conversion rates, and amount
of deal value in the pipeline. But let’s face it: There’s a lot of
data to pull together — and data rules these days. Band-Aid
solutions won’t cut it.
Even though marketers in this space have done a good
job of embracing metrics and being numbers-driven, it’s
time to cast a wider net. To figure out your 2014 media,
you need to see what B2C marketers are doing. They’ve
FYI, we’re talking about you. We’re using the term HR broadly to include HR, payroll, recruiting, compliance, learning, rewards and recognition, assessments, leadership development, and all that other stuff.
Planning your 2014 Media Budget:
Five essentials for HR technology companies that want to see efficiency, ROI, and the big picture | 2
got bigger budgets, and they’re buying in greater volume.
B2B marketers can learn a few things from their B2C
counterparts. That’s what we’ll discuss in this paper. We
hope we can point you in the right direction and help you
bring a greater level of sophistication to your work.
This can be our little secret, but we know there are probably
more than a few days when you’re not entirely sure how
accurate your numbers really are. What you do know is that
the status quo won’t cut it much longer.

3.
CAN’T GET THERE FROM HERE
Maturity comes with its own set of problems.
Think about when you were a kid. Everything
was cool. All you had to do was play video
games and show up to take holiday pictures
with your hair combed. Then — boom — you’re
a teenager. Suddenly, you’ve got your dad
yelling at you about your low SAT scores. It’s
the same way in growing companies — except
substitute “CEO” for “dad” and “marketinggenerated contribution to annual revenue” for
“SAT scores.”
Planning your 2014 Media Budget:
Five essentials for HR technology companies that want to see efficiency, ROI, and the big picture | 3
As this industry matures and your company grows, your
target numbers are only getting bigger and the suspect
universe seems to be getting smaller. There are only
about 2.5 million U.S. and 7 million global HR professionals
on LinkedIn. Of that number, only about 15 percent are
decision-makers — so 375,000 in the U.S. and slightly more
than 1 million globally. But it gets smaller. Industry media is
only going to pull in about 25 percent of the overall audience.
That’s not big enough to produce the results you need,
and while still valuable, these channels are oversaturated
with messages.
To calibrate your media strategy for the current reality, you
need to understand a little bit about some of the latest
trends in B2B marketing:
Nurturing 2.0.
We don’t need to tell you about lead nurturing. Enterprise
software companies are far more data-driven than other B2B
categories and were early adopters of marketing automation
solutions such as Marketo, Eloqua, Silverpop, and Pardot.
As a result, you’re already on board the lead-nurturing
bandwagon. However, get ready to kick things up a notch if
you haven’t already. Behavioral marketing and automated
nurturing are becoming far more sophisticated, and simple
automated three- to five-step nurtures focusing on a couple
of key buying personas won’t cut it anymore. Consider this:
There are now intent-based marketing programs coming
online that trigger automated responses from competitors
when they convert on one of your assets. Imagine a prospect
downloading your white paper and getting an email with your
competitor’s white paper almost immediately. The degree of
sophistication you need is increasing.

4.
CAN’T GET THERE FROM HERE
Programmatic buying.
If it’s digital, it can be tracked, analyzed, and turned into
rules and algorithms. With programmatic buying of digital
media, you can bid on pre-qualified advertising inventory
in real time. With traditional buying, you buy advertising
inventory in advance at a pre-negotiated price and ads
are served regardless of the quality of the audience or
the campaign’s objectives. With programmatic buying,
optimizations are analyzed and adjusted in real time to
achieve the campaign’s goals. This process allows for more
efficient media buying and strategic campaigns that are
more granular, which lowers the CPL and increases the overall
volume of leads generated.
engaged with your brand. You can gather more data about
who your buyer really is and tailor your offers, messages,
and brand appropriately. It’s especially valuable because
sometimes your buyers aren’t who you think they are. For
example, you may think the buyer of your performance
management software is a 45- to 50-year-old white female
HR executive — and many times it may be. But what if it’s a
25-year-old white female who’s a line-of-business manager
who has nothing to do with HR? You can’t reach that prospect
through industry channels. B2C marketers are already using
BT to put dynamic copy within ads. With BT, you can deliver
the right message to the right buyer at the right time at the
lowest cost.
Behavioral targeting (BT).
Looking to take your programmatic media buying one step
further? With the simple application of a third-party tracking
pixel from your programmatic media vendor, you can collect
behavioral data and gain insights about the visitors coming to
your website and downloading your offers. After you collect
the behavioral data, you can use it to create a prospecting
audience that has similar behaviors to those who are already
Predictive analytics.
Many HR software companies are building predictive
analytics into their products, so it shouldn’t come as a
surprise to marketers from these same companies that it’s
time to strive for predictive analytics with their own data.
But as we’ll get into in the next section, that’s easier said
than done.
Unless you have a DeLorean and a flux capacitor.
http://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/2013/10472/the-7-biggest-misconceptions-of-successful-b2b-marketing
4 http://blogs.forrester.com/lori_wizdo/12-10-04-buyer_behavior_helps_b2b_marketers_guide_the_buyers_journey
2
3
Planning your 2014 Media Budget:
Five essentials for HR technology companies that want to see efficiency, ROI, and the big picture | 4
All of this may seem daunting, but doing nothing isn’t an
option. You can’t go back to the future. 2 Most of you are
selling products with long sales cycles that start long before
your prospect fills out a form for an asset. However, many
of the top-of-the-funnel activities from back in the day are
now closer to the middle. 3 According to Forrester, your buyer
could be anywhere from two-thirds to 90 percent of the way
through their decision-making process by that point. 4 You’re
out of the game before you were ever in it. There are some
different ways to get to these buyers earlier in the process,
but first you need to put yourself in a position to succeed.

5.
BRIDGE OVER TROUBLED DATA
So here’s the good news: In other industries,
marketing sometimes gets a bad rap for
not focusing enough on the numbers.
That’s not true in this industry. Enterprise
software marketers are typically very datadriven, numbers-oriented professionals.
Although everyone seems to be talking about
multichannel marketing today, most marketers
in this space have been multichannel
marketers for years.
However, you’ve added more channels to your marketing
mix — SEM, content syndication, email, digital display, pay
per lead, retargeting, digital events, live events, social media,
5
6
Quantcast. Display Ad Clickers Are Not Your Customers. 2013.
Ibid
Planning your 2014 Media Budget:
Five essentials for HR technology companies that want to see efficiency, ROI, and the big picture | 5
and so on. And now four significant challenges loom for
enterprise software marketers:
The conversion is the great divide.
Your media sources can deliver data up to the moment
of conversion. You have all of the data in your marketing
automation database about what happens after the
conversion. Inability to combine the two is blinding most B2B
companies. Without bridging the data divide, it’s difficult to
make media buying decisions and optimizations with any
level of confidence. It’s all guesswork without the two data
sources being married.
“Not big enough” data.
Few companies are able to aggregate enough historical
media and marketing data to guide future decisions. Because
the media numbers that companies generate from quarter to
quarter and year to year are relatively small compared with
B2C advertisers, even if you start now, it’s going to take time
to build your database.
Data analysis requires interpretation.
Sometimes it’s easy to look at data and come to a conclusion
that is simple, obvious, and wrong. Case in point: Does a low
click-to-conversion ratio on digital display ads mean that
the ads are ineffective? Not necessarily. It might not have
anything to do with the sites where your ads appear. So,
before you start tinkering with art and copy or dumping a
media channel, keep this in mind: A Quantcast study found
100 times more view conversions than click conversions per
campaign. 5 Rather than clicking and converting immediately,
ad viewers waited. The same is true in SEM — it takes 3.5
days, on average, for a conversion after an initial click on a
paid search link. 6
There’s not enough runway for optimization.
You’re under more pressure than ever to spend media budget
efficiently, and you must be able to move money from
underperforming channels to areas that get results. If your
pay-per-lead efforts are producing a sky-high cost per lead
but email newsletters are surprisingly strong, you need to
know before the end of the quarter. If you can’t aggregate
and analyze your results on the fly, you’ve got trouble.

6.
FIVE ESSENTIALS FOR YOUR 2014 MEDIA BUDGET
You already know that you
need to shake some stuff up
with media next year. It’s OK if
you don’t know where to focus.
We’ve got some thoughts
about this one. We know you’re
under a lot of pressure to
spend your budget efficiently.
Fortunately, there are lots of
new opportunities in digital
media that not only give you
more bang for your buck, they’re
easier to track and show ROI. It
turns out that CFOs kind of care
about that.
What are five essentials for your 2014 media budget?
TIME FRAME
JANUARY
Drop Down
CHANNEL
IMPRESSIONS
CLICKS
CTR
SEM
126,801
984
0.78%
Content Syndication
213,000
100
Sponsored Email
85,000
1,789
eDM
131,000
Webinars
Re-targeting
ESTIMATED
PIPELINE
TOTAL COST
LEADS
$
11,875
32
$
0.05%
$
10,000
3
2.10%
$
12,504
135
9,445
7.21%
$
-
40,000
3,201
8.00%
$
1,309,702
1,229
0.09%
$
CONVERSION
RATE
800,000
3.25%
$
75,000
3.00%
$
3,375,000
7.55%
472
$ 11,800,000
5.00%
20,000
396
$ 9,900,000
12.37%
2,600
48
$
1,200,000
3.91%
Events & Trade Shows
n/a
n/a
0.00%
$
75,000
59
$
1,475,000
n/a
Branding Display
656,910
731
0.11%
$
45,759
16
$
400,000
2.19%
Print
826,943
956
0.12%
$
12,643
12
$
300,000
Web Downloads
109,560
7,632
6.97%
$
-
507
$ 12,675,000
7,478
All Others
56,798
2,943
5.18%
$
TOTAL
3,555,714
29,010
0.82%
$ 197,859.00
TOTAL
IMPRESSIONS
CLICKS
CTR
What’s working? What’s not? Marketing today requires
optimization based on holistic performance, and you can’t
get there without a unified dashboard of your programs
with the data behind it. You can drop some serious coin on
programming to automate the whole thing, but if you aren’t
doing anything currently, it doesn’t need to be anything
more sophisticated than a spreadsheet. It takes some
effort, but it’s worth it. You can simplify decisions, track KPIs
across all of your channels, and optimize in real time based
on the trends.
Drop Down
MONTH
1.26%
6.64%
TOTAL COST
118
$ 2,950,000
4.01%
1,798
$ 44,950,000
6.20%
LEADS
ESTIMATED
PIPELINE
CONVERSION
RATE
January
3,555,714
29,010
0.82%
$ 197,859.00
1,798
$ 44,950,000
6.20%
February
4,987,301
26,208
0.53%
$ 224,998.00
1,562
$ 39,050,000
5.96%
March
4,770,566
23,871
0.50%
$ 215,009.00
1,598
$ 39,950,000
6.69%
April
5,465,039
24,721
0.45%
$ 238,901.00
1,645
$ 41,125,000
6.65%
May
5,598,012
27,801
0.50%
$ 241,056.00
1,769
$ 44,225,000
6.36%
June
5,251,093
26,932
0.51%
$ 238,498.00
1,791
$ 44,775,000
6.65%
$ 232,919.00
1,832
$ 45,800,000
6.75%
July
5,002,861
27,143
0.54%
August
-
-
-
-
-
$
-
-
September
-
-
-
-
-
$
-
-
October
-
-
-
-
-
$
-
-
November
-
-
-
-
-
$
-
-
October
-
-
-
-
-
$
-
-
TOTAL
Planning your 2014 Media Budget:
Five essentials for HR technology companies that want to see efficiency, ROI, and the big picture | 6
1. Look at media holistically.
34,630,586
185,686
0.54%
$ 1,589,240.00
1,798
$ 299,875,000
6.46%
2. Focus more on buyers, less on channels.
Up to now, most marketers in this industry have depended
on industry media channels to get results and have been
more than comfortable making the direct media buys from
the channels they need. In the future, you’re going to need
to expand your reach outside of industry media. Buyers have
lives outside of industry channels. You need to reach them
there before they get too deep into the selling cycle and
your competition establishes the rules of engagement in
their favor.

7.
FIVE ESSENTIALS FOR YOUR 2014 MEDIA BUDGET
3. Start bringing behavior into the mix.
4. Get tracking data that’s specific to you.
The best way to reach prospects outside of industry media
is to better understand the behavior of your buyer. Set
retargeting and conversion pixels on your thank-you pages.
These pixels gather valuable information about actual
prospects who have visited your site and/or converted. As
you match this data to qualified leads and opportunities,
you’ll learn a lot about your buyers and your brand. Use this
data to create look-alike audiences and reach them through
programmatic buying. You’ll be able to expand your reach at
a lower CPM and get in front of prospects you could never
reach before. Also, you can use behavior data to update
the personas and enablement materials your salespeople
depend on.
7
http://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/2013/10472/the-7-biggest-misconceptions-of-successful-b2b-marketing
Planning your 2014 Media Budget:
Five essentials for HR technology companies that want to see efficiency, ROI, and the big picture | 7
You might already use basic site analytics on your website
to gather data about buyers. You might even be getting
behavioral data from media providers. However, this data
isn’t enough. Within your own site, behavioral data may
change slightly — and significantly — from product to
product and page to page. Vendor website data isn’t really
relevant because you can’t assume an overlap of behaviors
from their site to yours. You need to use tracking pixels very
deliberately within your own site. Get first-party data that is
relevant to you, not some third party.
5. Don’t underestimate the value of SEM and display
retargeting coupled together.
Although many of you are already putting budget into these
areas, you may feel a lot of frustration about low conversion
rates. Remember that the value of these activities isn’t
always immediately apparent. A comScore study found that
prospects who viewed search marketing ads for a company
were 82 percent more likely to buy the product in question
than if they received no exposure. However, when the search
ads were paired with display ads, the researchers saw a 119
percent lift in sales. 7 Get more impressions in front of the
right people and you will get results.

8.
GET IT RIGHT FROM THE START IN 2014
Every day, marketing becomes a more datadriven world. It’s easy to feel like you’re behind
the curve. You don’t feel like your infrastructure
is right. You don’t have enough budget. You
don’t have the right people.
How can you possibly do this?
Where do you even start?
Planning your 2014 Media Budget:
Five essentials for HR technology companies that want to see efficiency, ROI, and the big picture | 8
You start with the data. Don’t sweat it if you don’t have it.
You can get it, and the faster you start, the sooner you’ll get
there. And the journey will be worth it. The answers lie in the
numbers. And that’s where marketing nirvana exists. Get
the data and you will find enlightenment. You won’t have to
search for prospects. You’ll know where to find them and how
to reach them with the right message in the right place. You
can focus your spend and achieve an efficient cost per lead.
The Starr Conspiracy is ready when you are. We’ve been in
demand generation in enterprise software for more than a
decade. We know the industry, we know B2B marketing, and
we buy more media than any agency in this space. We’ve
also learned a thing or two from the B2C side, so we can get
you insights and results faster. If you need help getting your
media budget shipshape, schedule a meeting with us. All you
need to do is email marketing@thestarrconspiracy.com.
KPIs alone aren’t always enough for accurate data analysis.
Sometimes, you need a little extra expertise to lean on.
Want to avoid pulling the plug on something that’s actually
working for you? You need a partner with specific experience
in this area.
Talk to you soon.

9.
ABOUT STEVE SMITH
ABOUT KRISTIN CROSTHWAIT
Steve Smith is a partner at The Starr Conspiracy and executive
managing editor for The Starr Conspiracy Intelligence Unit, an
experienced team of thought leadership and research experts
who deliver the strategic guidance and big ideas you need to
improve marketing results and truly connect with buyers. Steve has
developed industry-leading brand and message positions for many
category leaders in enterprise software and authored more than 500
white papers and research reports on HR technology and human
capital management topics. He’s also a former newspaper journalist
and HR communications consultant for enterprise-class companies.
Kristin Crosthwait is director of digital strategy for The Starr
Conspiracy. She’s a veteran demand generation strategist, media
buying expert, and seasoned account director with experience
with both B2B and B2C companies. She’s in her element setting out
a vision for search, display, and other digital media channels and
then mapping and managing campaigns that bring a strategy to
life. If you want to bring in qualified leads at the lowest cost so you
can exceed your most aggressive ROI and revenue goals, you need
Kristin leading your media efforts.
ABOUT THE STARR CONSPIRACY
You shouldn’t have to pay an agency to get to know your industry. The Starr Conspiracy already knows your market segment, who you are, and where you fit
in. We’re a strategic marketing and advertising agency devoted exclusively to enterprise software and services. When you partner with us, it’s to build market
share, multiply brand awareness, and drive sales leads — not to bone up on the basics. We’ve been “out there” for more than a decade, so you can hit the ground
running. Founded in 1999 and located in Fort Worth, Texas, The Starr Conspiracy has won eight best places to work awards and countless creative awards.
Visit us on the Web at www.thestarrconspiracy.com.
Planning your 2014 Media Budget:
Five essentials for HR technology companies that want to see efficiency, ROI, and the big picture | 9