IronMarkets Introduces Lead Gen Offering For Other Media Companies

An inherent challenge for b2b media companies, big and small, is the tension between advertisers wanting a large quantity of leads and publishers not wanting to destroy their databases with too much promotion. As an industry, we’ve done a better job explaining to partners that it’s about the quality, not the quantity, but that messaging only goes so far.

So, publishers inevitably have to send more messages to their audience to promote various lead-gen campaigns. To offset this, publishers work with various lead-gen tools to help relieve some of that pressure, pushing advertiser content out. However, many of them are, for lack of a better phrase, crap.

That’s exactly what IronMarkets found. Formerly known as AC Business Media, which was spun out from the Cygnus Business Media breakup about ten years ago, IronMarkets focuses on heavy construction, landscape, and supply chain marketplaces. A few years ago, Ron Spink joined the company as CEO and very quickly started focusing on how to build a more robust lead gen offering, including using third parties.

In an interview with A Media Operator, he said, “We went and used the biggest lead gen companies for a couple of months and just tested them. We found that they didn’t do well, and their practices weren’t all that great.” And so they kept testing—over and over. “There are a little more than 2,600 lead generation companies with databases,” he said, “and we have now vetted 278 of them.”

That vetting resulted in a much tighter list of 33 companies that pass IronMarkets’s multitude of requirements. As Spink explained:

When we were building out lead generation products, we wanted to aggressively create a volume-based cost per lead engine for our clients. They’re high-value leads because they’re hand-raising leads [opt-in]. The only lead you’re going to get is someone who says’ ‘yes, I want to download that asset.’

However, the team realized that if IronMarkets needed the ability to access more scale, many other publishers would likely need the same. And so, last week, it announced the launch of a brand new division with the company: BlackBoxLG.

In essence, BlackBoxLG (which I will now call BBLG for short in this piece) acts as the middle-man between these independent lead generation services and sales teams, whether at publishers, associations, agencies, or whatever. As the name implies, the inner workings are a black box, with the lead generation relationships kept secret. But as Spink said:

“What we did is we built this product for ourselves. We recognized we can sell this product in any vertical market, but we don’t want to play in this markets. We are literally our own BlackBoxLG internal client.”

Here’s how it works… BBLG negotiated with all of the various lead-gen providers for flat-rate pricing. That way, when a publisher seeks leads, there is no price variance between providers. They also negotiated all of its rules, including clear opt-in and privacy policies and a unique landing page for every piece of content that a publisher might submit.

So, when a publisher brings a client’s piece of content, each of the providers within BBLG will have to put up their own dedicated landing page and then drive traffic to it, however they might. This way, the publisher knows that any lead that came through one of those forms was not duped but explicitly opted-in—or, as Spink calls it, “hand-raising.”

According to Spink, it can support basically any industry. “Can it support media?” I asked. “Absolutely,” he replied. He did qualify that the only way lead gen programs really work, irrespective of BBLG, is if the LTV of a lead is high enough. And so, if you’re selling $5 widgets, a lead gen program might not work unless the outcome is selling thousands of them.

But at the end of the day, Spink’s got access to a lot of scale. “We have 165 million database contacts across the network,” he said.

We have many publishers who say ‘we have a client right now where we could sell a 100 lead program with this tool.’ We consult with them on an estimated retail rate for those leads, how much it’ll cost the publisher, and then the number of leads we [BBLG] feel we can satiate with those selects in a month.

The selects can be industry, job level, job function, and qualifying questions. Obviously, each incremental filter increases the cost, but it does so in a flat way across the entire network. As the leads come in, they can route to your client’s CRM via an API without them ever knowing that BBLG exists.

The way Spink sees it, this is a way for media companies to insulate themselves from the coming disruption in digital media. In the interview, he said:

One of the theses that I believe in is how do you make sure as a media operator that you are mirroring your product set not just to one part of a buyer’s journey set, but all the way through that funnel conversation. One of the things we have done as media businesses for far too long is focus on top of funnel [display, run of site, etc.] and not enough on intent to purchase. It is incredibly important for media companies to get products out there closer to the buyer.

AMO’s reaction

Lead gen is a tricky business. It’s not an operational problem but an audience exhaustion one. Let’s say that you send a dedicated send to your audience Monday through Friday every single week. And let’s assume that you have 100,000 subscribers and a 0.2% unsubscribe rate. Each day, you’ll lose 200 people. After a week, you’re down 1,000. And after 52 weeks, you’ve lost 52,000 people.

I recognize the math isn’t flawless since 0.2% of 99,800 (after one day) is less than 200, but bear with me… I’m not a walking Excel spreadsheet.

Anyway…

After one year, you have burned through over half of your database. Sure, you might have made good revenue, but at what cost? We’re not dealing with massive industries here. And so, if you lose 52,000 subscribers, you need to go out and replace them. Can you replace that many subscribers year after year after year? It’s going to get expensive.

Here is how I’d look to use a tool like this if I were offering scaled lead generation. I would promote all lead gen programs to your audience less intrusively, such as a resource section in the newsletter. And then, if you’re struggling to satisfy the complete program, you can use a partner like this as an overall lead boost. You want to maximize how much you can generate from your owned audience because the margins are better. Each lead gen partner in BBLG charges a cost per lead, and then BlackBoxLG is charging a fee as well—as it should since it did all the work.

On the other hand, this sort of program is client-funded audience development. If you acquire 100 leads for them, it might cost you $3,500 from BBLG. While the client gets these—and you get paid a margin on top of it—you’ve also potentially acquired 100 new readers. They may churn higher than others, but it’s an obvious positive since the clients paid for it.

But this sort of offering also reiterates why developing more robust product offerings is so important. We should be going to partners and offering to help them create content, putting them on a monthly or quarterly program where, each cycle, we create something new and then drive additional leads. The more our partners can depend on us to generate demand from creative to execution, the better.

We should also not forget that brand building still matters. Leads are useless if the advertiser doesn’t know who the company is. And so, while I agree with Spink that we need to offer products that get closer to the buyer, we also need to make sure the buyer recognizes our partners’ brands. It truly is a full funnel.

Nevertheless, if IronMarkets’s criteria for BBLG are legitimate and they are continuously auditing the quality of the lead gen partners’ work, this seems like a strong tool for publishers to have in their toolkits.

Let me know what you think. Hit reply or join the AMO Slack to discuss this further. I hope you have a wonderful weekend.