2104 – The Impact of Real-Time Data on B2B Marketing Strategies with OMI’s Paula Chiocchi

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1:05With us right now is Paula Kiyoki. Paula, in addition to being a good friend, you are also the CEO of Outward Media. Your website is outwardmedia.com. Outward Media, by the way, also known as OMI. Well, Paula, it's great to have you. Thank you. Glad to be here. And I love anytime we can talk B2B and that's an area you know well. Do you mind maybe just giving us an overview of the work that you do through Outward Media? Sure. We consider ourselves to be a performance marketing agency, but what makes us unique is that we've built our own B2B database over the last 20 years of virtually all the businesses in the United States with about 145 million contacts associated to all manager level and above.

1:52And companies use us for social media marketing, direct mail, email marketing, programmatic advertising. So virtually what you'd call omni-channel, what's called omni-channel marketing. Yeah. Do you mind maybe just sharing a little bit, you know, for folks that maybe are not necessarily in the kind of the data world when it comes to, you know, potential customer information, just data, you know, just customer information, people information. The data that you're talking about, what is, can you maybe get a little bit more granular about what that is and how folks are using that, particularly the types of clients that you work with?

2:32Yes. So the data is used to get new customers. So they're all by SIC code or industry code, the size of the business relative to employees and revenue. We have intent data overlays for people that are searching for potentially the client's products and services that we can overlay for campaigns that we execute. We execute in the email channel for clients, delivering the email in order to develop new customers. And that's kind of a high-level overview. Yeah. And this data is not necessarily publicly available? Or, like, how does this data get pulled together? It's from a myriad of different sources.

3:15We have partners that feed us opt-in registrations of people that have opted in to say like the Wall Street Journal or Forbes, et cetera. So we have an opt-in time and date stamp on all the email. And then we compile through different sources, some of it being public record, Josh, which validates that they're an existing business where you register your corporation, that type of thing. So we assemble a number of different data assets to build out the database. And our core competency is in the small business. That zero to 50 employee range is very, in particular, zero to 20 is difficult to keep up with the turnover.

3:52It turns over fast. And one of the things that we pioneered was the 95 % email validity guarantee that our competitors adopted as well in order to prove to our customers that we stood behind our data. And you mentioned clients. We work with, we've been with AT &T about 13 years. We've been a supplier to them. Amazon, we're bringing on T-Mobile right now. So yeah, mostly Fortune 2000 in midsize. Yeah, you know, when you're talking about, you know, say a midsize company or certainly a larger enterprise like AT &T, they're pretty big. But, you know, when you think about like how important it is that they have great up-to-date data, like what that can mean for a company?

4:37Do you mind maybe addressing that issue a little bit about why it makes sense to invest in really great data? Well, the opportunity loss if it isn't good. So number one, if you're doing email marketing and you have bad data, you're going to get shut down. I mean, you're not going to be able to deliver the data. And then if you've got to have the right person, the right contact, the right title, because you're just wasting all your dollars, all your advertising dollars, if you don't have accurate data. I forget what the latest thing was. It was like, I don't know, it was like 30 % waste in terms of people not having the accurate data.

5:15And the contact data alone turns over about 4 % a month. So if you're not constantly refreshing your database, by the end of the year, you got 40 % bad data. Yeah, and what a waste that is. I mean, we think about to like, maybe you can cut again, for someone that might be at the SMB level and maybe they haven't invested in, you know, kind of what they're going to use, you might maybe sharing a little bit about what this ends up looking like. So, okay, cool. I've got a database. Now what do I do with it? Are you talking about a small, small business? Yeah. Yeah. Let's address maybe more of an SMB or midsize company use case.

5:58Well, a small business, I think what works for them is particularly in the social media aspect because you can take data like ours and build lookalike. You take your customer file and then you build lookalikes. And so we can upload the data like into Meta or into LinkedIn, and then they can perform a campaign there. And that's usually a reasonable, more reasonable cost than say, trying to do this big, you know, email marketing campaign if you don't have like an in-house agency, et cetera. A lot of small businesses will do social media for B2B and it's effective. So multi-channel outreach. So do you mind maybe just like if you were to spend, you know, a couple minutes explaining all of the different ways, what does social media touch?

6:42What does social media touches? What's an example of how that might look? Well, one of the things that we do is we combine it with direct, I'm sorry, with email. So if we do an email outreach campaign for new business development, then we take that same data set and uploaded into LinkedIn. So they have like virtually a one-two punch. So they're serving ads in LinkedIn, and they're also going direct to the inbox of the potential prospect. And so that's two channels that you're in. You can also add direct mail, and you can also add the social media aspect. Most companies right now are focusing on, there's been a real shift into social media, even over the programmatic, even though the programmatic is still strong.

7:22But it It seems like getting a bigger bang for the buck using the social media and email. I'm certain, yeah. So, you know, in terms of trends around data, like, where are we going in 2025? You know, are there new and innovative ways to use AI to better communicate, obviously, managing that data? Any insights there? I think we're at the tip of the iceberg on the AI. I was just in a Forbes agency council meeting that I belonged to, and we were all talking about AI, and everyone was saying that there's like 100 different things in AI, and they don't really know which one to use and which not to use.

8:06So I think we're kind of at the beginning curve of that. And I think, frankly, Josh, I think it's going to be a wild ride. So I don't really know. I mean, one of the things that we've been using is intent data for a couple of years, which is looking at behavior, what you're reading online. And then if somebody's researching, let's say, a cell phone plans or Internet access, then we marry that into the data set because we feel like they're potentially in market. But that's intent data. But with the AI and things are coming, I know our data scientist is probably looking at at least 30 or 40 different things and trying to figure out which ones are real, which ones are effective, which ones, you know, I think we're kind of at the beginning curve on that, frankly.

8:49is is zoom info would that be a different solution do you like how are you related to other suppliers like that uh zoom info has very good data by the way uh and but their data is typically mid-market to deep into the enterprise so they might go into ibm and have a hundred thousand contacts okay we and they don't really have small business so that zero to 20 employee range, maybe even up to 50, we're much stronger than they are in that part of the marketplace. Getting back to intent, what are the ways that you can gauge intent? All different ways. We have categories that the clients take a look at, and then they pick and choose the ones that make sense for the product that they're trying to promote.

9:36And then what we do is we we get 14 million signals a week we get in which is i'm sorry billion for signals in a week and then we parse through that data and pull out uh the companies that are searching and then match that to the contacts and then that's when we pull the file and one of the things that we've seen josh is if we do a standard email campaign no intent data will get X open and click rate. B2B is usually 3 % to 6 % open rate. But if you add the intent data, it doubles. The open and click rate will double. Oh, I bet. In an email campaign, it will double. I mean, that's always the goal, right?

10:16Is just to try to be as relevant as possible. I don't think any marketer wants to advertise or reach out or bother the wrong people. I mean, it's frustrating. It just creates friction. There's potential for blowback. like we want to minimize that. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I mean, you experience it yourself. Yeah. I know a few things about that. I probably get 20 emails a day wanting to lead generation for us. Did you go to our website? Do you know what we do? Yeah. They don't care. They don't care. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's unfortunate because that's kind of, you know, some of these noisier, like maybe LinkedIn DMs, email, again, you know, it's kind of what we've always used, but unfortunately, and I'd love your take on this is, you know, how can we be more permission-based?

11:09Like, how can we be more relevant? I mean, I think that's always critical to do, but I think that those who don't care about those things muddy a lot of waters for those of us who really do take great care about how we show up and build new relationships. I think now it's less is more. I mean, we've been involved in email marketing B2B since 2007. It used to be 50 million emails would go out, right? I mean, millions. Less is more, more targeted, more overlays. We have one client that offers advertising. They go buy who's buying advertising spend. We overlay that on top of our data. So between intent data and who's spending on advertising, we even saw that one triple the open and click rate because you're being more targeted.

12:02You're honing in on really more. It's a smaller database, but it's more effective. And I think you're going to see that to continue, that less volume, in particular for email marketing, is going to go out, but it's going to be more targeted. And so that annoyance factor that you mentioned should be lessening. Oh, that's great. That's great. So your website, outwardmedia.com, do you mind maybe sharing a little bit, like when you are chatting with a new potential client, like what kind of questions are you asking? Typically, it's who their ideal customer is, right? And then we try to mirror that.

12:44And if they don't know, then we can run an analysis of their customer base. And we usually do that at no cost. And then tell them what their ideal customer looks like. And then what we do is we try to look to mirror that out in the marketplace because we think that's more targeted than just like a big shotgun effect. So typically we find out their ideal customer, obviously what their budget is, what their KPIs are, what is the purpose of the campaign? Is it lead generation? Is it we really need to drive people for sales? Is it an awareness campaign, which is easier than performance campaign? And to be more on the performance side, Josh, people are looking for us to generate that lead or generate that sale.

13:27So the KPIs, each company's or client's KPIs are critical. Yeah. So when we go to your website, outwardmedia.com, you have a lot of good resources here. Do you mind? I don't know if you know what you got here. I probably don't know all of it anymore. Yeah. Or I'm thinking of like someone who's listening to our conversation. They're like, well, I'm not sure that I'm ready to have a call with Paula, but I'd like to learn more. What would you recommend they take a look at? Our blog section, we've been doing blogs for, I don't know, 18 years is good. It's interesting because how I came to you is I was getting your emails for about a year and I always read them.

14:10okay and found him not entertaining but interesting and that's what prompted me to finally call you okay because i've got this guy's been doing this a long time so i think uh i don't know that's probably not quite answering your question but i wanted to throw that in there but yeah well thank you that's very kind of you yeah the i would say probably the blog section and uh we do have some videos on there but uh i think the blogs are probably the best resource on And then certainly, you know, a potential conversation, which again, you go to outwardmedia.com and then right from your website, there's a link that says contact us.

14:50Yes. Were you asking me a question? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just like, so someone can click on contact. Sorry, I was muted. We also have. This music came on. But yeah, so when you initially have that conversation, we kind of talked about the questions that you ask. Let me ask, who is just a perfect fit for you? What might they be experiencing in their life where they go, oof, man, if I only had a partner who could help us with X? What kind of things make you go, oh, boy, yeah, we're probably going to do some great business together, potentially? I would say businesses that have a broad customer focus.

15:30So in other words, they're not just selling to 3000 manufacturers in the United States, but they have a broad small business customer focus. And that could be, you know, finance, that could be SAS oriented products, telecom, just anything that you're trying to get to the small business community and get to them where it's not expensive as compared to putting a salesperson on the street is expensive. Right. So doing it on an online environment is much less expensive. And so I would say anybody who's looking to get to those small businesses. Yeah. Is who comes to us. Brilliant. Brilliant. OK. Outward Media dot com is the website.

16:17We've got links to that in our show notes. If you're listening to this podcast, a podcast player, just kind of click around and you'll find where we've got a direct link there. And Paula Kiyoki, you are the CEO and you've helped a lot of great companies over the year, including such notable clients as AT &T. But all the way, like I said, all the way from SMB to enterprise and startups, brand new startups. Oh, that's amazing. Do you mind me just asking, like, is there a level of accessibility that just someone might be thinking that, oh, I'm probably priced out that they might go, oh, well, wait a minute.

16:54it, we could probably do that. No, because even if somebody just wants to license data and do everything themselves, it's no, that there's not a price issue there. We're price competitive to everybody else that provides data for that. So it just depends on the level of engagement, Josh. If they want to do it themselves and just license it file, they can do that. Or if they want to use us to come up with the whole camp, you know, the whole campaign and help distribute the emails, we don't do creative work, but to distribute email or to help them with the social media, that type of thing, we can do that.

17:23Really? Outwardmedia.com, Paula Kiyoki, you're the CEO. Thank you for joining us. Thank you, Josh.

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