Mark O’Donnell: Hi everyone. I’m Mark O’Donnell, a director in the tech and media practice here at the Alexander Group. And I’m joined by my colleague Yang, who also is a director in the same practice. Today, we are diving into the topic of how media companies can win in the mid-market. Yang one of the trends I’ve seen in my clients recently is that their growth with hold cos and enterprise clients is starting to stall, and they’re looking for ways to drive revenue in other segments, particularly the mid-market. Are you seeing the same thing?
Yang Liu: Mark, we’re absolutely seeing the same thing. I think the mid-market is a huge potential for a growth engine in the media space right now.
Mark O’Donnell: I’m also guessing you’re running into publishers having issues understanding really what mid-market advertisers need.
Yang Liu: Yeah, that’s probably the number one barrier to entry right now for your mid-market marketers.
Mark O’Donnell: Yeah, I know for me personally, the voice of the advertiser research we’ve done recently has been very helpful. Have you also been sharing that with your clients?
Yang Liu: Yeah, and that’s been a huge piece, right. It’s really a strategy lever for understanding what it is that you can bring to the table to mid-market advertisers before you even get into things like job design and comp design. And there’s three probably major tenets of the research that we see. It starts with the offering. So, mid-market advertisers are really looking for a full funnel offering. So that’s everything from that brand awareness all the way down to that last click. And being able to tie metrics like return on ad spend and conversion to the campaigns. The second major piece is the decision-making process. So mid-market advertisers are really involved. They’re extremely hands on in their ad buying. So if your strategy really just targets agency decision-makers, then you’re really missing a big piece of the puzzle. So we really recommend looking at that brand direct relationship or at least making sure that you’re including the brand direct decision-makers in the buying process is a super important piece. So, the third major piece of our research really shows that access is a huge priority in this space. So, access can come across in a couple of different ways. It starts with actually being able to correctly access and prioritize who those mid-market advertisers are. So looking at your total addressable market versus perhaps your serviceable addressable market. So we look at a lot of, you know, data science tools in this space.
This is particularly where you can look at AI, maybe machine learning to a certain degree, to help pinpoint sellers. But the other major bucket for access actually includes what kinds of access to tools and services are those mid-market advertisers looking for, right? And a lot of them will raise their hand and say, we want self-service, but they may not actually identify what it is that they’re looking for in self-service. And a lot of times it can be pretty daunting to say, hey, wait a second, we don’t have a really fully built out self-service engine yet. What do we do? And it doesn’t mean rush to creating your own ads manager and having a full self-service build out. Sometimes just taking the steps from a crawl, walk, run perspective and having, you know, better tools to have your clients be able to access the reporting in a more frequent way, or even be able to click into their own reporting, it really gets from looking at the data that they want to get from the campaigns to being able to make decisions on that data in real time and adjust any of the ad buying and the targeting in real time. So really, any steps that publishers, platforms can take toward that become a huge priority area that we see in mid-market customers.
Mark O’Donnell: Yeah. Those are great insights. So offering is important, understand the decision-making process, and understanding how to access not only your customer, but also how the customer wants to access you, or the advertiser wants to access you as either a platform or a publisher, is really important to consider when tackling the mid-market. If someone listening wants to dig a little deeper on this topic with the Alexander Group and maybe figure out how to best build their mid-market strategy, what should they do?
Yang Liu: Well, the good thing is there’s a link right here that you can click. It’s a contact us form. If you just mention in the contact us “voice of the advertiser research”, you’ll be able to schedule a call with us or any of the other leaders within the tech & media space, and we’d be happy to go into detail with you on this.
Mark O’Donnell: Awesome. Well, thanks Yang, and thanks everyone for tuning in. We hope to connect with you soon.
