New Business Development Manager Role Set to Drive Growth of Lead Intelligence Customer Base

We’re pleased to announce that Clare Milverton, previously Senior Agency Sales Manager at Magnetise Media, has been promoted to Business Development Manager for the Magnetise Group, with a particular focus on Lead Intelligence, the award-winning, end-to-end lead management and analytics platform. Used by an increasing number of agencies, advertisers, ad networks and large publishers, Lead Intelligence powers a vast range of complex, multi-channel lead generation programmes, supporting over 600 publishers and running over 300 campaigns each month.

Clare has built up a wealth of experience helping agencies manage data-driven campaigns for their clients during her time at Magnetise Media, as well as in her previous roles at Dun & Bradstreet and DraftFCB. Working across all Magnetise Media brands including TopFox, In-Banner and In-Video, Clare has become known for her UX (user experience) finesse and ability to add value to campaigns, optimising all stages from planning to analysis to maximise impact on an advertiser’s sales pipeline.

In her new role, Clare will help the Lead Intelligence team broaden out its customer base in line with the growing global demand for performance-based marketing and advertising solutions. As an actively developed, proprietary technology, Lead Intelligence is in the enviable position of being able to grow and evolve in line with the needs of its client base. Clare will be using her agency focus and insights to drive new ideas into existing Lead Intelligence campaigns as well as bring its capabilities and benefits to a wider audience.

If you’d like to find out more about Clare, Lead Intelligence or any aspect of our data-driven business, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Magnetise & Dennis Publishing Shortlisted for The Drum’s Best Long Term Marketing Strategy Award

As anyone in marketing knows, The Drum is a must-read publication. Offering a comprehensive blend of marketing and media news and analysis, its range of events and awards are also educational and inspirational… and great fun too! We’re rather pleased therefore that our work with Dennis Publishing has been shortlisted for Best Long Term Strategy in the Drum Marketing Awards, with winners to be announced at a black tie event on 9th May in London.

We’re up against some pretty impressive competition from the likes of the NHS Change4Life campaign and Ribena’s digital programme, but regardless of whether we take home the trophy on the night, we’re really pleased that the fantastic gains Dennis Publishing is achieving through lead generation are being recognised by our peers.

Over the last 3 plus years, we’ve helped Dennis find and tap into completely new audiences for subscription acquisition across all relevant channels - including traditional voucher and offer sites, hard-to-reach premium display, social media and even smart phones and tablets too. The now established programme continues to deliver excellent ROI thanks to Lead Intelligence’s ability to power complex, multi-channel campaigns while keeping control of activity and costs through incredibly sophisticated management and analytics tools.

Check out all the categories and finalists over on The Drum’s special microsite and wish us luck on the night!

Analysing the IAB OPM Report for A4U

The IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau) has been busy further qualifying and quantifying the efforts of the digital marketing industry, recently releasing an in depth study into the performance marketing sector in the UK.

Comprising both affiliate marketing and lead generation, this sub sector of the marketing world accounted for an incredible £814 million of marketing spend in 2012. Perhaps more exciting though is how the research has quantified the bottom line impact of these techniques for the first time. The report tells us that £11 in sales is now being generated for every £1 spent on performance marketing, equating to a total £9 billion sales across the year.

We’ve noted, and written before, about how the value of lead generation is not being fully appreciated within the marketing world – or indeed in the studies conducted about its purpose and potential – so it’s superb that the figures are now starting to tally with our own experience. Spend on lead generation alone in 2012 was calculated at £114 million and we expect this to rise further each year.

Following affiliate4u’s excellent analysis of the affiliate side of things, they asked us to take a closer look at the lead generation intelligence coming out of the report, which of course we were very happy to do! Take a look at our analysis here, and read up on the report over on the IAB website.

Every Which Way But Loose: How Magnetise technology delivers infinite campaign insight and control

We continually enhance the capabilities of our core technology platform and have recently rolled out some rather immense extra functionality to all users. Now, in amongst all the other features and ways to manage your lead generation activities, we’ve integrated an updated, customisable dashboard that delivers some incredible analytics and optimisation power, direct to your fingertips.

Dashboard Main Screen

While it looks and feels familiar still, the dashboard gives access to creating any Key Performance Indicator (KPI) or running any kind of data analysis you could possibly want – on the fly, in the blink of an eye. These real-time widgets are designed to enable you to measure, understand and act on any pivot, category or combination of data available. If you want to track landing page engagement or sign ups against repeat purchase percentage or any customer activations, no problem. And cross channel attribution and optimisation is a breeze too.

We work with such a vast range of businesses that only total flexibility would be the one size that fits all needs. So rather than decide what our clients would need, and how they would want it, we focused on creating a level of functionality and design that would cater for any possible requirement. Built on a highly efficient Java code base and cloud infrastructure, we've also incorporated in-memory processing of various data inputs to provide maximum speed and flexibility to our clients.  Accessing and working through the processes is simple and intuitive however, belying the power of the programming that enables it. Users just select the data fields or criteria from a list of popular options or create their own custom query or field, and the widget then displays the resulting information directly on the main page. 

Create & Manage Data Analysis Widgets 

Just presenting these data views and calculations within the dashboard would however require a beady eye to ensure that no insights were missed, so we’ve also included a very high-end alerting feature to give you actionable campaign insights as they happen, wherever you are. The moment that a factor in a campaign goes outside of the acceptable range you have set, the platform will send an alert to the email address you specify to recommend that action is taken. Keeping control within users’ reach, while giving each user granular control over what they control and how they control it, ensures we can help improve ROI and results for every single campaign run on our platform. 

Quick & Easy KPI Creation

By enabling this infinite data analysis and alert capability, we’re drawing sales and marketing data together within the same platform and the same screen to give our users unparalleled insights and intelligence. It is vital in today’s marketing world to follow through on activities and programmes all the way to a sale, and further than that, to the complete customer lifecycle including repeat purchase and lifetime value.   Bringing together marketing and sales data in this way delivers a vast improvement to campaigns, sales and businesses themselves. Clickz recently wrote about how the speed, flexibility and weight of data analysis will be the way to win at marketing efficiency in the future. There is certainly a business case for doing so. The Drum covered a piece of research by MarketingQED that calculated UK marketers  are wasting £2.5 billion a year by relying on instinct or guesswork rather than using data and considered decisions to steer their course. Considering that the IDC (pdf link) estimates that just 0.5% of the world’s data is currently being analysed, there is vast room for improvement. 

This is however fraught with challenges of course. The FT also covered how data is evolving advertising and the issues the industry is getting to grips with. One important facet is the transition to real-time data and analysis. After decades of relying on historical data to base current campaigns on we now have the ability, and indeed need, to access data about what is happening now, in the moment, instead. This real-time capability is changing the face of technology, marketing and life itself – and only the marketers that can access these real-time insights will be able to confidently drive, manage and pivot to ensure their campaigns and activities are doing the job they need.

While we can and do integrate historical data for our clients to use in the management and analysis of their lead generation campaigns, we recommend and enable real-time insights through our new analysis widgets and KPIs. No longer will our users need to base optimisation decisions on what happened 12 months ago, or try to predict what impact a creative tweak will have on initial or repeat sale. With Magnetise’s technology, you can now base your plans and activities on real-life data in real-time.

We do hope you enjoy testing out our latest dashboard, widgets and alerts for yourself. We’ve made them really intuitive and easy to activate, but our team are always on hand to walk you through the functionality and give you some ideas about the best data analysis for your particular needs so please do get in touch with any questions at any time.

Magnetise at A4U Expo

The recent A4U Expo in London brought together over a thousand delegates for a mixture of networking, exhibitions and presentations. This event has been running for six years now and never fails to provide fresh impetus and ideas to the fast-growing affiliate and performance marketing industries.

Our very own Managing Director Peter Gowrie-Smith was invited to speak at A4U Expo about the ‘Past, Present and Potential of Display’ which of course we know a thing or two about due to our work driving lead generation through display advertising via our In-Banner technology. We brought along our friend and colleague Farzad Jamal,  Commercial Director, EMEA, of OpenX, who we have known since his days at Northern & Shell, to co-present.

Attendees were taken on a journey through the advent of banner advertising in 1994, through its recent troubled times and into the new world of opportunity that is emerging due to new formats, ways to engage, the integration of data, pricing metrics and the advent of real-time bidding (RTB) and programmatic capabilities. The audience certainly seemed to be engaged and interested in where display has come from, and more importantly, where it is heading next – and you can find the presentation we gave here on SlideShare.

Another session we just had to get involved with was the Lead Generation: IAB Debate where Kevin Rice, Commercial Director of Magnetise Media, sat on the panel with other members of the IAB’s Lead Generation Council to discuss the key issues and opportunities facing this fast growing segment of digital marketing. The number of questions from attendees showed just how relevant lead generation is becoming to all of us who work in digital marketing, and we very much enjoyed the chance to explain more about we believe lead generation is one of the most important elements of any contemporary marketing initiative.

If you have any questions that weren’t dealt with on the day, or indeed would like any further information about how you could incorporate lead generation into your activities, do let us know in the comments below, or get in touch with us here.

Magnetise at IAB Lead Gen Workshop

As anyone who knows us knows, we’re a vibrant bunch of people who like nothing better than to get out there into our industry and dig into the nitty gritty of what we do with people interested in everything that lead generation can achieve.

We therefore jumped at the chance to get involved with the recent IAB Practical Workshop on How Best to Generate Leads Online which was held at the IAB in London on Wednesday 10th October. The agenda covered all the key areas of lead generation, from knowing what it is (and indeed isn’t), planning and strategy, innovative and creative campaign examples. Tim Milverton, Magnetise’s Co-Founder & Technical Director then took attendees through a comprehensive guide to the role of technology, including the importance of real-time processing and validation. The day finished with a practical session on tips and tricks from the experts, as well as giving attendees the chance to put their new-found knowledge into action by creating their own lead generation campaigns.

We’re really proud to be involved with the IAB’s efforts to bring lead generation to the attention of brands and agencies and have been members of the Lead Generation Council since 2010. The efforts of the Council, and indeed the vast capabilities of the discipline itself, are making their mark. The latest figures from the IAB H1 2012 Ad Spend Report show that lead generation accounted for at least £15 million UK online ad spend budget for the period.

Whether you are already a pro in lead generation, or starting to explore it for the very first time, both the IAB and the Magnetise team can help you to start up, ramp up and drive engagement and sales through all core channels including editorial competitions, display, video and more. Please do let us know if there is anything in particular you would like further information on, and we will share our knowledge and insights with you here on the Magnetise Blog.

Magnetise Treks the Inca Trail for Charity

We wanted to let you know about a fantastic charity initiative two of our team are about to embark on. Lucy  Zakrzewska, Magnetise’s Publisher & Acquisition Manager and Tom Lees, Senior Account Exec, are heading off up the Inca Trail to raise money for Plan UK, the global children’s charity. The organisation works with children in the world’s poorest countries to help them build a better future. With their support children, families and entire communities have to the power to move themselves from a life of poverty to a future with opportunity.

Lucy & Tom

On the 25th August, Lucy and Tom will be leaving for Peru to start their 4 day trek to reach the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Machu Picchu, the 15th century ‘Lost City of the Incas’ which is now Peru’s most visited tourist attraction. We'll be keeping in touch with them during their travels so will let you know how they're getting on here on the Magnetise blog.

The Inca Trail

We are all really proud of Tom and Lucy for giving their time and energy to help others, as well as a tiny bit jealous of the amazing time they are going to have. By reaching out to colleagues, friends and family, Lucy and Tom are already well over their donation target but we wanted to give them, and their charity, an extra push in the last few days before they head off on their most excellent adventure. 

If you can, please therefore click over to their Just Giving page to help them raise even more funds for Plan UK.