Business-to-business marketer Janus Capital Group launched a Web site last month as part of a digital strategy to reach customers and prospects one-to-one. It targets financial advisors, but needed a site that would serve other constituencies.
“We wanted to build out our relationships with intermediaries,” said Jon Leonard, AVP of marketing at Janus. Janus also wanted to create opportunities for sales to follow up with prospects. The strategy included integrating the site with its CRM system, e-mail provider, Web analytics provider, content management system, and site search and optimization tools.
Projects like this are part of a larger trend around behavioral targeting. “There’s definitely a movement towards more customer knowledge and more customer intelligence,” said David Frankland, principal analyst, Forrester Research.
Working with digital agency ZAAZ, which is in the Wunderman network, Janus looked at audience segments and engagement levels defined in its CRM system. ZAAZ layered in behavioral models to further refine content relevance.
Financial services marketers tend to be “pretty far ahead of the curve” in behavioral marketing, said Robin Neifield, CEO of NetPlus Marketing. “[They] have been using data in direct marketing, and they’re carrying that into digital,” she added.
Neifield has a multichannel retail client, Debshops, that is similar to Janus in terms of its data sophistication and targeting.
“We’ve been building up Debshops’ e-mail database and doing interesting CRM work with it on customer behavior,” Neifield explained.
Defining behavioral models helped Janus form an acquisition strategy and follow up. The result has been the creation of flexible messaging so that elements such as financial planning tools and marketing content on the site change based on user behavior. Segmentation has been an established marketing strategy for Janus, but the company is now moving that to digital.
“Right now we’re capturing all the behavior,” Leonard said. “A year from now, we’ll start doing behavioral targeting.”
Janus integrates other media channels with its site. “E-mail is a big part of our strategy,” Leonard said. Natural and paid search are also deployed, and the company is currently “dabbling in” blogs.
