Why the most powerful companies are signal companies?

Quotes

• To recap what we discussed yesterday, you got your demographic and geographic data, who someone is and where they are. The combination of your event data mixed with user intent is really what makes up a marketing signal. What happened in someone’s life that they are broadcasting doesn’t mean that the person is going to be interested in your products or services. That’s a marketing signal” -Ben “The biggest companies in the world are platforms that provide value for free and they take your questions and input. A signal is most valuable right when you put your intent into a platform that’s why something like Google is one of the most powerful companies in the world. Because you type your question, you type your desire into it and they know in that exact moment that you typed in your question that they can sell something to you. ” -Guest 1 “Google has got Gmail and all that but most of their money comes from advertising. So their marketing signal that they are selling to everyone who uses AdWords is, what do their users want right now.” -Guest 1“Facebook is amazing as well too. Tristan Harris is a Facebook developer and he started talking about the Facebook algorithm and we are not even conscious of the signals that they’re getting from the platform. As you scroll through the app and for half a second stop on Instagram or Facebook and you take a glance, they are knowing that you are interested in that before your conscious mind even knows that it is interested in that image or those words that I’ve read.”-Guest 1 “You think that you are not giving information when you’re scrolling through the interface yet when you glance and when you stop you are giving more information than you actually know you’re giving.” -Guest 1“Machine learning these days knows a lot more about people than people know about themselves. The question is how are you giving Facebook data. I have a friend who would run ads on Facebook and he would say, there’s no point in setting your own audience because you don’t know who actually wants to buy your product better than Facebook does.” -Guest 2“With machine learning, Facebook has access to more people than most websites so whether or not they are even aware of what exactly told the platform, Facebook can optimize for you in its algorithms.” -Guest 2 “I have to push back. We were on campaigns on the MarTech podcast where we are generally targeting marketers. We start with known marketers and those campaigns did not perform as well when we are using a lookalike audience based on people that we know are consumers of the MarTech podcast. We have to feed Facebook data that say at least these people are listeners and likely marketers and then our conversion rates go up. It seems like we have to feed them that data to get the machine learning to understand what we are talking about.” -Ben“The world isn’t as big as you think it is. When you’re talking B2B, maybe your target audience might be 80,000 or 100,000 people in the entire world that would listen to your podcast, I’m not really sure but when you’re talking about B2C, you’re talking about millions of people as a target audience. With a B2B approach, you definitely have to be more targeted because there aren’t as many targets out there.” -Guest 1“What you also have is all the attributions pixels throughout the internet. If you go to any e-commerce site right now, you’re going to have a Facebook pixel embedded or Google Analytics embedded, you’re going to have all these conversion rates and tags that are embedded.” -Guest 1 “Amazon is becoming one of the scariest one of all and they are becoming so powerful because they now have more than 50% of all the e-commerce on the internet goes through Amazon through their Prime.” -Guest 1“And they all have the web servers too.” -Ben “Yes. They are getting DNS traffic, they are getting every search in the Amazon (Ben: every Alexa comment.) Of course. (Ben: They’re listening to this conversation.) “We had a sponsor of the MarTech podcast, HG Insights which does tech intelligence data which is how do you understand what technology platforms companies are using. So, that’s another type of data source. There is this, engineering-driven data sources. There’s also Upwork and Fiverr that are taking a manual approach to collect that data. -Ben “The right approach in collecting data depends on the scale that you need to hit. If you only need like a 100 names, having a Virtual Assistant or having somebody on Upwork is a great way to do it. It’s going to be deterministic and close to perfect data.” -Guest 2“What happens though is when you hit 50,000 or 70,000 people in your CRM, talking from a B2B context, it’s nearly impossible to continually clean it without programmatic methods.” -Guest 2