by Laurie Sullivan, Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, April 6, 2017

The financial advisors managing municipal bond investments for their clients have become an important audience for Build America Mutual (BAM), but efficiently targeting them has become a challenge.

Two initiatives from SourceMedia that began rolling out last week could solve the problem. SourceMedia, an Observer Capital company offering B2B digital marketing services, released the first set of tools in a series scheduled to launch this year. The company also launched SourceCode, a team of consultants that can help brands solve complex marketing issues.

Michael Stanton, head of strategy and communications at Build America Mutual (BAM), said in an email that SourceMedia combines two pieces of the puzzle that will allow the company to more accurately target new and existing clients: identifying advisors who are active in municipal bond management, and reaching them with news and information they trust.

BAM wants to connect its clients to the public sector cities, school districts and water systems that tap the municipal bond market to build essential public infrastructure. One way BAM does this is to build a relationship with the investor and investment advisor communities. That means targeting specific messages to specific individuals.

Stanton explains that the plan will roll out slowly. “Both SourceMedia and BAM want to make sure we have the audience targeting as locked down as possible before we start deploying the advertising,” he wrote. “From there, we expect to start with a pilot, monitor the audience reaction to make sure we are truly reaching the right targets, and then hopefully build from there.”

BAM ran B2B and programmatic campaigns that provide either a strong contextual environment or data-driven deployments, but the company hasn’t seen an alternative that combines the data analytics and the “trusted contextual” content SourceMedia offers, he wrote. “This will be new for us,” he wrote.

Marcus Witte, VP of integrated marketing services at SourceMedia, said getting its entire tech stack integrated and cleansing the data was a “mammoth” undertaking that required quite a bit of investment and internal resources.

“We had to get all of our data platforms speaking to each other and make sure that we were dealing with clean data,” he said. “That was the largest undertaking of this entire product launch.”

MediaPost.com: Search Marketing Daily

(52)