January 25, 2022 by Naylor Gray

Want To Expand and Monetize Your Fiber Broadband Network in 2022? Here’s What You Need 

 

Naylor Gray 

Area Vice President Product Marketing, Revenue EDGE, Marketing Cloud and Revenue Solutions, Calix

 

What do BSP leaders care about most? Calix recently conducted a survey, “The State of the Service Provider,” in partnership with Heavy Reading to find out. The results show BSP leaders care about three core business goals:  

  1. Expand fiber broadband networks. Forty-seven percent of BSP leaders say fiber broadband network expansion is their number-one investment priority. (Looking five years out, that number increases to 57 percent.)
  2. Innovate services. Forty-nine percent want to invest in innovation. 
  3. Tap upsell opportunities. 52 percent of BSP leaders say their primary revenue growth strategy is upselling their existing subscriber base. (Another 24 percent cited expanding into new markets.)

How Can You Achieve Marketing Excellence—Simply and Easily? 

What’s the one thing BSP leaders need to make these goals a reality? It might sound counterintuitive, but the answer is…marketing! As Matt Collins pointed out in his article, “Why Great Marketing Is Not Marketing: How to Monetize the Network You’ve Invested Millions To Build,” marketing is critical to the success of your business. Our mission at Calix is to make marketing excellence easy and simple—for even the SMALLEST broadband service provider. With that in mind, one of our most exciting offerings is Calix Marketing Cloud Professional Edition. This solution makes it incredibly easy for you to execute sophisticated marketing in turnkey fashion. How so? It brings together TWO kinds of data about your subscribers and prospective subscribers: demographic and behavioral data.

What Is Demographic Data? 

As you probably know, demographic data offers socio-economic information such as population, race, income, education, and employment. In Marketing Cloud Professional Edition, demographic data comes from 122 million U.S. households. It also integrates 10 major lifestyle groups and 53 syndicated audience personas. 

What Is Behavioral Data? 

Demographic data is great, but it only takes you so far without the addition of behavioral data. This kind of data describes the actions and activities of subscribers, such as whether they are heavy gamers, work from home, or have dozens of connected devices. In Marketing Cloud Professional Edition, the personas are built from over 10,000 demographic and behavioral attributes. The result is that you gain access to insights like age, family composition, income level, and technology adoption rates.

What Does This Combination of Data Mean for Your Broadband Marketing Team? 

When you combine demographic data with behavioral data, you open up all kinds of possibilities to grow your business. To be clear, this is a huge game changer for smaller BSPs. This kind of approach to data has traditionally been the purview of big companies—Tier 1s and Tier 2s have literally hundreds of data scientists doing this work. Marketing Cloud Professional Edition democratizes those efforts. Using this offering, even the smallest BSP can compete on the same level as any trillion-dollar consumer giant. 

I spoke at a number of broadband industry conferences last year, so I know marketing is not on the radar for many broadband businesses. Here’s what I told those audiences: The right approach to marketing tees you up to accomplish your core business goals. That includes upselling, innovating, and expanding your network! Here are three ways this groundbreaking solution helps BSPs deliver on their priorities. 

  1. Create strategic fiber build-out plans that drive ROI.  Marketers can contribute to fiber build-out plans. For example, the platform provides fine-grained information on neighborhood demographics. Marketers can find specific locations with the highest concentrations of potential high-value subscribers. BSPs can then manage new build expenses by prioritizing the fiber installs. The result: the highest and fastest return on investment (ROI). Once install is complete, marketers can switch to acquisition campaigns. For example, they can target subscribers who match existing high-value customer profiles.
  2. Drive growth by identifying and acquiring new subscribers. A major concern of BSPs of all sizes is finding the right subscribers to fuel their growth. By leveraging behavioral and demographic data, marketers can locate and profile markets. They can also use the data to acquire net new subscribers. Rather than using ineffective “spray and pray” tactics, BSPs can strategically carry out acquisition campaigns. These targeted efforts allow marketers to maximize spend and yield the highest return.
  3. Execute effective upsell campaigns to increase ARPU. Marketers can focus on high-impact campaigns to increase ARPU while maximizing ROI. Imagine combining behavioral insight (like bandwidth usage) with demographic intelligence (income level). The next step involves using that combined data set to run a managed Wi-Fi upsell campaign. Or how about leveraging data on the adoption of a specific service and merging it with demographic insight to run a cross-sell campaign? These data combinations can reveal new, strategic marketing opportunities.

These capabilities build on the rich functionality of Calix Marketing Cloud in the Revenue EDGE platform. We are proud to continue to set new benchmarks for industry success. The fact is, ONLY Calix delivers this unique pairing of behavioral and demographic data. Just imagine the possibilities of a marketing platform purpose-built for your business. Using Marketing Cloud Professional Edition, you can achieve your core business goals and win against any competitor.

Learn how Marketing Cloud Professional Edition  can help you generate breakthrough growth for your broadband business.