Tag: Targeting

Demandbase Standalone Intent

Both services provide keyword intent, with Standalone Intent delivered to third-party platforms. (Source: Demandbase)

ABX Platform Demandbase, which also offers a data cloud and sales intelligence solution, rolled out its keyword intent dataset for third-party platforms.  Demandbase Intent is available both inside the Demandbase One platform (embedded) and delivered to other platforms (standalone).  Demandbase Intent joins Demandbase’s other Data Cloud assets, including firmographics, technographics, and contacts.

Standalone Intent, which supports 375,000 keywords and ingests 18 billion daily signals, provides buying signals for predictive models, data stores, and analytics.  Data is delivered via API, cloud delivery, or CSV flat files.

New keywords are added weekly, with historical intent maintained for twelve months.

Demandbase Intent helps marketing teams target in-market accounts and refine their messaging.  Furthermore, Demandbase Intent can trigger campaigns, avoid churn, and expand accounts.

“Our intent takes multiple sources into account, providing a much stronger and more accurate signals than others in the space,” said Demandbase VP of Product and Industry Marketing Jackie Palmer.  “By using Demandbase Intent, data scientists, corporate strategists, and sales and marketing analytics professionals can build and improve their predictive models, helping them to better understand buyers’ goals and navigate the anonymous buying journey.  As they identify patterns, trends, and opportunities, they can be more precise in prioritizing accounts and gaining deeper insight into their revenue potential.”

Demandbase claims that its keyword library provides superior targeting compared to taxonomically-based intent datasets, allowing vendors to target niche industries and segments, track competitor offerings, and dovetail on partners’ intent.  Furthermore, customers can add new keywords “to fit their needs, whereas other intent providers limit customers to a finite, predefined list of topics.”  They can then feed keyword intent to their data lakes, data warehouses, or business intelligence platforms, making the intent data available to data scientists for propensity-to-buy models.

Palmer told data scientists, “What you can do is build your…propensity-to-buy models, all the different things you need for predictive analytics around your account intent activities.  You can stream that directly into your CRM systems, marketing automation systems, or any go-to-market systems that you need to.”

Demandbase Intent can be used alongside other intent datasets.  Demandbase One also supports Bombora’s third-party intent, G2 second-party technology research intent, website visitor intelligence, and other datasets licensed by its Demandbase customers.

“Our mantra is the more intent data, the better,” Palmer explained to GZ Consulting.  “So, that’s why within the platform, we always integrate with Bombora, G2, etc.  But this is now for standalone people that may not want the Demandbase platform but also want to add additional concepts of intent into their data lakes [and] data warehouses.”

Furthermore, keyword intent is “totally complementary” to taxonomic intent data sources.

The Demandbase AI assesses keyword usage and the age of the article (older articles provide higher relevance), related articles the user has read, and “rare and hyper-qualifying keywords and themes to identify personas and buying committee roles.”

“We track the relevant articles,” explained Demandbase Data Cloud Product Marketer Imran Ahmed to GZ Consulting.  “If you want to look at how the market does it, they do it through co-ops.  They do it through metatags.  We’re doing it through articles that help us identify not only the keywords but help us gather all the users looking at those keywords across the web.  That brings up signal relevance and helps us get more granular and more exposure.”

Demandbase Intent does not look at Google search terms but looks a layer deeper at which articles are being viewed.

“Demandbase intent data is based on years of AI research and delivers more breadth and relevance than any you’ll find anywhere else.  Why?  Because we own the technology to identify anonymous accounts and pair that with our direct access to the bidstream — the source for the most intent signals.  Then we beef up the relevance of those signals using a combination of AI and natural language processing.”

Standalone intent is priced per keyword.

Standalone intent has been generally available since December and already has several clients.  However, due to the calendar, the firm held off on announcing the service until late January.

Demandbase Intent by the Numbers (Source: Demandbase)

Resources

Demandbase Audience Management Destinations

ABX Platform Demandbase released one of its “largest product launches of the year”: Audience Management Destinations.  While the firm has long supported B2B Campaigns via display advertising and LinkedIn channels, Audience Management Destinations extends its reach into consumer platforms and social advertising.

“B2B buyers are people, too, and B2B marketers can and should be advertising on those channels,” said Demandbase CMO Jon Miller.

New advertising channels include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google, YouTube, Bing, and Adobe Audience Manager.  Additional services will be rolled out next year.

Demandbase does not store Personally Identifiable Information (PII), so its social outreach is GDPR and CCPA compliant.  Instead, Demandbase leverages LiveRamp’s identity resolution, an opted-in identifier system that matches individual identifiers across platforms.

Demandbase also expanded its integration with LinkedIn.  Previously, it only supported account-level targeting on LinkedIn, but now marketers can target at either the account or person level.

Demandbase Targeting

Marketers will build audiences using a set of selectors that include first-party data, third-party data, intent, technographics, and activities. (See the image on the right).  They can then activate campaigns to their targeted buyers across the business and social web.

“This will allow a highly consistent customer experience across social networks and other platforms,” explained Miller on LinkedIn.  In addition, the new release expands marketing’s outreach and orchestration across a broader set of channels “using the account intelligence and the Demandbase One platform.”

“We’re constantly learning about how the B2B buyer thinks and acts, and this new account-based social targeting functionality plays a role in reaching buyers more holistically,” said Miller. “By viewing the buyer not just as someone within a target account or in a buying committee, we recognize that buyers are individuals, too.  This mindset shift — and the corresponding ability to engage with them as such across business and social platforms — gives our customers yet another advantage in today’s B2B go-to-market landscape.”

Demandbase claims that it is the only system that runs both “people and account-based plays from one system.”  Marketers can target specific audiences and “then automatically apply the most effective sales and marketing tactics to advance the account in its journey, across every touchpoint, and with the most relevant messages.”

Demandbase augmented its company and contact intelligence in April with the acquisitions of InsideView and DemandMatrix.  The two firms supplemented Demandbase’s firmographics, contacts, and technographics and provided Demandbase with a set of sales intelligence, B2B DaaS, and ICP/TAM tools. 

Demandbase supports its own intent data along with partner datasets from Bombora and G2.  TrustRadius is coming soon.

“Demandbase’s solutions are stronger in certain areas and helps drive top of the funnel engagement or audience targeting, while InsideView has been more focused on bottom of the funnel data.  We realized the two companies are quite complimentary and we could combine our customers to offer a much more complete solution to all of them.  Today we have an integrated top of the funnel to bottom of the funnel marketing and sales data provision to allow customers to look at the full funnel and identify a more appropriate addressable market, including what kind of technologies those companies use.”

InsideView CEO Umberto Milletti to MarTech Series this week

The three companies combined to create a four-cloud solution that supports Advertising, ABX Marketing, Sales Intelligence, and Data.

“What’s exciting about this is the ability to provide all of this to customers as one solution,” continued Milletti.  “We have done a lot of work since the merger was completed to combine all of our technologies and go to our customers with information on how much more we can do for them.”

Demandbase combined its Demandbase One platform with InsideView and DemandMatrix to support four clouds.

RevenueBase Launched

RevenueBase, which describes itself as a Revenue Database as a Service (RDaaS), formally launched on Tuesday as a “one-stop data solution” that recognizes data as a “strategic asset for a business.” 

According to 2016 research by SiriusDecisions, marketing databases are riddled with critical errors with bad data ranging from ten to twenty-five percent of records.  SiriusDecisions noted that the firms with higher data quality have shifted from periodic data cleansing projects with discrete completion dates to data maintenance processes with “ongoing policies and procedures to maintain data quality.”

RevenueBase was founded by industry veteran Mark Feldman, the VP of Marketing at NetProspex prior to its acquisition by Dun & Bradstreet.  As a marketing head at Backupify, Motion Recruitment, and Localytics, Feldman became frustrated with B2B data issues, including misalignment with the sales and marketing team’s go-to-market strategy, data decay, difficulty acquiring data, and managing disparate vendors and formats.  His stint as a B2B data customer led him to return to the B2B data space and create an RDaaS company that broadly aggregates company, contact, and technographic data that aligns 1:1 with customers’ go-to-market strategies.  It then builds a custom database for clients that it calls a Revenue Database, which is updated on an ongoing basis.

“When I was hired to run growth operations at Localytics, a web and mobile app analytics company, my first directive from the CEO was to put together a list of target accounts to assign to our new enterprise account executives. It was my first week and my reputation was on the line. I started by going to our data vendor and asking them to help me build a list of all of the companies in the world that were focused on mobile monetization strategies across millions of monthly active users. Seems like a slam dunk, right? Nope.

My list for Localytics was full of bad data. There was no way to confirm the companies listed had the mobile monetization opportunities that our software could solve, or that mobile monetization opportunities would be high up on their list of priorities. I quickly realized that, in the B2B world, not all data is created equal. Right then and there, I saw an opportunity to change the B2B data game by solving the major growth impediment challenges facing revenue leaders—acquiring, integrating and maintaining the quality of their data—by building the world’s first Revenue Database as a Service.”

RevenueBase CEO Mark Feldman

“Like so many B2B marketers, I was frustrated with the inadequacies of traditional list providers,” wrote Feldman.  “I saw an opportunity to revolutionize the B2B data game and solve the greatest challenges facing revenue leaders today. Our all-in-one Revenue Database as a Service solution provides next-level data quality, expediency, and accuracy.  We transform your data stack from a constant struggle into your greatest asset.”

RevenueBase takes a white-glove approach to serve its customers.  Revenue Archetypes are defined during customer workshops and consist of an ICP, market segmentation, pains addressed, buyer personas, sales showstoppers, and “jobs to be done.”  The Jobs-to-be-Done descriptor is a bit misleading as it is account, not persona-based.  Jobs-to-be-Done describes the core functional “job” that an organization is trying to accomplish.

Personas cover function, level, titles, buying unit members, demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals.

RevenueBase then builds a revenue database for its clients and supplements it with custom data collected by its overseas team of fifty editorial researchers.

“A revenue archetype is a model of what your ideal customer looks like, i.e., one you can derive revenue from,” said Feldman.  “It’s where there is a mutual benefit.  They need your product/service and will pay a fair price for it.  They also will favor you over the competition because your solution will result in the best cost-benefit tradeoff for the customer.“

Conversely, the Revenue Archetype also defines companies that are not good fits (e.g., industries or geographies that require a standard not met by a firm’s offerings, such as HIPAA or GDPR).  It also identifies roles not involved in purchasing a company’s products or services.  These individuals may be too junior in the organization or not work in functions that use a company’s products or services.

Coverage continues with a discussion of RevenueBase’s ICP modeling and database.

Terminus Enhancements

ABM Platform Terminus rolled out a set of platform enhancements for “optimizing ABM strategies.”  New features include global targeting, chat playbooks, and Live View.  Global targeting expands Terminus’ coverage beyond the US, letting marketers create and manage international campaigns.  The functionality is generally available as of February 24.

International Targeting is country-based, with campaign-based budgets and timelines.  Users can also target ABM accounts or focus on an enterprise account in specific countries.

Terminus Chat now supports playbooks that “intelligently collect visitor data, trigger sales automation with prospects and customers, and qualify inbound traffic in real-time,” blogged Terminus Product Marketing Senior Director Audra Felten.  The new functionality simplifies chat set-up with a “powerful new chatbot builder and logic builder.”

The new Live View feature lets reps proactively engage website visitors.  Users can view live information about accounts visiting the company website, along with page views, before reaching out on the chat channel.

In March, a new Advertising Insights report will be available in the Measurements Studio.  The report tracks brand awareness, lead and opportunity creation, pipeline acceleration, and closed-won deals.  Advertising Insights measures advertising effectiveness and ties its impact to account-based execution.  Digital Marketers can assess site visits and leads driven through Terminus advertising.  Likewise, Demand Gen Marketers can evaluate visits, conversions, and pipeline directly associated with Terminus Campaigns and adjust the marketing mix accordingly.

“With our February release, we’re going all in on building the ABM platform of the future, which means bringing ABM and sales engagement together even more seamlessly,” said Terminus Chief Product Officer Bryan Wade. “At the end of the day, it’s all about revenue. Customer-facing teams have to be focused on the best-fit accounts and engage at exactly the right time to drive results, but that can only happen when efforts are coordinated. These new capabilities make it easier than ever for sales and marketing to operate as one team.

Terminus just announced a $90 million Series C that valued the firm at $400K. I will cover the round on Monday.

Zoominfo Targeted Audiences (Part II)

Zoominfo launched their new Targeted Audiences service to support programmatic advertising against their universe of B2B account and contact data. [Part I]

ZoomInfo employs signature-block mining, natural language processing, machine learning, and email verification to build and maintain their Data Cloud.  They also recently acquired EverString to augment their firmographic depth and field fill rates for 95 million companies.  Targeting against the Zoominfo Data Cloud offers “campaigns with unmatched precision and enhanced performance.”

“Digital agencies and marketers typically face challenges in collecting high-quality, complete B2B audience data,” contrasted ZoomInfo. “Most widely available contact information for companies and their employees is either inaccurate, incomplete, or outdated, which means many digital agencies and marketers deliver their messages to the wrong people altogether.”

“What’s common knowledge to those in the industry — but not to a bright-eyed data guy like me — is that advertising audiences aren’t engineered to be precise.  Quite the opposite, actually: This space is all about volume and audience expansion through inferences, and modeled data has taken over.”

ZoomInfo SVP of Innovation and Data R&D Derek Smith

Marketers can also build custom audiences from over three hundred demographic and firmographic selects, including funding data, benefits data (licensed from GlassDoor), event participation, banking variables, technographics, and Fortune 500/1000 flags.  Biographic variables include function, level, and title/keyword.

Targeting is most effective for the North American market because ZoomInfo is limited in the number of legally gathered and stored identifiers for EU citizens due to GDPR.

“Our product is unlike any other for two reasons. First, we’ve amassed a treasure trove of emails, phone numbers, and titles. Second, we’ve architected our company data to let you identify companies with a level of granularity that significantly eclipses the competition,” said Derek Smith, SVP of Innovation and Data R&D. “Was this always intentional? Of course not.  But unbeknownst to me, our data became tailor-made for advertising activation as a result of other projects at ZoomInfo.”

As a new offering, Targeted Audiences should be viewed as a solution for building precise B2B audiences and activating them via LiveRamp.  With nearly 100 million targetable professionals, 500 million identifiers, and 300+ selects, ZoomInfo can build very focused audiences.  However, there are some gaps.  Targeted Audiences does not offer any campaign analytics, creative management, social marketing, retargeting functionality, or intent-based targeting.

“Targeted Audiences allows marketers to build strategic campaigns based on contact and company information and creates new levels of granularity in B2B audience data that have never before existed on the market,” said ZoomInfo CEO Henry Schuck.

Targeted Audiences is a standalone offering.  Marketers and agencies can test out the service on a few audiences before signing a volume contract.  The fifty off-the-shelf audiences are priced at $1 CPM ($1 for 1,000 advertising exposures).  Custom Audiences begin at $2.75 CPM, but the price falls with volume commitments.

Echobot British Data (Part II)

German Sales and Marketing Intelligence firm Echobot is entering the British market with a UK Data Pack for its CONNECT company research and TARGET prospecting services. I covered the CONNECT service yesterday. Today I’ll be delving into the TARGET offering.

Echobot TARGET supports prospect list building for companies and contacts against a broad set of British and firmographic variables, including UK SICs, postal codes, counties, web technologies, and company signals.  Radius searching around postal codes lets reps target prospects near their home, office, or a client they plan to visit.  

TARGET also provides a set of event signals for prospecting and alerting.  German screening supports over 30 event categories, but the UK edition is limited to eight triggers, including M&A, exec changes, and partnerships.  The English-language signals are still being built out and will be released as Echobot individually tunes them.

Contact list building supports eighteen departments, five job levels, job title, and field availability (e.g. email, direct dial, XING link, LinkedIn link).

TARGET Lists are displayed as a set of company tiles with a business description, contact information, and the most recent signal.  Tiles may be expanded for additional attribute display of web technologies, social links, and firmographics.  Users may also link to the CONNECT profile and click through older signals.

TARGET Lists include a segmentation report with an industry pie chart at the two-digit SIC level, company size pyramid, and company heat map.  When rolling over the segmentation reports, ALT-text provides additional details about each industry slice or company employment wedge.  Users may click on the industry pie chart to drill down into a segment.  Clicking on the heat map takes the user to a full-screen view for zooming and recentering.

TARGET lists may be downloaded in four formats (Excel, CSV, JSON, and Salesforce), so records may be analyzed by sales or marketing, uploaded into Salesforce, or delivered to developers.  Users may download up to 20,000 records at a time.

TARGET users may also save lists, share lists, or use lists for suppression (exclusion lists).  Search criteria may be saved for re-use and alerting when new companies or contacts meet the search criteria.

A single region starts at €499 / month for both TARGET and CONNECT.  Licensing both the UK and D-A-CH regions raises the price by €299 / month.  Echobot is offering a €100 / month discount to customers that license their solution before the end of the year.  A seven-day free trial of CONNECT is available to prospects.  TARGET users receive a demo and a single-day, capped-download trial.

Echobot, like many sales and marketing intelligence vendors, has continued to grow during the pandemic.  The firm added over twenty staffers this year and posted record revenue this summer.

“The expansion of the market into the English-speaking area is an important step into the future for us.  It has never been more important for companies to digitally set up their sales and marketing processes.  We are very pleased about the strong growth and the fact that we are able to support our customers beyond our borders.”

Echobot CEO Bastian Karweg

We are beginning to see continental sales and marketing intelligence companies build UK or pan-European services.  Along with Echobot, French vendor SparkLane offers a UK service, and Scandinavian vendor Vainu has beta offerings for the UK, France, and the US.  Of course, we are also seeing UK firms build European services with Rhetorik, Cognism, and DueDil offering European datasets.

Demandbase Keynote: Three New Products

At Demandbase’s virtual Keynote on St. Patrick’s Day, Demandbase discussed the evolution of ABM platforms and three new products: Site Analytics, Data Stream, and Self-Service Targeting.

The first product announcement was around Site Analytics and improved web engagement metrics.  The functionality is not a replacement for Google or Adobe Analytics but enables an understanding of account-level interactions across the company website.  It also provides page-level intelligence concerning which pages matter the most, allowing marketers to promote and optimize high performing pages.

Site Analytics also helps uncover new audiences for sales and marketing outreach, such as verticals outside your current ICP.  It can also be used for understanding which accounts are demonstrating interest in a new product launch for SDR outreach, optimizing content based upon key account viewing activity, and monitoring trends to determine campaign performance and the impact of various marketing activities.

Marketers may filter by page, URL keyword, account filters (industry, revenue, and employment), page performance, and audience.  Marketers may also save filters and create new audiences based upon site traffic.

The second launch was Data Stream, which lets analysts push data from Demandbase into BI platforms for expanded account-level reporting.  Data Stream is designed for firms that have already invested in data modeling and reporting and that have a data team or data analyst working with a BI or reporting platform.  Demandbase data includes audience and account intelligence, campaign metrics, site analytics, and intent.

Daily, data is pushed into a data warehouse (e.g. Google Big Query, Amazon Redshift, Azure Synapse Analytics) or Cloud Storage (e.g. Google Cloud, Amazon S3, Azure Blog Storage).  From there, customers can load the data into reporting tools such as Tableau, Domo, or Google Data Studio and combine account-level data with other data sources.  This process provides an account-based lens to digital marketing alongside intent data and other corporate datasets.

Data Stream “helps you form a complete picture across your prospects and customers,” said VP of Marketing Phil Hollrah.  “Being able to deliver this data in an automated fashion with no manual intervention needed is a huge benefit to our customers.  You can set up your reports, you can auto-refresh this data daily, and then those reports are going to be up-to-date with the latest information.

Demandbase Self-Service Targeting Campaign Builder

The third release was Self-Serve Targeting for account-based advertising.  Previously, this was only available as a managed service, but now marketers can set up campaigns and creative, then modify and optimize the campaigns.  Self-Serve Targeting is supported by a five-step wizard that allows marketers to upload and change creative.  Marketers set up campaigns with budget, geolocation, duration, and audience.  And because it is self-serve, marketers can quickly adjust campaign budgets, scheduling, frequency, or creative, allowing them to make real-time changes.

The wizard provides a campaign forecast that estimates the max spend versus projected budget, estimated impressions against qualified accounts, and the likely reach across the targeted accounts.

Self-Serve Targeting supports multiple campaigns for different segments, whether performing 1-to-1 or 1-to-many advertising.

Site Analytics and Data Stream are generally available.  Self-Serve Targeting is available as part of an early adopter program.

Demandbase Keynote: Three Phases of ABM Evolution

Like other vendors that have canceled public events, Demandbase gave its ABM Innovation Summit keynote as a virtual event on St. Patrick’s Day.  This year’s theme was “ABM Next,” though CMO Peter Isaacson admitted that their annual conferences are always forward-thinking.  Demandbase also announced three new product offerings: Site Analytics, Data Stream, and Self-Service Targeting (covered in tomorrow’s blog).

Demandbase is a long-time champion of Account Based Marketing (ABM), having been a lone voice in the woods for many years.  Back in 2007, they began offering a visitor intelligence service that mapped IP addresses to firmographics.  Since then, they released a B2B DSP, account-based retargeting, website personalization, account-based chat, and an AI-based ABM platform.  In 2020, they are launching buyer committee targeting, though they did not provide any details on this roadmap item.

Demandbase contends that we are now entering the third phase of ABM. The “Evangelical” phase was aligned with the development of initial ABM technologies and “an awareness of the importance of the account,” said CEO Gabe Rogol.  The Evangelical phase shifted the focus of B2B marketing efforts from leads and individuals to accounts.  In late 2015, the “Early Adopters and Buzz Phase” began with crystallization around the term ABM.  Phase II included point solutions, the beginning of AI tools, and the first full-scale implementations.  While Phase II included significant topical buzz, there was not a great deal of consistency and best practices for ABM success.  Phase III is a definitional phase where “ABM is table stakes,” but “there is not a clear definition, yet, as to what are the core technologies that make ABM successful and what are the best practices that make ABM successful.”

Rogol offered three core requirements for ABM success:

Core ABM Platform
  • Core ABM Platform: A comprehensive ABM platform consists of
    1. A data layer containing first and third-party data that “provides a unified view of your accounts”
    2. A decisioning layer that manages planning, segmenting, orchestration, and measurement
    3. An actioning layer that supports advertising, site personalization and engagement, sales enablement, and third-party marketing activity integration
    4. An AI and machine learning layer which helps “understand which accounts are most likely to buy and what are the next best actions to take both as a marketing organization and a sales organization”
    5. An intuitive user experience
  • Account Based Audiences: Rogol called Account Based Audiences “the fundamental unit of B2B Marketing.  Much like a people-based audience that’s united by common behaviors and demographics, an Account Based Audience is united by the way it is behaving across your CRM, your website, [and] marketing automation.” It should be “marketed to in a similar way to drive through the customer journey.”  Account Based Audiences should be accessible to all customer-facing teams, including marketing, sales, customer success, and data and engineering “so that your organization can act in a unified way that amplifies the strategy and impacts the ABM.”  Finally, Account Based Audiences should be available through all marketing, advertising, and sales channels.
  • Control and Access: Although “AI drives the decision making,” B2B marketers still want access and control over their data.  “ABM is one of the most important categories in B2B marketing,” Rogol added, “but you need to be able to control and access the data.”

“B2B marketers are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of data available to us every day.  Being the control freaks we are, marketers are constantly frustrated trying to extract the right insights to tailor our campaigns and reach our target audiences,” said Rogol.  “We are launching new solutions that will empower all of us to take control of data to create tailored campaigns that will drive growth for their organizations.  These new solutions are a reflection of what’s coming next in the world of ABM.”

Tomorrow, I will be covering Demandbase’s product announcements on the virtual keynote.