Last month, technographics vendor HG Data rolled out two new services: HG Connect, a Salesforce Data Exchange connector, and HG Audience for digital targeting.  HG Connect supports competitive and complementary targeting of prospects based upon installed hardware and software.  HG Connect use cases include sales intelligence, lead qualification, and demand generation.  Account records are enriched in near-real time via the Data Exchange and updated on a monthly basis.  Matching is done via corporate URLs.

“It is our mission to help companies achieve extraordinary results in their marketing and sales outreach through the use of accurate and comprehensive technographic data,” said Barbara Winters, VP of marketing at HG Data. “With HG Connect, customers don’t even have to think about how to integrate technographic data into their workflows, it’s already there, ready for them to use, so that they can begin creating targeted segments for their campaigns immediately without needing to work with an IT or operations person to integrate the data.”

The HG connector is Lightning enabled, delivering HG Data’s technographics to mobile devices, reports, and dashboards.  The data is also available for triggers and workflow.  Along with Vendor and Product data, HG Data publishes Confidence and Intensity Scores (accuracy and frequency of uniquely dated documents).

Data enrichment is limited to Account records with plans to enrich Lead records in the future.

Customers license access to HG Data segments which is enabled via a Salesforce Data Integration rule (formerly called a Clean rule).  HG Data tracks 13 million global companies and 88 million technology installations. Their taxonomy spans 3,800 vendors and 7,500 products.

The Data Exchange is a Salesforce enrichment service associated with Data.com.  The Data Exchange does not yet support prospecting.

HG Data also launched HG Audience for programmatic advertising on platforms including Krux, Lotame, Adobe Marketing  Cloud, DataXu, MediaMath, and TheTradeDesk.  Marketers will be able to target audiences based upon technographic variables, firmographics (e.g. sector, revenue, employees), job function, and job level.

“HG Audience allows companies to modernize their digital advertising targeting strategy in a profound way,” said John Connell, Vice President of Digital for HG Data. “Instead of deploying digital ads based on just traditional firmographics or Internet content consumption, companies can now use our precise custom segments to apply ABM-style focus to traditionally broader-reach display media tactics.  With HG Audience, we’re giving our customers access to the influencers and decision makers at the companies that matter to them, leading to better engagement, greater efficiency and much better ROI on their advertising dollars.”

Over the past few years, a number of content vendors have released programmatic products.  These include Infogroup (B2B and B2C selects), Dun & Bradstreet (B2B), HG Data, Bombora (B2B Intent), and LinkedIn (Member targeting).

“In the last year to 18 months, there’s been a shift with B2B companies doing more programmatic media buying,” says Ashu Garg, general partner at Foundation Capital, a venture capital firm that has invested in the ad tech space. “What’s behind the change is the greater ability to connect anonymous data with PII (personally identifiable information) data. Secondly is the ability to get much more precise targeting from niche segments and audiences across platforms, whether that be social, display or video platforms.”

An AdWeek BrandShare study commissioned by Dun & Bradstreet in September 2016 found that 65% of B2B marketers were deploying programmatic campaigns, a ten percent jump from 2015.