Category: Content Marketing

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

TechTarget Much Better Positioned to Withstand Recession than in 2008

Technology Sales and Marketing Services vendor TechTarget ($TTGT) believes it is in a much stronger marketplace and revenue position than in 2008, the last recession not caused by a pandemic. It has shifted away from economically sensitive brand revenues to a “robust product suite, which allows us to address the evolving needs of our customers.”  As a result, brand revenues have declined from 30% of total revenue to 10% since 2009.

TechTarget is fundamentally much stronger than in 2008.  It has trebled its revenue over the past fourteen years and doubled its Adjusted EBITDA margin.  In 2009, the firm had virtually no long-term contracts; now, 42% of revenue is associated with longer-term contracts.  Other positive signs: TechTarget has grown its customer base from 1,000 to 3,200 customers and is much less reliant on legacy global customers, reducing its revenue share from 32% to 20%.  Furthermore, its largest customers have shifted from hardware to cloud and software vendors with subscription customers.  Whereas its top customers in 2009 suffered revenue downturns, its current customer base is more likely to struggle to grow revenue than to suffer declining revenue.

“The modernization of the sales and marketing organization is a strong and durable trend.  It is hard to compete in today’s IT market without a data-driven go-to-market strategy,” argued CEO Michael Cotoia on TechTarget’s Q3 earnings call earlier this month.  “As the leading provider of first-party purchase intent data in the enterprise IT market, we will continue to benefit from this trend.”

Priority Engine

Priority Engine, its subscription sales intelligence platform, grew revenues by 15% last quarter.  TechTarget will continue to invest in Priority Engine after doubling the number of engineers working on the product in 2022.

In 2023, Priority Engine will further bolster its Salesforce integration with “bi-directional data flow, campaign orchestration from within Priority Engine, additional program impact reporting, market insights to inform marketing and sales outreach, and alert-driven account and prospect intelligence for our sales users.”

Priority Engine also plans to ingest Salesforce data for analytics dashboards around ROI, open pipeline, and won/lost opportunities.   The dashboards will answer the question, “how do we set up our sales reps within our customers’ environment to make the most appropriate and relevant follow-up?”

“We also want to make sure that we are working with our customers to provide more insights across their total campaign with TechTarget, both on the sales side and on the marketing side.  So, what you’re doing with their lead generation and demand gen, their content, their branding, the visitors on their website to really bring that end-to-end view into Priority Engine to help fuel and help modernize…both sales and marketing.”

TechTarget CEO Michael Cotoia

The firm sees significant opportunity for growth in TechTarget’s sales-specific module, which is still in the early adoption phase as it was rolled out less than a year ago.

TechTarget does not break out the number of customers licensing Priority Engine or the Priority Engine sales module.  However, CFO Daniel Noreck said that the module is “growing nicely but still a small base.”

More broadly, the firm has 3,200 customers, but there are over 18,000 global technology companies with at least $50 million in annual revenue, providing plenty of market opportunity. 

“We believe most of those companies are good candidates for the Priority Engine sales module,” stated Cotoia.  “While we expect that our rollout to those customers will be slowed by macroeconomic weakness in the short term, we think the long-term opportunity is enormous.”

Content to Close

TechTarget’s fastest-growing service is Content Enablement which powers its Content to Close strategy.  In conjunction with its customers, TechTarget produced content “to fuel their marketing and sales outreach.”  The service is aligned with the growing focus on self-service research among younger purchasing and business professionals.

“Most technology companies’ current go-to-market strategy is very sales rep heavy. We believe this approach is going to need to transform in the coming years to adjust to the changing buyer dynamics.  The companies that win business will have a comprehensive content strategy to effectively influence buyers before their sales reps get involved.”

TechTarget CEO Michael Cotoia

The acquisitions of Enterprise Strategy Group (“ESG”) and BrightTALK have “uniquely positioned” TechTarget to support growing self-service requirements.  Content Enablement via these subsidiaries will continue to be an “aggressive” investment area.

TechTarget also believes it has a market advantage due to its opted-in, privacy-compliant intent data sets gathered from its B2B media websites and BrightTALK.  Cotoia argues that customer sensitivity to privacy issues and growing government regulations will offer an ongoing competitive advantage for its intent data from permission-based audiences owned and operated by TechTarget.  This advantage “will become even more apparent when Google eliminates third-party cookies.”

TechTarget will continue to look for acquisitions like BrightTALK and ESG that expand the firm’s product capabilities.  It is also interested in acquiring vertical media companies like Xtelligent Healthcare that expand the firm’s TAM into verticals that share similar attributes as Enterprise IT: significant purchase price, complex buying process, long lead times, and large buyer teams.

Healthcare Intent

TechTarget recently integrated XTelligent Healthcare intent into Priority Engine, creating a sales intelligence solution for HealthTech and Healthcare.

Priority Engine for Healthcare Highlights for Top Accounts.

Priority Engine for Healthcare supports over 400,000 opted-in healthcare contacts, including Providers, Health Systems, Payers, Pharmaceuticals, Life Sciences, Accountable Care Organizations, and Federal/State Healthcare Agencies.  TechTarget claims that 90% of the US healthcare system is covered.  Xtelligent said its audience contains “70% Business & Finance Executives and Clinicians who have critical involvement across healthcare technology purchases that are becoming increasingly complex.”

To demonstrate confidence in the company, TechTarget began a new stock buyback program to repurchase up to $200 million in common stock and convertible debt over the next two years.