Clearbit leverages first and second-party intent data for building and activating audiences.
B2B data vendor Clearbit is the latest firm to announce a partnership with G2 to deliver G2’s second-party technology intent data. The G2 feed will be available alongside Clearbit’s firmographics, contacts, and Reveal visitor intelligence.
“For any company that shows up in your defined Audiences, Capture automatically creates new accounts and key contacts (from our database of marketable and verified contacts) directly in Salesforce,” blogged Clearbit CMO Kevin Tate. “This way, your marketing and sales teams can focus on engaging the right people, based on role and title, from the companies you care about.”
Clearbit offers B2B data enrichment, audience building, visitor intelligence, and web forms to over 1,500 customers, including Segment (Twilio), Intercom, HubSpot, Asana, and Atlassian. Clearbit’s reference database gathers insights on 44 million companies and 350 million contacts.
“Marketers know that engaging the right companies at the right time is key, but with increased pressure to build high-quality pipeline, it’s never been more critical. With G2 and Clearbit, teams can now leverage the powerful combination of company fit and buyer intent to focus their funnel – and even use Clearbit Capture to discover key buyers and contacts at their best-fit, high-intent prospects.”
Clearbit CTO Harlow Ward
G2 Buyer Intent Signals include
Companies viewing G2 Product Profiles and Sponsored Content
Companies viewing G2 Categories, Comparison Products, and Alternative & Competitor Pages
G2 Buyer Intent Scores for every visiting company
“Buyer intent data is a secret weapon for leading B2B marketers,” said Christine Li, VP of Growth & Enablement at G2. “Clearbit’s integration with G2 helps marketers take that data even further — driving more streamlined actions for sales, intent-based revenue, and realizing the full potential of account-based marketing.”
The combined first and second-party intent datasets help identify the optimal time to reach out to customers and prospects. By integrating intent data with a firm’s ICP, marketing can determine which ideal customers are in-market.
As G2 also identifies accounts that are viewing alternatives or running product comparisons, it assists with identifying competitive threats at current customers. Risk flags allow Account Executives and Customer Success Managers to reach out proactively to wobbly renewals and reduce churn risk.
Clearbit Audience and Capture leverages first and second-party attendance.
Clearbit Audience and Capture combine first and second-party intelligence for building and activating campaigns across Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Google. Admins can also set up automated Slack alerts when intent scores are met, helping ensure that sales reps focus on target accounts while they are in-market.
“Our focus is on helping you put our Clearbit + G2 audiences to work across your existing stack and apps (with our flexible integrations & webhooks),” remarked Tate to GZ Consulting. “It’ll be interesting to see how these changes in the economy continue to affect how companies spend on MarTech – but we’re seeing more companies currently looking for flexible solutions to ‘upgrade the stack they already have’ vs. ‘rip-and-replace with a walled-garden suite.’”
The new 6Sense Conversational Email Campaign Builder
At the 6sense Breakthrough Conference, 6sense unveiled its new Conversational Email module. Conversational Email employs AI models, psychographics, technographics, intent data, and predictive analytics to deliver “hyper-personalized, hyper-relevant emails to qualify and convert leads to sales meetings.”
Conversational Email supports campaigns across functions and the buyers’ journey. Marketing can send “personalized peer-to-peer nurture emails from multiple AI personas, and Operations can systematize meeting conversion and scheduling for qualified accounts. Sales teams can operationalize best practices and “scale across segments much easier.”
Marketing can also deploy Conversational Email to revive dormant accounts, qualify and convert inbound leads, and boost webinar and event registrations, participation, and follow-up.
6sense claims that beta customers enjoyed a 50% reduction in deal cycle times for marketing-sourced opportunities and a 1.5X increase in average deal size.
“A look at the basic process Conversational AI uses to nurture leads and turn them into sales opportunities.”
AI tools include a Visual Conversation Flow Builder, Email Assistant, and Qualification and Sales Handover. The Email Assistant employs AI to “effortlessly engage the correct buying team members, schedule follow-up based on out-of-office replies, book meetings with the right owners, and send targeted content.”
Dynamic content consists of multivariate blocks tailored to specific keywords, segments, personas, or products for personalizing messages.
Additionally, Conversational Email supports automated workflow triggers based on account buying behavior and contact activity.
“This launch is one of our most significant product updates yet,” said 6sense CTO Viral Bajaria. “Every company has overlooked and underworked, yet high-quality, leads. Critical outreach happens too late or simply never at all, which leads to missed revenue opportunities. The early results from customers in our beta program using 6sense Conversational Email demonstrates the impact: reduction in deal cycles, increase in average deal size, and new pipeline generated. While others in the market focus on sending emails, we are the first to focus on writing relevant emails and responding in ways that lead to more quality pipeline, more efficiently.”
6sense Contextual Targeting improves engagement and recall.
6sense also rolled out Contextual Targeting, which places ads alongside similar digital content. A study by Spark Neuro found that contextually relevant ads generate 43% greater engagement and double the ad recall.
In addition, 6sense offers over 100 new custom contextual topics for B2B marketers. “Advertisers won’t need to settle to use contextual segments that are largely designed for consumer marketers,” stated 6sense.
6sense claimed three benefits to Contextual Targeting. It:
Respects user privacy by targeting audiences without using behavioral or data profiles
Provides ready-to-use contextual topics built specifically for B2B
Eliminates wasted ad spend on buyers that aren’t likely to engage
Another new feature is Campaign Forecasting which estimates a campaign’s daily audience, daily impressions, and daily spend. Campaign Forecasting helps marketers assess campaign budget and reach before launching the campaign.
6sense also announced at Breakthrough that a sales intelligence data application would be released in Q1. 6sense, which bought data company Slintel last October, will offer global contact data, intent data (3rd-party data, anonymous web visitor insights), firmographics, psychographics, and technographics. In addition, the “intuitive” UX will provide “actionable insights and [an] orchestration layer necessary to identify, prioritize and engage with accounts in-market.”
“With B2B buying committee members increasingly choosing to remain anonymous through most of their journey, sellers need insight to earlier signals for their sales outreach to be effective. With our latest advancement in 6sense Sales Intelligence, we bring industry-leading intent data, contact data, and AI insights to help sellers efficiently identify priority prospects, personalize their interactions, and take timely action with ease to drive meetings and conversion of pipeline to revenue.”
Amar Doshi, SVP of Product & UX at 6sense
The Breakthrough Conference was billed as “an inside look at best practices to leverage AI and big data to accelerate revenue generation efficiently.”
“The Proceed with Confidence focus of our 2022 Breakthrough event couldn’t be more timely. We heard from more than 50 sales and marketing speakers at this year’s event that 6sense Revenue AI is the must-have competitive edge they can’t grow without,” said 6sense CEO Jason Zintak. “B2B companies are losing revenue opportunities and leaving money on the table. To deliver a better buying experience in today’s selling environment, it’s imperative to leverage AI along with pre-intent data, intent data, and predictive analytics to know which accounts are in market to buy your product or service, when and how to target them, and what messages to deliver to best engage.”
Leadspace is promising at least a fifty-percent cut in third-party data licensing expenses for human-verified contacts, firmographics, and technographics. “This frees companies to reinvest their savings into advanced AI-assisted technologies to fully optimize funnel conversion,” stated Leadspace.
Leadspace aggregates third-party data from over thirty vendors, with data spanning 70 million companies, 240 million buying centers, and 280 million business professionals.
Leadspace delivers “fully-enriched, 360-degree buyer profiles of current and high-performance lookalike customers” that align the company’s territories with its TAM and ICP. It then activates ABM-derived audiences across multiple channels, including Google Ads, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and LiveRamp.
Leadspace offers connectors for major platforms, including Salesforce, MSD, Marketo, Pardot, and HubSpot.
“Leadspace is redefining the performance of B2B sales and marketing teams. We have over a decade of experience in delivering the most extensible B2B profiles in the industry. And unlike other offerings, the Leadspace platform is data source agnostic, open, and extensible,” stated Alex Yoder, CEO of Leadspace. “Companies large and small need and deserve complete and active profiles, but today many companies struggle to keep their profiles up to date and complete. We’ve worked with SalesIntel for several years, and this expansion in our partnership to include human-verified B2B contacts and technographic data in the Leadspace B2B graph is a testament to their being the leading vendor for the most affordable direct dial and accurate contact data in the industry.”
SalesIntel employs a global research network of nearly 2,000 editors who double-verify its data each quarter, ensuring a 95% accuracy level of its contacts. It also provides firmographics and technographics.
“At SalesIntel, we are committed to providing the best sales intelligence available for revenue teams of all sizes. Leadspace requires the highest quality data to fuel its platform, so this partnership expansion comes naturally. We are honored to be a trusted provider,” said SalesIntel CEO Manoj Ramnani. “With customers having access to accurate contact data and over 200 million technographic data points, they will be equipped with the most accurate insights so they can expand reach, grow pipeline, and increase close rates.”
Account Based Engagement platformTerminus announced Connected Account Experiences, which helps customers identify in-market prospects, reach out to them, and engage them across the buyer’s journey.
Terminus claims that its cookie-free, first-party data provides a 16% lift in traffic from its targeted audience activation.
“Marketers can continuously optimize ABM strategies with Terminus Identify, the visitor identification system recently added to the Terminus Platform which features the company’s own first-party data sets,” stated the firm. “Unlike other platforms, this owned data is never static and gets stronger with every interaction and with every channel.”
Terminus leverages both first-party visitor intelligence and partner intent data sets from Bombora and G2, helping marketers identify in-market accounts. Other Terminus intent datasets include psychographics (the wants and interests of a company based upon public messaging), technographics, and hiring insights derived from job postings.
Other account intelligence includes firmographics, event data, relationships, and engagement data captured through interactions between prospects and company employees and automated platforms.
New engagement channels span CTV and audio, including Spotify, Hulu, DirectTV, and other streaming services.
“CTV is considered one of the fastest-growing channels in video advertising,” advised Terminus. “Leveraging CTV from Terminus means customers can diversify their arsenals of creative assets and advertising channels, reach customers while they’re watching Hulu or other ad-supported streaming platforms, and boost brand awareness and revenue.”
Connected Account Experiences supports partner integrations through Salesloft, Outreach, and Slack.
Terminus supports many channels, including targeted display advertising, email signatures, account-based chat, personalized websites, LinkedIn Sponsored Content, direct mail (via Sendoso), asynchronous video (via Vidyard, Wistia, CloudApp, Hippo Video, or Loom), CTV, and audio.
“Today’s marketers need an ABM strategy that engages buyers with personalized touchpoints and connected account experiences across all channels and across the full funnel,” said Tim Kopp, CEO of Terminus. “With Connected Account Experiences, Terminus enables marketers to identify their buyers wherever they are, reach them on any screen they use, and engage them with the marketing and sales automation tools their teams use every day.”
Clearbit announced the general availability of its Data Activation Platform. The new service helps B2B marketing teams “focus on creating demand, capturing intent, and optimizing their pipeline.”
The Data Activation Platform addresses the “business imperative for companies to have real-time intelligence about their target market, ideal customers, and engaged prospects.” It then applies this intelligence across all stages of the customer’s journey.
The Data Activation Platform offers Clearbit customers a user interface for many of the features that were previously only supported as APIs.
“Data activation is specifically around the next step of how we’re helping companies put data to work,” explained CRO Kevin Tate to GZ Consulting. “We started with the data. How do you collect data and make it available so that companies can be smart as they engage your customers in the market? And then, over the last three years, four years, what we’ve gotten to see is how these very fast-growing companies and their growth engineering teams and go-to-market teams have put our data to work in all these different customer touchpoints. Until this Data Activation Platform, the way they put that data to work was through APIs and integrations that they stitch together.”
“We’ve been fortunate to work with many of the most innovative B2B growth teams in the world, and they’ve taught us that it’s not just about having good data. It’s about activating that data to improve your funnel from top to bottom,” said Ross Moser, CEO of Clearbit. “The ability to apply real-time intelligence to each step of the customer journey – and optimize experiences in real-time – is what’s driving success for Clearbit’s customers.”
Clearbit company and visitor intelligence
The Data Activation Platform leverages Clearbit’s heritage as a data company. Its database spans 44 million companies with over 100 firmographic and demographic attributes. Clearbit also maintains data on 350 million contacts. Marketers can target audiences, enrich their CRMs and MAPs, and personalize their website and customer experience apps. Capabilities include
Clearbit Reveal visitor intelligence for tying anonymous users to firms and detecting website visitor intent
Audience management and segmentation based on data ingested from a company’s CRM, MAP, or CDP. Alerts may be triggered to activate audiences across systems.
Real-time enrichment for short webforms.
Real-time integrations and APIs
Audiences can be targeted in multiple ways. For example, marketers can deploy audiences on Facebook and Google:
Prospect Audiences target employees across the complete ICP, including account expansion to new prospects outside the CRM. Targeting may be filtered by role and seniority, providing persona-level targeting across the ICP.
Contact Audiences that sync all matches to a contacts audience for retargeting on Facebook and Google
Site Visitor Audiences that retarget web visitors when they match on Facebook and Google.
Data syncing includes “Audience inclusion attributes” or “smart attributes” that are calculated, such as a Boolean ICP or current customer flags that can be pushed downstream to Salesforce and other platforms. The refreshed value is automatically pushed to downstream systems if the calculation is modified. Smart attributes are updated every fifteen minutes.
Clearbit partners include Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo, Pardot, Segment, Drift, Intercom, Chili Piper, Slack, Zapier, Qualified, and Clari. Personalization partners that leverage Clearbit Reveal include Uberflip, Optimizely, and Mutiny.
Clearbit is coming off a “big, big growth year” but does not disclose any sizing or growth details. LinkedIn lists it with 177 employees, up 90% over the past year. Business Development and Sales grew at a 150% pace. While Clearbit originally targeted B2B Internet service companies, it is gaining traction in financial services, retail services, and investments, businesses that are “looking for data, to power their intelligence, their go-to-market motions,” said Tate.
ZoomInfo provides a set of data-enabled services for sales, marketing, recruitment, and revenue operations under the RevenueOS brand.
ZoomInfo announced the immediate availability of its new MarketingOS ABM Platform. The service is part of a broader RevOS offering that supports marketing, sales, operations, and recruitment. MarketingOS consolidates ZoomInfo’s legacy marketing capabilities, bringing together two recent acquisitions, Insent and RingLead, with new programmatic and audience management functionality.
ZoomInfo also refined its positioning statement from Revenue Acceleration to Revenue Operating System. It stated that RevOS is “the World’s only revenue operating system of its kind.”
“Our comprehensive B2B database is the key differentiator that sets MarketingOS apart from other ABM solutions,” said ZoomInfo CEO Henry Schuck. “ZoomInfo’s unique data science algorithms allow marketers to connect with the right prospects at precisely the right time. No other solution on the market combines the power of data-driven insights and marketing-optimized workflows like ZoomInfo’s MarketingOS.”
“Marketers typically fail because the data in most ABM platforms is both inaccurate and incomplete. Current ABM solutions are designed to leverage companies’ own first-party data, which exists in their customer relationship management or marketing automation systems. Without quality data, marketers pour advertising dollars at the wrong prospects and companies, and, as a result, deliver fruitless leads to sales and waste time and resources. With ZoomInfo’s best-in-class data and intelligence at its foundation, MarketingOS enables marketers to effectively reach target accounts and drive qualified leads for sales.”
New functionality includes social and display advertising, abandoned from tracking, and audience targeting. Marketing can build audiences and track campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Marketing can also build campaigns and manage them programmatically through Clickagy DSP (ZoomInfo) or TradeDesk.
Marketing OS looks to address the “Funnel Famine” suffered by traditional marketing teams. Several issues cause Funnel Famine: crowded B2B advertising channels, dirty data, leaky black-box marketing campaigns, siloed data, and sales’ longtime distrust of Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs).
MarketingOS addresses the issue of leads created by “The Funnel Famine.”
“Most marketing programs begin with data, whether it’s for tailoring your communications, whether it’s for sending an email, whether it’s for sending a direct mail. It’s all about those accounts that you’re targeting and the professionals at those accounts,” explained ZoomInfo SVP of Product Strategy and Product Marketing Justin Withers to GZ Consulting. “And the reality is that a lot of data, especially if it’s pulled from the CRM or other systems, is outdated. It’s inaccurate. It’s incomplete, and that can actually pollute or even inhibit the lead flow at the top of the funnel, and [it] ultimately leads to poor conversion. It leads to leaks in the funnel, and all this hard work that marketers put in at every stage of the funnel ultimately spills out before it can even reach sales.”
The reality is that the sales and marketing funnels operate in parallel, not sequentially, as represented in traditional funnel diagrams. MarketingOS lets marketers run account-based programs in parallel with sales running account-based sales programs “so that everyone’s aligned at every step of the funnel.”
Under current processes, sales and marketing operate in parallel to each other with little coordination and a single point of handoff for MQLs, a situation that “really doesn’t set marketing up for success…and it leaves sales in a bind,” continued Withers. Thus, marketing complains that sales teams ignore its leads, and sales reps complain about the quality and quantity of marketing-sourced leads. As a result, there is an “acute misalignment between sales and marketing.”
With MarketingOS, handoffs can occur at different points along the marketing funnel, based on the channel and prospect response.
Sales and Marketing are aligned around a set of target accounts both within and beyond the ICP. Thus, an ICP account with spiking intent will be passed to sales, even if marketing has had limited conversations. Furthermore, the rep will know that multiple individuals from the firm have visited the website or that individuals have clicked through on ads or email campaigns.
Likewise, chatbot conversations with target companies can immediately route a chat to the sales rep or schedule a call.
New functionality for managing abandoned forms can revive a prospect. ZoomInfo claims a 60% increase in lead flow with its abandoned form tracking.
MarketingOS Audience Builder with Audience Segmentation
MarketingOS functionality includes
Expanded targeting that leverages the full set of ZoomInfo’s first and third-party intelligence for building and activating audiences. ZoomInfo selects include firmographics, technographics, biographics (e.g., Title, 192 Job Functions, Job Levels), web forms, and uploaded lists (e.g., tradeshow lists). Other selects include business events (e.g., funding data, executive changes, projects) and over 300 company attributes (advanced data-mined firmographics such as fleet size and company benefits). Targeting also ingests account, contact, and lead attributes from Salesforce, HubSpot, and Marketo.
First and third-party intent data time outreach while buyers are in-market, helping to improve marketing and sales efficacy. Marketers can track up to 500 intent topics, with up to 50 available at a time. In addition, chat-based targeting is coming soon.
An “in-market predictive score” that identifies each prospect’s buying stage, “informing how and when marketers should engage with prospects based on their ranking and helping them to prioritize their outbound efforts on prospects who are most likely to convert.”
Campaign Management and Analytics. Marketers upload their creative, build an audience, set the budget, and select their channels.
Webforms, infused with automated enrichment, support shorter forms with reduced abandonment rates
Abandoned form tracking, with Workflows passing the lead to sales or additional nurture steps
ZoomInfo Chat (FKA Insent), a conversational marketing chatbot that leverages ZoomInfo data to score and route leads. Chat immediately passes high-scoring, live leads to sales reps. The chatbot also automates meeting scheduling.
Visitor Intelligence, with pages scored differently (e.g., Product Pages are scored higher than Career or Investor Pages)
Automated workflows triggered by intent, custom intent, WebSights visitor intelligence, Scoops (e.g., business events, projects), Funding, Technologies, and FormComplete. Workflows can also be built to expand reach across the potential buying committee by persona.
RingLead data orchestration to dedupe, cleanse, enrich, and route leads
ZoomInfo Enrich, a set of DaaS enterprise platform integrations for data enrichment and hygiene.
MarketingOS is powered by ZoomInfo’s database spanning 100 million companies, 150 million executives, technographics, intent and engagement data, and event data.
“Marketing and sales funnels work in parallel, so everyone is aligned at every step of the funnel,” explained Justin Withers, SVP of Product Strategy and Product Marketing. With MarketingOS, “sales and marketing are working in lockstep at every stage of the journey.”
MarketingOS is one of four products branded under the RevOS banner.
Tying together intent and engagement data and processing them through ZoomInfo Workflows is the future of ABM. Intent data is employed at the top of the funnel when buyers are in the initial research phase. Once prospects have begun interacting with a vendor, most buyer behavior research falls under the engagement category (e.g., web forms, email responses, chatbots, conversational intelligence, etc.). Finally, intent data helps identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities at the tail end of the customer lifecycle.
Engagement and intent data are also valuable churn risk indicators, helping customer success and account managers detect potential cancelations or defections well before decisions have been made. In addition, intent data can show a spike in research related to product-associated topics and competitors. Engagement monitoring widens to include customer success interactions, training participation, platform usage, and general account health indicators.
“We can support your new customer acquisition with these signals,” stated Withers. “We can support your opportunity acceleration with these signals. We can also support your renewal, upsell, cross-sell motions based on different types of signals that are happening at those accounts. So, it really is a full customer lifecycle marketing solution.”
MarketingOS will be available as a pair of SKUs:
ABM Elite+: The full ABM Platform package, including RingLead Cleanse, Enrich, and Route
ABM Advanced+: Package includes everything except RingLead
“The purpose behind the two distinct offerings is to simplify our primary offering for those focused on ABM engagement and marketing programs, as opposed to the more operationally focused data orchestration capabilities,” explained ZoomInfo Analyst Relations Director Michael Basilio to GZ Consulting.
MarketingOS includes ten marketing seats and three administrative seats for RingLead routing and ZoomInfo Chat.
The broader RevOS branding consists of MarketingOS, SalesOS, OperationsOS, and RecruitingOS. ZoomInfo calls RevOS the “world’s first integrated go-to-market platform.” All four RevOS services are generally available.
ZoomInfo’s data cloud, orchestration tools (e.g., RingLead, B2B DaaS, Workflows), and engagement tools (advertising, sales engagement, web forms, chat, and conversational intelligence) are at the heart of RevOS.
“There’s nothing more important in business than successfully executing your go-to-market strategy,” states ZoomInfo in its product collateral. “Get it right, and your business flourishes. Get it wrong, and you’re toast. That’s why having one integrated go-to-market platform is so crucial. You can think of it as your revenue operating system.”
SalesOS bundles together a set of new and legacy sales tools:
Sales prospecting
Chorus, the conversational sales platform the firm acquired in July
Sales and Marketing Alignment has been a stated goal of the two functions for at least a decade, but they have operated with different datasets, metrics, objectives, and platforms. Thus, alignment was more vision than reality. By aligning ABM on a common platform and reference database, alignment is no longer impaired by an organization’s tech stack and data foundation.
“Crucially, MarketingOS lets marketing teams work from a common data foundation. Only 39% of sales and marketing teams share buyer signals, and half say it’s because their sales and marketing systems don’t integrate. The shared data foundation of SalesOS and MarketingOS tightens key handoffs and unlocks true marketing and sales alignment, eliminating conflicting records, wasted effort, and missed opportunities.”
ZoomInfo CEO Henry Schuck, “Introducing RevOS: The future of modern go-to-market software,” (Feb 8, 2022)
OperationsOS contains RingLead data orchestration (i.e., match, unify, dedupe, normalize, cleanse, enrich, score, and route data) and B2B DaaS services (e.g., APIs, webhooks, cloud data warehouse integrations).
Finally, RecruitingOS contains ZoomInfo Recruit, its recently launched prospecting and engagement service for HR departments and recruiters. RecruitingOS also includes a set of Applicant Tracking Service connectors.
“Recruiters can filter and reach more good-fit candidates, use pipeline management tools to collaborate and organize the hiring process, and automate the candidate outreach process,” explains Zoominfo. “This helps you source and connect with candidates faster, reducing the time to find and hire talent.”
Along with new product positioning, RevOS sports new logos, color palettes, styles, and a “unified in-app experience to create a singular, cohesive go-to-market solution that spans the entire suite of ZoomInfo products.” There are also redesigned data dashboards and reports that “offer a faster, more responsive experience that allows your sales, marketing, and recruitment teams to visually demonstrate ROI and how their work aligns with broader organizational objectives.”
In short, RevOS unifies sales, marketing, revenue operations, and recruitment on the same set of data, providing “the same source of truth” and “one integrated platform for every stage of the marketing and sales funnel.” “If data is the lifeblood of the modern sales organization, then go-to-market teams must have the technology to act upon that data. RevOS’ unified data tech stack gives sales, marketing, operations, and recruiting teams a single source of truth from which to launch their campaigns and go-to-market motions, simplifying internal workflows, reducing costs, and maximizing interoperability between teams,” blogged Schuck. “RevOS is the next chapter in ZoomInfo’s journey as the world’s leading go-to-market platform.”
MarketingOS supports a Campaign Manager for building, sizing, and tracking campaigns.
Dun & Bradstreet announced the acquisition of a pair of digital B2B data companies to support its Audience Solutions. (Part I). Today, I’m covering the Eyeota acquisition.
Eyeota supports a global methodology for onboarding offline and online data in a privacy-compliant and globally consistent way without the use of personally identifiable information (PII).
“In today’s market, brands need the ability to bridge real-world insights into the digital space in order to communicate more effectively with their customers and prospective customers,” states the firm’s About Us. “Yet the market has never been so difficult for brands to navigate. The challenge is finding the best ways to capture and activate audience data and to do so in a way that they can be confident is authentic, trustworthy and reliable.”
Eyeota builds audiences “based on what people are buying, watching, listening, reading, and interacting with in both the digital and offline world” that takes into account consumer demographics, behavior, and psychographics.”
Eyeota supports a broad set of global ad buying platforms, trading desks, DMPs, DSPs, and ad networks, including Adobe, Google Marketing Platform, Lotame, MediaMath, Neustar, Oracle Marketing Cloud, and Salesforce DMP. Eyeota also supports social targeting on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
“Eyeota’s expansive global data onboarding and activation capabilities are underpinned by our commitment to delivering audience solutions at scale, and we are proud of the work we have accomplished to develop one of the most powerful, agile, and interoperable frameworks for delivering addressable data in a privacy-conscious era,” said Kristina Prokop, Chief Executive Officer of Eyeota. “By combining forces with Dun & Bradstreet and NetWise, we will be able to offer a more holistic B2B audience platform to our clients, leveraging a powerful combination of data, technology, and insights that help clients better target and engage audiences across global markets and digital channels.”
Eyeota’s products extend the Audience Solutions business into campaign execution and “being online and participating more fully in the B2B MarTech and AdTech supply chain.”
Dun & Bradstreet is acquiring 100% of the outstanding ownership interest in Eyeota for an estimated purchase price of $165 million upon closing, subject to net working capital adjustment. The deal is expected to close by November 5.
Eyeota has 84 employees and grew its headcount 12% over the past year. Founded in 2010, it maintains four offices in the U.S. and outposts in Sydney, Tokyo, Singapore, Pune, Berlin, and London.
Dun & Bradstreet announced the acquisition of a pair of digital B2B data companies to support its Audience Solutions. (Part I)
NetWise offers Dun & Bradstreet a B2B-to-consumer ID Graph that helps Audience Solutions compete in this broader digital context. The Graph includes 30 million U.S. businesses, 100 million business professionals, 250 million opted-in consumer profiles, and 70 million consumer-to-business linkages. At the audience level, NetWise supports over 500 standard B2B segments and 150 consumer segments.
NetWise extends D&B Audience Solutions’ identity graph “across every major online channel, individual device, or a marketing platform,” said Dun & Bradstreet CEO Anthony Jabbour. “Just as our clients rely on the D-U-N-S Number for precision in their offline data, we’re looking to provide the same level of confidence and consistency online as well.”
NetWise adds a B2B-to-Consumer Graph for cross-channel, cross-device digital marketing.
NetWise excels at joining the offline and online worlds together to connect business personas to their online personas,” said NetWise CEO Dwight Gorall. “We look forward to joining the Dun & Bradstreet family with Eyeota. Once together, we can work to create a complete solution for clients, enabling a full spectrum of capabilities – from audience creation to activation – at scale across many demand-side platforms, customer relationship management systems, connected T.V. or social media platforms. We are committed to helping global enterprises future proof their marketing strategies so they can thrive in a multichannel world.”
NetWise notes that it is the “original producer” of its B2B data products built from first-party data sources, including state and federal business filings, company websites, job descriptions, job postings, social websites, and business directories. Moreover, the firm has unrestricted rights to use and sell its data. Thus, it offers supplementary intelligence for enriching Dun & Bradstreet’s company and contact files.
According to its FAQ, “NetWise generates comprehensive and deterministic B2B segments using current job titles, company firmographics, and other self-declared business-related attributes like skills, education, certifications, etc. This is accomplished by analyzing publicly available information and data created directly by persons in our dataset. These data features are often multi-source validated across our compiled data. Segments are deterministic, based on foundational information and never modeled unless explicitly indicated.”
NetWise is fully compliant with CCPA. In addition, its Data Protection Officer is a California-licensed attorney.
Outside of the US, NetWise maintains 100 million global profiles that can be folded into WorldBase and 300 million non-EU global profiles. NetWise does not build profiles on GDPR (EU) subjects.
Dun & Bradstreet is acquiring 100% of the outstanding ownership interest in NetWise Data for an estimated purchase price of $69 million upon closing, subject to net working capital adjustment. The deal is expected to close during the fourth quarter.
NetWise is based in Boca Raton, Florida and has 47 headcount (as per LinkedIn).
As part of its Q3 2021 earnings discussion, Dun & Bradstreet announced that it acquired two digital marketing companies: NetWise and Eyeota. The acquisitions “extend the company’s position in the B2B online marketing value chain and will build upon its rapidly growing Audience Solutions business by adding global scale and the online data to power omnichannel marketing around the world.”
“Dun & Bradstreet’s acquisitions of Eyeota and NetWise will cap-off several years of investment in the Sales and Marketing space, including the acquisition of our Customer Data Platform, Lattice Engines, which is at the core of our D&B Rev.Up platform, and the acquisition of Orb Intelligence to link digital and physical businesses in our Data Cloud,” said CMO Stacy Greiner. “We are executing on our vision to help revenue-generating teams get out of the business of wrangling data and technology and back to engaging with their customers and prospects to drive growth for their companies.”
Dun & Bradstreet noted that marketers have a broad set of digital channels but are unsure whether their advertising dollars reach their targeted audiences online across multiple digital touchpoints. The three companies “will be able to provide data and technology that empowers businesses to confidently identify, reach, and engage high propensity B2B audiences for multichannel marketing campaigns.”
“Our online Audience Solutions business continues to see robust growth rates, and we see a significant untapped opportunity in the online business-to-business marketing landscape. This led us to strengthen our position through the signing of definitive agreements to acquire Eyeota and NetWise,” said Jabbour. “These two complementary companies will extend our position further in the B2B online marketing value chain and build upon a business that has grown over 40% year to date.
The acquisitions extend Dun & Bradstreet audience channels from B2B to B2B2C, helping businesses target business decision-makers at home and improving match rates. The deals also provide Dun & Bradstreet with an international ecosystem of digital activation platforms. Other vendors with B2B2C datasets include AnalyticsIQ BusinessCore and Data Axle B2CLink (FKA Execureach).
“This will enable clients to build on the investments they have made into Data Management mastered on the D-U-N-S Number, and more readily activate that data in social, search and display advertising campaigns,” stated the firm.
“We are solving for the current audience shrinkage these marketers face today with the low match rates that plague this industry. This will enable clients to build upon the investments they’ve made into data management mastered on the D-U-N-S Number and more readily activate that data in social, search and display advertising campaigns. Said simply, Dun & Bradstreet has the offline B2B targeting data, NetWise enables marketers to translate that data into online audiences, and Eyeota syndicates it across the digital ecosystem.”
Dun & Bradstreet CEO Anthony Jabbour
As Work from Home and Work from Anywhere are likely to remain the dominant approaches to professional work in the coming years, marketers need to engage business professionals across multiple devices, channels, and locations with a consistent message. The acquisitions assist with both multichannel audience targeting and activation, tying together offline and digital.
Continue to Part II, which discusses Netwise, or Part III which discusses Eyeota.
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.
