Tag: Bombora

Next Quarter Adds Bombora Intent

Next Quarter, an AI-based Account Planning solution, partnered with Bombora to deliver third-party intent data to its Fortune 500 Clients.  Next Quarter licensed Bombora’s Company Surge data to power its White Space offering.  Next Quarter recommends the next best product to sell, “along with a guided path to uncover new growth opportunities.”

Bombora’s intent file helps identify in-market customers, including upsell and cross-sell opportunities, inside of Salesforce.  Churn risk is also assessed.

Engagement (activity) data is gathered from Salesforce, so Next Quarter offers recommendations based on Bombora intent and account conversations.

Features include Account Chatter, Whitespace Analysis, Relationship Maps, Competitor Assessment, Target Setting, Scenario Planning & Gap Mitigation.

Next Quarter emphasizes white space opportunities at current accounts for B2B and B2G sales.  Target industries include technology, pharma, management consulting, manufacturing, and Aerospace & Defense.

“Sales reps can uncover potential white space opportunities and develop tailored solutions to meet their needs by building strong relationships with current customers and understanding their business goals,” blogged the firm.  “Next Quarter gathers data from your historical sales trends for similar customers.  Using AI algorithms, we provide a score (NQ Score) by combining historical sales data with intent data that identifies the top recommended products or services to sell.”

Users can perform scenario analyses that identify and present next best product recommendations based on similar customer groupings.

“Next Quarter is committed to helping customers increase revenue,” said Next Quarter CEO Rahul Shah.  “By combining our account planning solution with Bombora’s Intent data, we can offer a unique competitive edge to help drive account growth through AI-based recommendations leveraging intent.  Next Quarter’s Account Growth module is an AI-based account planning solution that identifies new opportunities, finds decision-makers and influencers, and suggests guided next steps for sales teams to grow existing accounts.”

Next Quarter, formerly ForecastEra, received $7.3 million in seed and equity funding in 2021.  It supports over 5,000 users and expects to quintuple its base over the next year.

Named accounts include Boeing, BASF, Bloomberg BNA, Dell, and NTT Data.

Pricing starts at $100 per user per month.  Volume discounts kick in at 100 users.

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

Bombora B2B Research Trends

Intent data vendor Bombora analyzed its topical data to gauge economic concerns and how they may play out across B2B research.  While economic growth is up 60%, economic downturn is up 119% year-over-year, and market volatility has spiked 149%. Likewise, layoffs (109%) are far outpacing hiring (42%).

“In general, what we’re seeing is a shift in focus from business growth to business resiliency.  In fact, July 2022 actually marked the first time we’ve seen the volume of searches for resiliency surpass those for growth,” blogged Hsiaolei Miller, Bombora VP Insights & Partner Success.  “So, instead of focusing on advertising and launching new products, B2B businesses have been investing more of their time and energy into understanding how to maintain their current business through retaining their customers, encouraging renewals, and other strategies.”

Business Resilience topics are surging (Source: Bombora Market Insights)

Thus, Brand and Demand is the primary focus of businesses, with searching on customer expansion and RevOps becoming more important.  Last year, growth-oriented topics outpaced more “maintenance-focused” topics.  However, these topics have achieved rough parity.

Moreover, research in Brand and Demand topics has shifted towards inbound efforts and away from outbound marketing.

Inbound Marketing research is growing and outbound is in decline Business Resilience topics are surging
(Source: Bombora Market Insights).

“With cost pressures mounting, businesses need to focus on extracting as much value and engagement possible from the customers in their pipeline vs. going through the process to find net-new customers,” argued Miller.  “Businesses still want new business, but they want to be more efficiently capturing and capitalizing on every lead that comes into the pipeline.  This can be seen in the increased research into retargeting and conversational marketing strategies and the increase in interest in general inbound marketing software.”

Bombora also found increases in research related to customer expansion (upsell, cross-sell) and time to value.

“Customer expansion involves creating more value for your business by selling your existing customers more of your product or service.  Customer TTV is the time it takes until the ‘Aha!  moment’ when a customer realizes the expected value of your product,” stated Miller.  “Businesses are looking to accomplish both of these goals through investments in customer support automation vs. traditional customer support, which aims to maximize efficiency while also lowering overall customer support costs.”

On Salesforce’s earnings call this month, co-CEO Bret Taylor argued that executives are focusing on time to value and digital transformation benefits (e.g., cost savings, customer satisfaction, and top-line growth) when evaluating digital investments.

Ross Graber, Principal Analyst at Forrester, came to a similar conclusion in his 2023 B2B predictions.  “In light of economic uncertainty, B2B organizations will strive to grow in the places they know and the places they understand.  As a result, B2B growth strategies will tilt heavily toward retention, cross-sell, and upsell revenues.  Growing revenues within the existing customer base requires not only great products and services, but strong customer relationships.”

Sales and Operations Planning had the biggest jump in topical research in Q3, up 386% year-over-year.  RevOps looks to align sales, marketing, and customer success across the customer lifecycle.  RevOps looks to address questions such as how do we get and keep customers?

“During times of uncertainty, businesses are less focused on casting wide nets for new customers and taking big risks, and more focused on squeezing the value out of the customers they already have in their pipeline,” stated Miller.

Resources

Bombora RevTech Integrations

Bombora Insights in Terminus

Bombora is one of the leading sources of third-party intent data gathered from B2B Media sources, with over 5,000 media websites contributing to its Company Surge intelligence.  It has chosen to remain independent and broadly partner with RevTech Companies, including six of the seven vendors that were listed in Gartner’s 2022 Magic Quadrant for ABM Platforms: 6sense, Demandbase, Terminus, Madison Logic, RollWorks, and Triblio (Foundry).

“Gartner weighs Intent data as its single-most critical capability for new account acquisition and a driving force in both customer retention and expansion,” blogged Bombora Senior Product Marketing Manager Ryan Moline.  “This full-funnel visibility into what’s important to your prospects and customers empowers your go-to-market teams with the data needed to create hyper-personalized, omnichannel buying experiences that result in more meetings booked, accelerated deal cycles, and opportunities for long-term growth.  This is just one reason why many of the companies recognized in this year’s Gartner Magic Quadrant partner with Bombora for their Intent data needs.”

Both ABX platforms and direct customers rely on Bombora to identify in-market demand, allowing them to reach out to accounts in their ICP when they are actively researching solutions.  Company Surge data can also be deployed for identifying churn risk accounts and upsell and cross-sell opportunities.

“Bombora’s content consumption model has become the de facto standard in B2B marketing for third-party behavioral data to indicate intent,” stated Forrester.

This month, Bombora announced an integration with HubSpot and an enhanced integration with Salesforce.

“Bombora has prioritized direct integrations and partnerships in order to make it easier for sales and marketing teams to access our insights without changing their workflows,” said Bombora CEO Erik Matlick.  “HubSpot is one of the most well-known marketing, sales, and service software companies in the world, and we’re thrilled for our app to be in the spotlight as they look to help B2B brands with their business challenges.”

Company Surge for Salesforce

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.

Bombora in D&B Hoovers

Search Results include Bombora Intent Badges.

D&B Hoover’s customers can now view and build lists of in-market accounts using the Bombora intent file.  Users can set up SmartLists (dynamic lists) with a combination of account and intent data to identify in-market ICP accounts.  The list is then displayed on the sales rep’s desktop and daily email digest.

Target lists can be assembled from over 175 selects that span company, contact, intent, and technographics.  Bombora intent data is gathered from over 4,000 B2B media website and span 7,000 pre-defined topics.  70% of the websites are exclusive to Bombora.

Dun & Bradstreet provides a sophisticated approach to selecting intent topics that tie to business strategy.  Instead of simply choosing the obvious topics, the firms recommend that customers employ topic clusters, “a group of like-minded Intent topics [that are] representative of all facets of a product or service.”  Clusters would include

  • Brand/Products (core): Brands, products, key functions
  • Competitors/Partners: Brands and products of competitors and partners
  • Industry/Vertical: Strongly associated categories, use cases, and product/service capabilities
  • Pain Points/Challenges: Pain points, issues, expected outcomes
Multiple intent topics may be monitored in a SmartList.

Dun & Bradstreet has removed intent scores, which are often confusing.  By creating clusters, topics are either surging or not, with no interpretation required.  Instead, the number of clustered topics serves as the indicator of surge strength.

The firms recommend that content be adjusted based on the number of intent topics identified for a prospect.  Sales and Marketing should “serve higher-level or awareness-based content to those showing interest in one or two topics, and lower-funnel content to those showing interest on many topics.”  Furthermore, prospects with many surging topics are probably closer to making a purchase.

D&B Hoovers also added 4 million direct dial numbers to their database, bringing the product total to 6.2 million.  Direct dials contain a set of standard and mobile numbers, so users should hover over the direct dial number to determine the phone type.

“As more business contacts work from home, direct dials are essential to engage customers in real-time, from anywhere,” wrote Product Management VP Phil McWade.  “Access these numbers in the lists you’ve already created, when viewing a Contact Profile, or within Contacts Search & Build a List results.”

D&B Hoover’s coverage has grown to 209 million global companies and 235 million contacts

Bombora Growth Capital Financing; Implements BERT

First and third-party intent data vendor Bombora closed on $20 million in growth capital financing from Runway Growth Capital.  The cash infusion “will be used to help Bombora capitalize on market opportunities, build stronger partner relationships, and accelerate its pace of innovation.”

The funds will help them expand data partnerships across the sales and marketing ecosystem. 

“We want to make it easier for brands and their agencies to use it in their own stacks and chosen solutions, and for our platform partners to enhance the value of their own offerings,” said Bombora CEO Erik Matlick.

The firm is also looking to “deliver solutions that enable addressable advertising across the cookieless landscape for publishers and partners alike,” Matlick told Adweek.

“The B2B intent data market is growing quickly, and marketers are seeking better, more efficient ways to identify and engage with in-market prospects. We have been impressed with Bombora’s expertise, and its ‘data collective’ approach really stood out to us in the market.  This partnership adds to Runway’s already strong history of supporting key players in the data and marketing technology space and we are excited to have Bombora join our portfolio.”

Mark Donnelly, Managing Director, Head of Origination at Runway

In other news, Bombora announced that it implemented BERT-based natural language processing in its intent categorization, resulting in a 26% increase in topic prediction.  BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) looks at the context of each occurrence of a word.

“Bombora’s engineers and data scientists never stop looking for ways to serve our customers better,” said Bombora Data Science VP Nicholaus Halecky, Ph.D. “The BERT-based B2B Topic Classifier demonstrates a substantial performance increase in Company Surge intent signal quality, and we know this will improve our customers’ business results.”

The BERT implementation was spearheaded by former PwC and DialogTech data scientist Amber McKenzie, Ph.D., who joined Bombora as VP Data Science. BERT is an open-sourced NLP developed by Google.  It was implemented in Google Search in late 2019 and has since been deployed by Microsoft, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Wayfair.  BERT distinguishes meaning by assessing word order context, seeing the difference in meaning between “the stock of apples has dropped” and “Apple’s stock has dropped.”

G2 – Bombora Partnership

Two of the leading intent data vendors, Bombora and G2 (FKA G2 Crowd), announced a partnership to provide an integrated data set to Pro, Power, Activate, and Accelerate G2 customers from within my.G2.  The combined offering mixes G2’s technology research intelligence with Bombora’s third-party intent data set gathered from dozens of B2B media companies spanning over 4,000 sites.  Thus, software vendors can determine both which companies are exploring solutions in their category and which topics are of interest.

Once activated, My.G2 customers will see Bombora’s topic scores next to G2 Buyer Intent accounts.  Admins configure the relevant Bombora topics for display.  Based on the product, the number of topics is capped at either ten or twenty-five, which should be sufficient for most technology companies.

The partnership is part of Bombora’s freemium strategy, where they license a subset of their content into partner workflows.  In the G2 partnership, they are “double verifying” the intent data for accounts showing activity in G2.  “The customers are not seeing new accounts that we see as showing intent if they are not also coming to the customer’s G2 page.  The goal would be to help prioritize the intent they are receiving in G2 in a light way,” said Bombora Partnerships VP Charles Crnoevich.  “In layman’s terms, they have been to your G2 crowd page or category page (similar to a company coming to your website) and Bombora sees them showing elevated levels of intent around the B2B web – our cooperative of B2B websites.  This data overlay is also only in G2 crowd, so if you wanted a big infusion of Company Surge data in SFDC, Terminus, RollWorks, Marketo, HubSpot, Outreach, etc., you would need a premium license of Company Surge data with us.”

Crnoevich said that there are only a limited number of “compliant and reliable intent data sources” on the market, including G2 and TechTarget, ”so we’re excited to form a partnership with them [G2] from a thought leadership perspective in the intent data community.”

G2’s intent data set complements Bombora’s and is sourced differently.  “G2 shows data across their network on a number of interactions and user level,” stated Crnoevich.  “Our data is across a huge network of sites and we normalize it against normal traffic to give a propensity score instead of a count of interactions.”  Users are shown both the number of relevant topics that are surging at an account and the specific topics and surge scores with surging intent.

Having both topic counts and individual topic surge scores are valuable.  One or two surging topics may be anomalous (particularly at SMBs), but a broad set of related topics that are surging indicate a significant growth in research.  Likewise, high scores above the baseline (50 is the baseline average, and 60 is used as the minimum surge score indicating increased intent), demonstrate a significant spike in interest as well as help shape a sales rep’s positioning.

Bombora’s surge data validate target buyer’s research behavior on G2, helping sales and marketing teams ”craft hyper-personalized outreach covering the products and topics they’re most interested in.”  Intent data from the two firms also assist in sales outreach timing and prioritization.

“Understanding the buyer’s journey so you can help them make informed decisions is one of the most important focus areas for every tech business.  This collaboration allows us to combine the power of G2 Buyer Intent data with Bombora’s Intent topics giving vendors a thorough and enhanced view of their buyers’ research behavior across G2 and the B2B web.  G2 customers will now not only have access to more insights but more context, too.  We’re excited to give businesses the opportunity to experience the value of Bombora’s Intent topics and scores right from within their my.G2 admin panel.”

G2 CRO Mike Weir

While intent data should not be used for defining Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) and ABM lists as it is ephemeral, it is quite valuable for determining which of your ABM firms are currently in-market for technology solutions.  Thus, intent helps decide which accounts should be nurtured by marketing and which should be actively targeted by sales reps.  Surging intent does not answer who, but it addresses “who now?”

“The integration of Bombora with G2 allows revenue teams to see valuable prospects’ activity across both G2.com and the greater B2B web,” said Mike Burton, SVP of Sales at Bombora.  “Combining these powerful intent signals provides a huge validation for account-based activities, arming folks with the information they need to have successful sales and marketing interactions.”

G2 intent data also identifies competitors being researched, which assists with both new opportunity messaging and churn reduction.

G2 has over five million unique monthly visitors researching software solutions.  Half are North American viewers, 20% European, and 20% Asian.

G2 displays both product profiles and user reviews, with products categorized.  Purchasers can even build side-by-side comparisons of software product reviews.

The pandemic has increased the demand for third-party product insights and reviews.  The loss of face-to-face meetings at tradeshows and in the office has moved most product research to the Internet.  The trend of independent purchasing research, which goes back at least a decade, has accelerated.  However, digital research is now being accompanied by intent datasets that are helping level the playing field and provide vendors with early, actionable intelligence about which firms are in-market.

“Seemingly overnight, the ‘digital first’ world [that] sellers once knew has evolved into a “digital-only” world – a world where the same marketers, compete for the same buyers, against the same solutions — across the same channels,” explained G2 Director of Product Marketing Yoni Solomon.  “That’s why incorporating intent data on buyer research, behavior, and online activity has never been more important for the success of B2B sales and marketing.”

Bombora Workflows & Partnerships

A/B Testing analysis of Company Surge variables in LinkedIn Campaign Manager
A/B Testing analysis of Bombora Company Surge variables in LinkedIn Campaign Manager

Intent data vendor Bombora has enlarged its direct sales team and is looking to shift from data resellers to OEM partnerships.  The OEM partnerships will deliver a “limited but powerful amount of data (or limited supported use case)” to customers and partners that want full, direct access.  Terminus is their first OEM partnership, but Bombora is looking to roll out three or four OEM relationships in Q4.

Shifting to OEM workflow solutions for intent data makes sense.  Unlike firmographics, technographics, or contacts, first and third-party intent data is more difficult to present to end users as it is both ephemeral (i.e. changing weekly) and statistically based (i.e. firms with a score above 70 are in the top 6% of signaled intent).  Thus, filtering the data by topic, company, and surge score provides confidence to end users that the data is meaningful.  OEM deals also place the intent data in the proper workflows for sales and marketing end users.

“Say a 200 person software business has Boeing as an account record in their Salesforce. We will append the topics surging at Boeing that that customer has licensed from Bombora onto the account object in Salesforce.  Once it’s there, it becomes searchable, so they can create tasks for salespeople, or they can use Salesforce as a hub and pipe that data to sales platforms, or marketing automation platforms.  Once the data’s in the system, it can be piped out to a bunch of different workflows.”

Bombora SVP Data Sales Michael Burton

Bombora also recently began providing intent-based audience feeds to LinkedIn Marketing Solutions for sponsored content, sponsored InMails, text ads, video ads, and dynamic ads.  Each week, Bombora provides an updated list of domains to LinkedIn based upon ABM lists or firmographic selects.  The domain list is updated dynamically based upon surge data with the first set of matched audiences available within 48 hours.  On the LinkedIn side, LinkedIn member targeting is available (e.g. job function, level, interests) through the Campaign Manager.

Bombora recommends that users perform A/B testing against the standard B2B audience list and the company surge list.

Bombora was spun out of Madison Logic in 2014 and made the Inc 5000 list for the first time in 2019 placing #997.  2018 revenue hit $26.4 million, up 425% over three years.

Bombora – LiveRamp Partnership

LiveRamp - Bombora data flows for audience targeting.
LiveRamp – Bombora data flows for audience targeting.

This is Bombora week in my blog. Yesterday I covered their Bombora for Growth offering and today I’m discussing their August LiveRamp partnership. It is one of many partnerships they’ve formed over the past few years

Bombora’s latest partnership is with LiveRamp, an identity resolution firm that also supports data onboarding.  Bombora identifies audiences based on intent data to develop in-market audiences for both large and small companies.  Large company attribution is fairly straightforward as IP addresses can be employed.  For smaller companies, attribution is performed behaviorally based on thirty attributes with an 86% confidence level.

Bombora then layers in their topical surge data to determine which companies are showing high levels of intent by topic.

“What typically we’d receive from Bombora is a list of IP addresses which map a specific business profile,” said LiveRamp B2B COO Pieter De Temmerman.  “For example, we might be asked, ‘Can you find small businesses that are currently in-market to buy a CRM system, or accounting software, or you name it’.”

“What Bombora has done, and patented, is we’ve looked at IP addresses from a behavioral perspective, and because we see 30 to 40 billion business transactions a month, we’re looking at them through the lens of the behavioral attributes of a business (versus a home, Starbucks, or hotel) IP address.”

Bombora CSO Mark Dye

“What we realized is that a lot of these B2B marketers are wanting to target large companies, which are easy to identify, but are also wanting to have a conversation with the longer tail of customers,” said de Temmerman.  “When you’re dealing with these smaller companies, you might be dealing with a large number of prospects, but you don’t necessarily know who they are,”

The combined offering pulls together a set of third-party cookies and associated devices for anonymous users, expanding the universe of targetable in-market SMBs.  According to Bombora, “This solution, being the first of its kind in the B2B market, produces a high likelihood of the SMB audience to be susceptible to the ads they are seeing.  Thus, producing a higher return on ad spend and a lower customer acquisition cost.”

Bombora targets 7.5 million global SMBs with up to 100 employees based on IP addresses.  Bombora audience targeting is initially available for North America and the UK with plans to expand to additional markets “in the coming months.”

LiveRamp charges $2 per CPM for SMB targeting and $4 per CPM for Bombora surge-based SMB targeting.

Other articles on Bombora Partnerships: