Demandbase’s July acquisition of B2B marketing vendor Engagio is bearing fruit.
On Tuesday, Demandbase released a new version of its platform called Demandbase One, which combines its existing marketing automation and account-based marketing offerings with inbound B2B marketing capabilities from Engagio.
Demandbase One includes the core Demandbase ABM platform, which uses predictive analytics to help marketers and salespeople prioritize, manage and analyze accounts and ABM campaigns, as well as the ability to deliver personalized ads, orchestrate across channels and do attribution.
“The ability to expand audiences and advertise to them is really what is going to change the world of B2B advertising,” said Demandbase CEO Gabe Rogol.
Understanding how display ads are performing, for example, is particularly important for marketers in the B2B world due to their longer sales cycles.
B2B marketers don’t expect their target audience to convert directly from a display ad, said Jimmy Montchal, VP of demand generation at Coursedog, a startup that sells class scheduling software for colleges and universities, and one of Demandbase’s beta testers.
“If I have eight different sets of buyers for every deal I do, how do I know my ads are working if I’m looking at vanity metrics, like click and impression?” Montchal said.
Coursedog uses Demandbase to track which ads are driving awareness, which specific accounts are visiting its site after seeing an ad and whether those accounts are anonymous or known.
“It’s helping us to understand the impact of ads and it’s helping me justify spending back to finance and leadership,” Montchal said.
Justifying spend and precise targeting were always important, but they’ve become de rigueur during the pandemic.
Coursedog targets academic institutions, most of which have been super busy thinking about getting students back to campus safely. Contracting with a new software provider hasn’t necessarily been top of mind for Coursedog’s usual prospects.
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“We’ve really had to buckle down to make sure that we’re spending as effectively and efficiently as possible in the right areas,” Montchal said. “That means focusing on accounts that are actually in market rather than taking a traditional lead gen approach where you’re casting a wider net.”
That’s where intent data comes in, said Jon Miller, founder and former CEO of Engagio, and now Demandbase’s chief product officer.
With the new unified platform, B2B marketers can integrate their first-party and CRM data with proprietary Demandbase data to get a more complete, single view of target accounts and the people associated with them, Miller said.
“Marketers can then use that information to find the best accounts for their businesses and prioritize those accounts,” Miller said.
For example, Demandbase uses its algorithm to help marketers zero in on high-value intent keywords beyond the usual, generic ones, said Coursedog’s Montchal.
“That way we can see people at the top of the funnel even before they’ve started to engage with us,” he said. “With COVID, we don’t want to be over communicating with colleges that are already stressed out, which is why knowing if there is actual engagement is critical for us.”
Since starting on the new platform, Coursedog has seen a 25% lift in account visits to its site and a 25% uptick in revenue coming from its most valuable tier-one accounts. Website revenue has increased 250% year over year.
“We’ve seen these massive increases because we’ve been able to turn the web channel into a revenue-producing opportunity,” Montchal said. “It’s the ability to see insights for anonymous and known users and make decisions in an automated way so that we can follow up in the right sequence.”
