A New Zero-Waste Approach to Company Advertising

Just a few months ago, CMS Critic covered the news of our release of Real-Time Identification for Drupal CMS users. Since then, we’ve opened the API for our platform, giving developers the opportunity to leverage company identification of web visitors – using company IP addresses or networks – and use each company’s set of attributes to serve a more personalized experience. And just last month, we launched Real-Time Identification for CRM at Dreamforce.

Over the last year, our team has been hard at work to release the next phase to our platform. It’s a major piece to our puzzle, this time changing the way business advertisers target and personalize their ads.

Today, we launched Demandbase Company-Targeted Advertising, and for the first time, advertisers have the ability to target specific companies only, and through this technology, they can follow that customer from the ad to the web site and through the CRM system – through the entire campaign, with no cookies.

We saw an opportunity in the B2B advertising market when we saw marketers struggle with campaigns with little results. In fact, some companies are wasting more than 90 percent of their ad budget to attract businesses to their website. B2B sales teams are usually only targeting a few thousand companies, yet there are tens of millions of them out there. So we came up with a brand new approach, giving B2B advertisers the opportunity to run efficient, zero-waste campaigns.

By uniquely identifying companies on a website – on the first visit and without a cookie – we qualify the visitors and when applicable, they are served the targeted ads. This is what makes the Demandbase Company-Targeted Advertising solution so unique. You can serve ads to your targets on their FIRST visit to a target site while making them personal and more relevant.

So here’s how it works. We ask our customers to send us a list of companies, or a set of attributes about a company that would be a good target for them. For instance, they can target Fortune 1000 companies, or select businesses by industry size, revenue, exact company name, or a number of attributes. This is a critical step in ensuring that Company-Targeted Advertising produces zero-waste campaigns. From there, we get the customer’s creative, or if they don’t have one yet, we can work with them to create ads in house here at Demandbase. Then we work with ad exchanges to make sure that client ads are personalized and served to the companies on the target list. No more effort, time and money wasted on focusing ads where they don’t belong – in front of companies that aren’t on your target list or match up to the attributes you were looking for in a company.

Metrics like impressions, clicks and CPL, still apply, but also companies can now connect your ad spend to overall target company engagement. With our solution, customers know their targets, so they are able to engage accounts that were not responding to other marketing tactics, as well as accelerate the buyer’s journey for those already engaged.

A few large enterprise companies have been testing this with us, and they’re targeting and personalizing online ads to specific account lists to drive higher website engagement. While our customers are still underway on their campaigns (and not yet ready to share those results but will soon!) we know they’re seeing more brand awareness, sales leads and revenue from these targeted companies. Imagine the impact it could have on your marketing efforts… what would you do differently?