by Jess Nelson , October 6, 2017

Demandbase has unified targeting, engagement, and conversion solutions into an end-to-end B2B marketing platform.

The San Francisco-based company announced the expansion of its account-based marketing (ABM) platform on Thursday to help marketers guide prospects down the entire funnel.

The user interface is straightforward, enabling marketers to select target accounts, manage their audience segments across campaigns, integrate CRM data, and measure the success of account-based marketing programs. The platform includes website optimization, forms, live chat, and account-based marketing automation such as email as well.

A layer of artificial intelligence, embedded into the Demandbase platform, surfaces important data points that help marketers personalize their communication for optimal return on investment. It looks for data patterns, and associates them with prospective and client accounts. Demandbase claims the layer of A.I. improves account identification rates, as well as the ability to create targeted audiences based on intent signals and interests.

Account-based marketing, or ABM, is a popular B2B marketing tactic. “It all comes down to targeting the right accounts effectively,” says Chris Golec, CEO at Demandbase. Funneling budget into SEO and social “is useless if it’s not targeting the right people on the right account,” he explains.

Prioritizing “big wins” is not a new concept in the advertising industry, but technology now empowers marketers to focus their energy on the sales that matter. “It’s much less expensive to market to a limited number of companies than it is to market to the masses,” explains Golec.

The challenge for many marketers, however, is to ensure that they are attracting the right companies to their website, engaging with them with the right content at the right time, and then turning that engagement into sales activity. With as many a 10-20 people influencing a decision, Golec says it’s important to determine the right people to target.

Demandbase monitors online signals such as “what people are reading, what they’re writing, and what they’re doing,” says Golec. “By applying AI, we can put all of that into something that’s useful for sales and marketing teams.” Demandbase has its own DSP, and Golec says it ingests 50 billion signals a month.

Particularly helpful for marketers is a visualization feature that illustrates how accounts are moving down the pipeline.

MediaPost.com: Search Marketing Daily

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