Demandbase Builds Professional Demand

You've allocated some serious advertising dollars to get visitors to your Web page -- but once you have those eyeballs, there's little you can do to keep them there and ensure the wallets connected to them buy something. Wouldn't it be great if you could see who was shopping around on your site and you could instantly gain that visitor's contact information to follow up? Well, the folks at lead-generation automation company Demandbase have focused on this notion. And it's a good thing, too, since 95 percent of all people visiting your Web site will depart without signing in, registering, or contacting you.

The San Francisco–based Demandbase released its flagship Demandbase Central product in August 2008, a platform that aggregates data from sources such as Hoover's, ZoomInfo, Jigsaw, and Experian to score and segment lead opportunities. As a follow-up, Demandbase came out with a free product in November -- a widget called Stream that works as a ticker along on the bottom of any Web site. The ticker identifies relevant businesses visiting the Web site. Users of the widget can then click on the contact information and purchase it from Demandbase. Chris Golec, founder and chief executive officer of Demandbase, tells destinationCRM.com that the widget really helped in getting the Demandbase brand out to the company's target B2B audience. Now, however, Demandbase is further evolving its product line and getting a bit more professional.

This week marked the launch of Demandbase Professional, a Web analytics platform that aggregates and separates lead data, giving organizations and marketers the ability to see which leads should be followed up on. "It's an interesting product and certainly is relevant in a down economic time where we see marketing folks going back to basics and focusing on targeting and segmenting so that they can better identify prospects and have relevant offerings," says Jonathan Block, senior director of research for SiriusDecisions.

The Professional platform allows users to identify the business traffic that most resembles a target market, thereby segmenting a batch of leads. Demandbase says the Professional edition also offers the following key capabilities:

• Daily Lead Report: Users get a detailed report about the previous day's Web traffic. They can see who visited the Web site and whether that person fits the company's target market. The report includes a list of the best business contacts (filtered from sites such as Hoover's and Jigsaw) for any follow-up from either sales or marketing. The lead report is sent through email daily and can be imported into CRM or marketing automation systems or routed to another person in the team for follow-up.
• WebLeads: The Professional product presents detailed contact information for each Demandbase Web lead, as well as the date of visit, the number of visits, the number of pages viewed, and even the specific pages the person viewed on the Web site.
• B2B Web Analytics: The analysis reports include charts and graphs for easy visualization -- charts that reveal trends around, say, percentage of traffic over time. The analytics functions also allow for classification according to several business demographics such as specific industries or company sizes.
• Trend Analysis: Users can track "trends" such as geography, company size, and industry. The trend analysis can then be related to the effectiveness of the marketing campaigns.
• Profile Matching and Filtering: Users can segment and create custom profiles of certain types of leads. They can run reports detailing those visitors who match the profile, as well as the percentage of traffic that meets the profile criteria both daily and over time.
• Lead Routing: Professional allows people to create rules that will set minimum lead-scoring parameters for allowing a lead to enter the system. Users can also specify the person to whom certain leads go.

Block says that an important aspect to the Demandbase product is the ability to let marketers home in on targets and to separate out those who aren't interested in doing business. He adds that targeting the right customers has never been more important. "The next step is integrating with other marketing systems," he says. "Once I identify users, I need to get them into CRM or a marketing automation platform. [Demandbase is] doing this now, but the more they can integrate into other overall marketing services, the more streamlined they become."

 

News relevant to the customer relationship management industry is posted several times a day on destinationCRM.com, in addition to the news section Insight that appears every month in the pages of CRM magazine. You may leave a public comment regarding this article by clicking on "Comments" at the top; to contact the editors, please email editor@destinationCRM.com.

Related Articles

Demandbase Shines Up Its Stream Product

With real-time alerts and notifications, the lead generation solution provider helps users be even more proactive when it comes to Web site activity.

ZoomInfo Finds a Fresh Way to Collect Contacts

With the introduction of FreshContacts, the business database service provider allows users to gain access data for free -- so long as they trade in their business contacts.

Climbing to New Heights of Lead Generation

Looking to expand its library of ideas, CrownPeak, a provider of Web content management software, turns to Demandbase to target more customers at less expense.

Demandbase Provides More Tools to Capture Ripe Leads

The provider of lead-generation solutions unveils Demandbase Professional 2.0 to help B2Bs target the right people at the right time.

Jigsaw Cleans Your Cloud

The online business directory's new Data Fusion product targets issues of data quality.

ZoomInfo Zooms In On the SMB

The company data provider focuses on bringing more intelligent data to the midmarket.

Cloud-y Announcements Surround Salesforce.com

Dreamforce '08: Salesforce.com's partners capitalize on conference momentum with a number of new announcements and product releases.

Demandbase Helps Harvest Leads, One by One

The software-as-a-service demand generation specialist gets on the platform bandwagon, and releases a free tracking widget as well.

5 Key Elements of Microtargeting

Improved campaign relevance will stretch your marketing budget.

Mismanaged Lead Management

Sales organizations aren't measuring what they need to measure; closed loop lead management could be the answer to multiple woes.

Are We There Yet?

After years of false starts, wrong turns, and disruptive detours, SMBs can now steer themselves in the right direction: Marketing can finally get them where they want to go.