Demandbase Launches B2B Marketing Cloud

Demandbase, which helps B2B marketers target Web advertising to their prospective clients, has created a B2B Marketing Cloud designed to address the unique needs of B2B advertisers. "This is the first marketing cloud designed specifically for B2B," says CEO Chris Golec, who explains that the product is designed to address a gap in the advertising marketplace. "There's millions of dollars spent on B2B marketing, and all the solutions available are mostly B2C based. This market is hugely underserved," he adds.

The cornerstone of the B2B Marketing Cloud is the Performance Manager, an interactive dashboard that ties together advertising impressions, Web site activity, and CRM data. Instead of focusing on traditional B2C metrics such as cost per sale or impression, the Performance Manager focuses on metrics that make sense to B2B marketers. They can see how many impressions were served to each company, the cost to advertise to that specific company, and what kind of sales activity has resulted.

There are also insight graphs designed to specifically address B2B concerns. A view called "Pipeline Risk" compares Web site activity to Salesforce opportunity probability. A manager could look at the dashboard and see how many high-probability deals have no or few Web site views in a recent time period, a warning sign. The manager can also view hidden opportunities, companies that have frequently viewed a Web site but aren't listed as opportunities in Salesforce.

The B2B Marketing Cloud also enables marketers to have a full-funnel view of marketing performance. With an account view, a marketer can see ad spend, ad performance, interactions with the Web site, and what sales activity resulted for each company that is being targeted. "Our whole platform optimizes the ad spend based on actual sales activity," Golec says.

Demandbase has also included benchmarks in its B2B Marketing Cloud so companies can see how much they're spending on campaigns compared to others, giving them a better sense of what kind of campaign performance or cost is normal across customer averages.

The B2B Marketing Cloud allows companies to buy and plan their advertising spend within the platform. With the Programmatic Audience Creation feature, marketers can choose to target ads to groups such as the Fortune 500 or the top companies by industry. They can further target their ad spend by attributes like revenue, location, and technologies used. Marketers with existing clients they want to target can upload lists from their marketing automation or CRM system to use in their targeting campaign.

The feature sets make Golec confident Demandbase offers far more power and ease of use for B2B marketers. "This platform has been specifically for the B2B sector from the ground up. Selling to multiple people, the critical role of the Web site and the longer sales cycle—none of those things are true in B2C," Golec sums up. "You can't do [B2B marketing] with a foundation built for consumer marketers."

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