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Account-based marketing specialist Demandbase announced the launch of the B2B Data Cloud, a data platform designed to serve the entire marketing and sales funnel from advertising through to customer relationship management (CRM).
The platform combines account-based identification technology using network IP addresses, behavioral intelligence and third-party data with customer’s first-party information.
The B2B Data Cloud is designed to drive more effective advertising, personalization and sales programs by allowing customers to leverage an open data model that connects into hundreds of ad exchanges, marketing technologies and CRM systems.
“Ten years ago, when a marketing department wanted to purchase technology to improve their efficiency, reach more prospects or engage their customers, they had to go through their IT department,” Peter Isaacson, chief marketing officer at Demandbase, told eWEEK. “Which meant your project was 27th in line, sitting behind finance, sales, operations, even HR.”
With the introduction of cloud-based technologies, marketing departments didn’t have to integrate that technology into a company’s legacy systems, Isaacson explained, noting that marketers could access these tools through a browser and a whole new world opened up to them.
“More than any other reason, that is why marketing technology companies have exploded from 200 four years ago to a couple of thousand today,” he said.
The company also announced Job Function Targeting, a feature within Demandbase’s Account-Based Advertising and Account-Based Retargeting solutions that leverages B2B behavioral data from its recent acquisition of WhoToo.
This enables Demandbase customers to advertise to the right buyers and influencers within their most important target accounts.
With Job Function Targeting, Demandbase provides an advertising solution that is tailored for B2B, complete with superior account targeting, millions of business profiles, a proprietary real-time bidder built for B2B and an account-based performance dashboard.
“It would be tough to find a marketer today who would say that data analytics will decrease in importance,” Isaacson said. “As data continues to become more readily available, marketers need to re-evaluate how they leverage the information across solutions, from marketing automation and advertising all the way to CRM.”
In addition, he noted that data will play an essential role in how B2B marketers advertise, personalize, convert and measure campaigns so that they’re aligned with sales every step of the way.
“This will ensure that marketing is measuring what’s most important to sales so they can provide prospects with a more cohesive experience across the funnel,” he explained. “The best advice I can give is to make sure you have a rock star leading your marketing ops team.”