Demandbase boosts its B2B early warning system

Metaphorically, Demandbase’s new Real-Time Intent is a kind of early warning system for business sellers.

Demandbase helps marketers target content, ads and sales to web users, based on the company they’re coming from and their interests.

Today, it is upping its Account-Based Marketing game, announcing new artificial intelligence tech that processes more data more quickly, so marketers get a better idea of what a web user is looking for, earlier in the search.

Called Real-Time Intent, it processes much of the same kind of data as previously — website visits, form fill-outs, pages viewed and the like. But it can now treat pages viewed and other data as early intent signals and act on those signals in real time.

CEO Chris Golec told me that Demandbase previously “did the same thing, but at a lesser scale,” crawling the business web and drawing conclusions about what people wanted to buy.

Now, he said, it tracks 500 million unique business users monthly, accounting for about 100 billion intent/interest signals. It then categorizes those signals into 50,000 categories of interest, compared to fewer than 10,000 previously. Here’s one Demandbase screen showing real-time intent/interests from users at specific business accounts:

Demandbase identifies users’ companies by their IP address and other clues. In addition to what those users are reading, the platform employs data from ad networks and exchanges, third-party info about the companies in question and publicly available data from social media, articles, press releases and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

It’s a lot more data much earlier in the B2B buyer’s customer journey, Golec said, compared to before, where Demandbase “was not tracking reading at scale with AI.” This means, he said, that marketers can now identify a company’s interest in their product as soon as they start researching, before they hit your website.

Last year, the company bought data science firm Spiderbook, which automated the process of crawling the web and used machine learning/natural language processing to identify companies in the market to buy specific products and services.

Research firm Gartner has estimated that B2B buyers have already completed about 60 percent of their purchase-decision process by the time they reach a vendor, so having early insight can help steer a buyer toward your product.

Golec suggested that someone selling, say, Cisco servers can now see what tech people from GE are reading about as soon as they start the process. Demandbase’s data is made available to tools and platforms for ads, sales intelligence and web site personalization.

Golec acknowledged that a data vendor like Bombora also deals in B2B intent data, but he said they “are more of a data aggregrator” that eventually makes its data available to marketers and tools, whereas Demandbase is an AI/tech company that offers real-time signals to automatically inform ads, sales and content.

Bombora, he noted, is “not monitoring traffic signals,” but collecting data like form fill-outs or white paper downloads, while Demandbase employs AI to process as much as 10 times more data.

About The Author

Barry Levine

Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.