NetLine brings company-targeting to its self-service content marketing portal
Long available via its managed services practice, company targeting means self-service marketers only pay for account-specific leads.
In the mid-90s, Los Gatos, California-based NetLine began offering a managed services distribution of B2B content like white papers to websites, blogs, RSS feeds and newsletters.
That service allowed enterprise marketers to target either individual companies or types of users, such as IT management at companies larger than 500 employees in the US and the UK.
Marketers only paid for leads when they matched their targets, either individual companies or types of users. Publishers that made the content available received a piece of the lead gen fee.
In the managed services offering, content is targeted at users either by comparing visitors’ IP address to known companies or by the email address and other info in the online form visitors filled out before downloading the content. Publishers can also help visitors to self-select themselves by creating surrounding content, such as a blog post pointing out that this downloadable white paper is designed for enterprise IT users.
About a year ago, NetLine opened a self-service Portal, so that B2B marketers could upload a white paper themselves and select their targets at much lower fees and without contracts.
Through the self-service portal, they could only target by job level, company size, job area, industry and geographic region, after the visitor filled out a form. Leads matching those criteria were the ones the marketers paid for.
Today, NetLine is taking the next step for its self-service content marketing portal.
It is adding the ability for self-service marketers to upload a list of specific companies along with their content, and pay only when they obtain leads from those companies. The company notes this kind of targeting/lead payment was previously only available for full-service enterprise clients with large monthly budgets and contracts.
This means that IP targeting before a form is filled out is now also available through the self-service portal, in addition to company filtering through the form. Here’s a workflow to set up filtering:
SVP of Audience and Product David Fortino told me that, to his knowledge, this is “the first self-service content-powered ABM [account-based marketing] platform available on the market.” He noted that account-targeting services like DemandBase are focused on display ads, while NetLine users only pay for leads matching their targets.
NetLine quoted Citrix’s Marketing Program Manager Jillian Gillette, who said that “the quality of the leads is consistently excellent [from both the managed services offering and the self-service portal], resulting in greater ROI.”
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