Azalead Account Based Marketing Tracks Web Site Visitors, Orchestrates Outbound Messages, and Reports on Results

Account Based Marketing. Perhaps you’ve heard of it?

Okay, just kidding: ABM gets just slightly less attention than Donald Trump and arguably generates a similar amount of confusion. Many of the industry vendors are addressing that problem (the confusion, not Trump) by working together in the Account Based Marketing Consortium which, among other things, has published an excellent survey and nifty six-level functional framework. You can download them both here.

The purpose of the framework is to help marketers understand the differences between ABM vendors. Let’s apply it to ABM Consortium member Azalead, a Paris-based firm that is planning to enter the U.S. market.

We’ll start with an overview of what Azalead does. It lets marketers create lists of target accounts by identifying Web site visitors (at the company level) based on IP address, by reading data through a CRM system integration, or by uploading lists any source. Users can export account lists for retargeting, connect via API with the company Web site to personalize messages shown to visitors from target firms, or send lists to CRM. Azalead tags can be embedded in Web pages or emails to track response. Opportunities and revenues can also be imported from CRM. The system reports on impressions (i.e., messages sent), responses, opportunities and pipeline value for targeted accounts and gives salespeople lists of all identified Web site visitors or of visits from target accounts.  It can also rank accounts with a system-generated engagement score.

Now that you have a more or less coherent view of Azalead functions, we can map these to the Consortium framework.

Account Selection: users can select accounts from the list of identified Web site visitors, from the list of accounts imported from CRM, or from any other list uploaded to the system. There is no predictive scoring although users can build lists by filtering on whatever attributes have been attached to the records, such as industry, country, or company size. Azalead has created its own technology to identify site visitors whose IP address cannot be tied directly to a specific company. Results vary, but in Europe this can increase the percentage of identified visitors from the usual 30% to as high as 50%..

Insights: once a company has been identified, Azalead can present users – typically sales people – with a screen that shows the company name, basic information (industry, revenues, etc.) from an external database, engagement history as captured by Azalead’s Web and email tags, and contact names from the CRM system. 

Content: Azalead doesn’t create content.

Orchestration: Azalead can create lists based on engagement level, opportunity stage (imported from CRM), and other account attributes.  Different lists can be selected for different marketing treatments.

Delivery: Azalead tags on a company Web site can both identify visitors and return basic parameters including company name, industry and size. These parameters can drive personalized Web site messages. Messages in other channels are generated by sending lists to marketing automation, CRM, retargeting, or other external systems.

Measurement: Azalead offers a summary dashboard and more detailed information on retargeting, display ads, and Web site visitors. A pipeline impact report plots sales opportunity probability against marketing engagement for individual deals, helping marketers to see the impact of their efforts.

So, what information is missing here? The framework doesn’t explicitly cover integration, arguably because that’s a supporting technology rather than a functional capability. Azalead has API-level integration with Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics CRM. A general purpose API allows custom integration with Web sites and other systems. The company is working on API integration with major marketing automation platforms, but currently uses its own tags to track response to emails sent by those systems.

The framework also doesn’t including pricing or vendor background, which are also not functional capabilities.  Azalead pricing is published on its Web site. A limited system starts at $1,000 per month for a 3,000 monthly Web visits and 400,000 ad impressions. A system with all features starts at $3,200 per month for 20,000 Web visits and 1.4 million impressions. The company was founded in 2013 and currently has about 80 customers, mostly tech companies in Europe. It plans to open a New York office later this year.

Vendemore Moves B2B Display Ad Targeting Towards the Bottom of the Funnel

My post last month on DemandBase and Bizo’s products to target Web display ads at individual businesses resulted in a call from Vendemore, a Stockholm, Sweden-based firm that has been providing similar services for seven and a half years. Like the other firms, Vendemore uses IP address to identify the company of Web site visitors, spots visitors of interest to its clients, and sends targeted ads to those visitors. This can happen via real time bidding for ads on external Web sites or on the client’s own home page. Vendemore can also use cookies to identify site visitors for retargeting on other Web sites within an ad network.

Users can assign spending limits, frequency caps, and ad contents to individual businesses or to lists of businesses. API integration with CRM and marketing automation systems also lets those systems assign businesses to the target lists. This allows marketers to send different contents to companies as the marketing automation system tracks them through different stages of the buying process. Vendemore has also developed standard formats for channels including YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and surveys, making it easy to convert existing content into advertisements. It provides more global coverage than U.S.-centric DemandBase and Bizo.

It's tempting to position Vendemore and similar firms at the top of the marketing funnel, as a way to connect with new prospects that have not yet identified themselves to a company. This would offer a simple narrative about expanding B2B marketing automation beyond its home base in the middle of the funnel, where it nurtures known leads. But that’s not quite right. Vendemore CEO Christopher Engman says the system is used primarily to reach people at firms which have already begun a buying process. He said the other most common applications are to encourage cross selling within existing client accounts and to reach potential users at firms that have authorized corporate purchases of a product but left the actual buying decisions to individual divisions or departments. In each case, the systems reaches people at target firms who can't be identified by the sales force or marketing automation.  In two of those three cases, the result is actually to move further down the funnel, to existing customers, rather than higher up.

Looking even further down the funnel, today also brought an announcement by retention specialist Optimove of its new ability send retention messages via paid online advertising, in the form of Facebook Custom Audiences. I’ve recently had some other conversations as well about using marketing automation to support retention campaigns.

So we are indeed seeing an expansion of marketing automation along two dimensions: beyond email to media such as paid advertising and Web personalization, and down the funnel towards customer growth and retention. The move down-funnel makes particular sense because it leverages the known individuals present in the marketing automation database.

I still do expect to see marketing automation systems move up-funnel towards acquisition.  This will use paid advertising and social media, supported by unified databases built with Customer Data Platforms. But apparently it will happen later than I had expected.  After all, it's easier to add value when selling to existing customers, there are fewer synergies between acquisition and marketing automation (i.e., no known individuals to leverage), and marketing automation is run by different people than paid advertising and social media. If you’re sniffing around for the Next Big Thing, this suggests you might turn your nose in a slightly different direction.

DemandBase Adds Real-Time Access to Web Visitor Identities

Summary: DemandBase has added real-time access to its data identifying Web site visitors, enabling Web sites to deliver customized pages. It's another step in the company's systematic expansion.

It’s more than a year since my original post about DemandBase. At the time, they had just extended their product beyond basic IP-address-based Web visitor identification to provide company details and contact names. Last week they announced their next leap forward, an API to return detailed company information quickly enough to use it to tailor visitor treatments.
Specifically, ABR returns data within 10 milliseconds of the initial page request, in time to customize even the first page served. According to DemandBase, this compares with one to two seconds for conventional IP address look-ups.

ABR gains its speed by querying DemandBase’s own database rather than querying external directories. This is one of those things that is harder than it sounds. DemandBase built its database by monitoring which IP addresses most often visit its 2,000-plus clients, parsing multiple external IP directories for the owners and geo-locations of the servers at those addresses, and adding attributes from business directories including D&B, Hoovers and JigSaw. The company says it can associate three times as many visitors with U.S. business addresses as a conventional IP lookup.

Once it finds a match, ABR will return 15-20 client-selected company attributes including size, industry and corporate parent. The system can also apply and return a client’s own data, such as the salesperson assigned to a company and custom classifications for size or industry. These features were already available from DemandBase: what's new with ABR is exposing the data to other applications through a real time API.

One use for the data is to feed rules that send different messages to different sets of customers and prospects. DemandBase is also working to use the data to route chat requests to appropriate agents. Another benefit is sending shorter registration forms to system-identified visitors, improving completion rates while still capturing complete profile data. The system also improves Web analytics by flagging responses from specific companies and market segments, even when visitors fail to identify themselves, delete cookies, or reach the site without clicking on email links.

ABR is still a bit rough around the edges. In particular, there are no prebuilt connectors for specific application systems (Web site engines, CRM systems or analytics tools), so clients are on their own when it comes to integrating the information they receive. The first connectors are due shortly. Similarly, client data such as customers and sales people must currently be loaded by DemandBase staff. This will also change, first with a self-service file upload and eventually with a direct API connection.

Pricing for ABR is set at $2,500 per month for unlimited use. This is beyond the reach of many small businesses, but affordable for companies with the technical savvy and visitor volume to benefit from the system.

Beyond its intrinsic merits, ABR is an interesting illustration of DemandBase’s continuing effort to separate itself from the commodity businesses of IP lookup and compiled data. The company started by giving away its basic service, identification of company visitors to Web sites, to quickly build a large base of clients and partners. It then added value by enhancing the data with business directory information and making it easy to buy the names of individual contacts. ABR further expands the company’s footprint by using its data to enhance other systems, moving it beyond the business of selling stand-alone software. Clever folks.