Spiceworks on Wednesday said it would be able to help those marketing CRM, marketing automation and supply chain management applications improve their ability to reach buyers by adding more than a dozen categories to an intent-based targeting service it introduced last year.
Austin-based Spiceworks, which serves as an online marketplace and community for discussions among IT decision-makers, classified the new categories under general headings of business applications, cloud and security. Besides martech products, those in the business applications area would also include tools for HR departments, as well as more horizontal products such as analytics and productivity.
Brand customers who work with Spiceworks can use the intent-based targeting signals generated by discussions in its forums from tech buyers, reviews they’re reading on the site and other activities to determine who is actively looking to make a purchase. Spiceworks offers a number of ways to reach out to those buyers, including advertising, content syndication and e-mail to its opted-in distribution list.
Spiceworks’ executive director of product management Jonathan Sass said intent-based targeting has already helped create a more relevant buying experience for its community, and almost doubling the number of categories will only make its customers more successful.
“It really came through feedback from clients. They just wanted to see more granularity,” Sass told B2B News Network. “The initial set were in natural areas like hardware, software and so on, but this was a way of taking those segments to the next level.”
Sass said there were no immediate plans to continue adding categories for intent-based targeting, but that its data science team would continue to review the billions of data it generates to determine if further refinement is needed. The more immediate priority will be helping guide brands on how best to act on those intent signals and optimize their marketing plans accordingly.
“Some are aligned better at different stages within the buying funnel than others,” he said. “It depends on what your goals are. Some are focused on brand awareness, so you may want to go broader than your initial chosen intent segment and combine with audiences outside of it. In other cases you might want to leverage audience extension, display, e-mail. Or you might be focused on lead generation.”
While Spiceworks is serving up intent-based targeting data based on what’s happening within its community, others, including DemandBase and True Influence, have been offering similar capabilities to help brands do the same thing based on visits to their own sites. Sass said there were no integrations with third party vendors at the moment but said the company would offer more details about its plans at its Spiceworld conference to be held this September.
