DemandBase says marketers will soon be able to assess which B2B professionals are ready to make a purchase in a way that’s similar to studying keywords to know which topics will be popular in search engines.
The San Francisco-based firm this week launched Real-Time Intent, an application that will work with its account-based marketing software with artificial intelligence (AI) to identify buyers earlier in the online research process. The data comes from a variety of sources, including ad networks, exchanges, its own proprietary data and publicly-available information on social media and the press. DemandBase claims its network receives more than 400 million B2B users each month.
Real-Time Intent will look for signals such as the top topics/keywords of information companies are researching, the number of employees researching them, what articles they are reading and if they are researching a firm’s competitors. It will also allow customers to identify companies and verticals they might not have been aware of or actively targeting.
“This moves beyond account rankings to understand what individuals from specific companies are reading and researching across the internet,” Chris Golec, DemandBase’s CEO, told B2B News Network.
By understanding intent at the earliest possible moment, you can engage accounts well before your competitors have a chance to react, Golec said. And by understanding the intent throughout the buying and customer lifecycle, you can tailor your communications to deliver the right message at the right time.
The AI component of Real-Time Intent likely comes via technology from Spiderhook, a data science firm DemandBase bought last year. Spiderhook specialized in automating 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.
“You can use the insights on what people are reading to influence content strategy across the funnel,” Golec explained. “If buyers showing early interest in ABM tend to look at infographics, for example, let’s plan for more infographics.”
Perhaps more critically, though, is the connection DemandBase claims Real-Time Intent will make between sales and marketing teams. Companies could filter accounts by intent, for example, and push the list to sales development representatives (SDRs) each morning with specific topic points, Golec said, or or trigger SDR outreach for any account that shows a spike in intent.
DemandBase says Real-Time Intent will allow customers to personalize web site experiences at the persona level later this year. At this point, Golec said the technology can identify intent at the account level, while identifying intent at the persona and individual level is in the works for future releases.
