Commentary

Intent Data Is Powerful Tool For Business Decisionmakers

Tom O’Regan is CEO of Madison Logic, an 8-year-old, B2B firm that’s focused on digital brand and demand-generation solutions. The big differentiator here is that Madison Logic uses intent data (demographic and purchase intent data) to help businesses make better decisions. Madison considers TechTarget, IDG and LinkedIn its closest competitors.

Through its publisher platform, Madison also aggregates digital and mobile display inventory from more than 4 billion buyer intent interactions. It claims reach encompassing more than 2 million companies and 400 million unique users across key B2B industries and functions.

RTBlog asked O’Regan for an example. Take Google, which has products it sells to B2B companies. Madison is able to show which companies are in the market for Google’s cloud-based storage solutions, say, and show what type of content is germane to potential customers. You would call that lead generation. 

It goes a bit further: Say you’re a B2B company that wants to know which companies are showing an interest in cloud-based solutions, and you need to create content that specifically appeals to this audience. “We’re helping fill a pipeline for those firms,” O’Regan said.

Madison runs native, display and mobile campaigns across a network of 1,600 sites that leverage proprietary technology enabling clients to see everything that business decision-makers are looking for. “We are looking to identify the intent of business decision-makers: What type of content is resonating with them? Whitepapers, webinars, infographics? We can target these people on contextual websites in the B2B ecosystem,” O’Regan said. “We run native campaigns on our platform and elsewhere. We use a DSP in-house and our data to target a platform.”

O’Regan notes quite rightly  that one of the biggest problems with native ad campaigns is determining the ROI. He maintains that Madison Logic is able to run the analytics on ROI and to determine what opportunities and sales resulted. This is certainly in sync with what marketers are looking for: results-based marketing.  

Asked about Madison’s relationships with B2B companies, O’Regan says his firm works directly with CMOs and leverages powerful proprietary intent data. Madison can take a targeted account list and zero in on all of the people at the target companies who show the most interest and buyer intent in specific products.

Where companies often fall short is in researching rival companies that are providing similar products and services. In that case, Madison compiles a predictive list and a target list of all the other companies that are researching things like cloud solutions. That way a company can analyze the volume of leads against the target and predictive lists.

Madison taps its content marketing solutions service, comprised of writers and editors who create bespoke content syndicated across B2B sites and within Madison’s platform. Madison incorporates the content into native ads in mobile and display,  taking an excerpt and running it as a sponsored link on one of its 1,600 sites or as “gated” content (a teaser).  Madison also offers a “form fill” on the 1,600 websites where it can dynamically place content -- such as a whitepaper download or a teaser, like “here’s the best way to leverage IBM’s cloud-based solutions for your business. Learn more.”

When prospects look at a piece of gated content -- for example, from IBM -- Madison plugs their information directly into systems like Eloqua, Marketo and Salesforce. IBM can then see how many leads a platform like Madison can generate for them, and how many turn into opportunities and sales. The upshot: These kinds of tools offer marketers ROI on their marketing investment, which is the name of the game.

“We’re targeting hand-raisers in real-time: decision-makers in companies who are showing interest in products right now. We create content based on advertiser interest,” O’Regan said. Who can argue with that logic?

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