Demandbase Sees 300% Increase In Influenced Pipeline With Automated Content Journeys

Challenge:

Demandbase wanted to engage with its target account audience and provide them with access to information about ABM that they could ingest at their own pace. While the company has historically done a good job of developing content, said John Dering, ABM Thought Leader & Director of Marketing Programs at Demandbase, they “weren’t merchandising it to the best of their abilities.” Demandbase simply posted the content on their site and hoped that visitors would find it or sales would send it to prospects and customers.

“We were looking for ways to start to extend and understand the impact that our collateral was having on our targeted accounts and to our sales processes,” Dering said “We wanted to find a way where we could merchandise that content to them and allow them to consume as much as they’d like on their own terms. Traditionally in nurturing we would deliver one piece of content a week, or every other week, and unfortunately it would take six to eight weeks to get all that content though. LookBookHQ provided a great opportunity for us to provide that info all in one sitting, if [visitors] chose to consume it.”

Solution:

The company incorporated LookBookHQ into its content strategy, instead of posting content directly to its website, which allowed visitors to consume multiple pieces in one sitting. Demandbase was also able to remove friction in conversions because, Dering said, “historically when we were doing these tests, we were sending people to the landing page to fill out a form to access the content.”

“We already had all of these people in our database so capturing their pedigree information — names, titles, phone numbers — wasn’t necessary for us,” he added. “We wanted to extend the reach of our content to more people, so we found some ways using LookBookHQ and our marketing automation system, Oracle Eloqua, to track the attribution the same way we would a download (as if someone filled out a form) without requiring them to do that.”

Results:

The first thing that Demandbase gained from leveraging LookBookHQ was an increase in “downloads,” which the company defines as “getting access to the content,” Dering said.

The company was also able to track engagement using the solution. “LookBookHQ tells you when someone is engaged with that content, how much time they spend on it and how many pieces of content they consume,” he said. “[This] lets you start to ingest that information, incorporate it into your marketing automation, use it for scoring and understand what’s really going on.”

Shortly after incorporating LookBookHQ, Demandbase saw:

• A 2x increase in responses to content promotions; and
• A 3x boost in time visitors spent consuming content on the website.

After conducting an analysis of the numbers a few months later, Demandbase found that the content automation platform led to:

• A 300% increase in influenced pipeline;
• A 13% boost in annual contract values; and
• A 50% increase in deal velocity.

“If you know the people who are consuming one piece of content versus people who are consuming four pieces of content — like an average person looking at some content or a fast-moving buyer — that’s really great intelligence for your sales team, especially when you’re focusing on target accounts,” said Dering. “You can capture that behavior and create alerts for your sales team, and when you can follow up with those people in that moment, you have a much higher chance of turning that behavior into sales activity.”