DemandBase driving massive 10-20X higher ROI on B2B ads via new Facebook company targeting

Would you like to advertise only to people who are in the market for a solution like yours? That’s exactly what DemandBase says its new Facebook targeting ad technology does — and therefore increases your advertising return on investment by a staggering 10-20 times.

“A huge portion of your web traffic is from people or businesses that will never, ever buy from you,” DemandBase CEO Chris Golec told me. “So we created an advertising platform that lets you bring the right visitors to your website.”

DemandBase is a marketing technology company targeting the business-to-business sector. The company has worked for years on creating focused digital advertising campaigns that then lead site visitors into a personalized web experience on your site. This week, the company added a product that allows you to advertise on Facebook, but limit your ads to only those companies that you want to sell to.

“We call it zero-waste advertising,” Golec says. “We’re only hitting the right businesses.”

The idea is simple: Executives and managers at Fortune 1,000 companies are on Facebook, just like everyone else. And they’re there daily while in the middle of deals, purchasing decisions, and strategic shifts. So why not meet them where they are?

The challenge to date has been accurate targeting to narrowcast your message to just the right people, and that’s something that DemandBase solves with its IP address technology. By sniffing Facebook visitors’ internet protocol addresses and using its database of corporate IP ranges, DemandBase can tell with a high degree of certainty which company a social media user works for. Given that information, B2B marketers can target general industries, specific companies, as well as more specific slices of the market such as companies in a certain industry with revenue over $100 million.

A lot of the industry uses browser cookies to track and identify web surfers, but Golec says IP addresses are much better for B2B marketers.

“Cookies are very effective for tracking behaviors,” he told me. “But for B2B advertising, it’s much more about who you’re selling to.”

DemandBase, which has grown it’s revenue by 100 percent each of the past two years and grew its ad solutions 400 percent this past year, says that “Company-Targeted Advertising” on Facebook is effective because it’s measurable on both the website — and the real-world sales side. B2B is low-volume but high-value, so it’s ultimately all about filling the hot lead funnel for sales, the company says.

And the company makes a bold promise, saying that the new company targeting ad product “has resulted in 10-20X ROI improvement for the exact same ad dollars.”

As the marketing automation and marketing technology space heats up, competitors and partners such as Adobe, Salesforce, Oracle, Marketo, and Eloqua are staffing up and increasing their investments, Golec says. That’s one reason DemandBase is also investing in new technology — and adding a new CFO, Brian Barnum, formerly from Business.com and the Rubicon Project, a leading online advertising automation company.

The goal, Golec says, is a full customer acquisition and retention solution:

“We’re helping our customers programmatically set up campaigns, personalize their sites, and engage with customers all over the web and on their website,” he said. “It’s the full customer life-cycle: attract, convert, retain, and grow.”