Ziff Davis B2B
True Omnichannel Approach for Unparalleled, Full-Funnel Demand Generation

In today’s competitive marketplace, companies face an ever-growing challenge—reaching and engaging with potential buyers throughout the entire buyer’s journey with unique yet informative experiences tailored to each individual within a buying committee. Marketers must identify the right leads at the right time and do so in the right ways to achieve sales success.

Enter Ziff Davis B2B, a global performance marketing company that introduces brands and solutions to IT buyers at critical points in the purchase decision cycle via the industry’s highest quality data and demand generation processes, including their wholly owned media network of industry-leading brands including MarTechAdvisor.com, HRTechnologist.com, Toolbox.com, and ReadITQuik.com.

Following are the insights shared by Jim Riesenbach, EVP and General Manager, Ziff Davis B2B, a division of Ziff Davis, a j2 Global company.

Please elaborate on the process that Ziff Davis B2B adopts to understand its customers’ needs and deliver high ROI solutions in consistent and reliable ways.

We have built a sophisticated data management platform that includes contact, behavioral, and install base data for over 40 million individuals worldwide. Quite frankly, we can see through engagement data what products and solutions leading tech buyers need and want. They trust Ziff Davis B2B as a reliable source to learn about cutting edge, innovative, best-in-class products. This prescriptive data is gathered based on the engagement a potential buyer has in response to a particular topic and is used to match potential buyers with vendors. Most enterprises today have buying committees rather than single individuals who make decisions regarding a particular platform or technology solution. Therefore, marketers must be able to identify both the right companies as targets, and a range of decision-makers within those companies at the various stages of product evaluation; this is ABM, Account Based Marketing. We map the layers of information based on behavioral and install base data, namely who the solution seekers are, their interest and readiness to engage, enabling us to create strategic content that generates leads from various industries and buyer personas. In conjunction to the data, we work with our clients to understand their product positioning so that we can best determine what content would most effectively engage individuals in these buying committees—by educating them about the choices that are available in the market ultimately helping them make the right purchasing decisions.

Please shed some light on how you most effectively address your client’s requirements for sales leads.

Our customers are looking for results. They come to us to help surface their relevant product and company info as effectively as possible to generate a range of leads at varied points in the buying funnel. We take a proactive, consultative approach where we walk our clients through what an accurate profile for potential buyers would look like and what is realistic for them to expect. It is important for us as well as the client that we deliver leads that meet all granular, predefined criteria so that the leads have higher opportunity to convert. We work with them to understand their product offering, price point, average sales cycle, and how they are positioned to handle the leads to which we'll connect them.

There may be potential buyers who are interested in a particular product or service but may or may not be “ready” to actually make a buying decision. These leads typically self-educate and engage with brands and companies through their own research across our media channels long before marketing or sales can engage with them directly. We reach out to these key individuals either through email, our proprietary newsletters, and phone calls to get to know their roles and responsibilities, and evaluate their interest in learning more about particular solutions then send them white papers or other relevant content on behalf of our clients.

In other cases, our clients are looking for lower funnel leads—those buyers who are actively seeking solutions and are ready to buy them. As it pertains to generating these lower funnel leads—we use the information that we've gathered from our one-on-one interaction with the potential buyers but also from databases that we've created containing information on the actual products and technologies that are in use by these buyers.

What sets Ziff Davis B2B apart from the rest of the players in the space?

Several companies only possess one piece of the marketing equation. Some only have the particular ability to do phone calls, while others have some spot solutions that don’t address the full breadth of marketers’ needs. Our sales experts work with our clients to provide 360-degree solutions from a marketing standpoint starting with the data, business content, and the ability to help customers think through the variety of strategies that they could leverage. This customer-centric approach is central to our success and, coupled with our industry presence, it’s key to our ability to deliver to our clients consistent, reliable results, quarter after quarter. Few performance marketing vendors are positioned to take this strategic approach.

We have the ability to use every tool whether its search marketing, branding, content creation, webinars, or data refinement. Additionally, our state-of-the-art B2B lead generation call center is the largest of its kind in the world. We’re one of the rare providers who own and operate our supply chain, continually investing in technology to provide the highest quality solutions for our clients.

What does the future roadmap look like for Ziff Davis B2B?

The clients to whom we provided solutions in North America are now reaching out into areas such as Asia, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and South America; and accordingly, we’re growing with them by expanding our offerings to include in-language solutions among other services. We deliver end-to-end omnichannel solutions that are integrated into our outbound activities such as email and telemarketing allowing us to aggregate a huge amount of data which later assists in building significant online audiences. Our large technology buyer database is supported by broad distribution capabilities via our owned and operated websites that are recognized as industry destinations for buyers and professionals in the tech and IT services markets.

Our resources and capabilities in content creation and a growing network of over 47 Million active decision makers and influencers are testaments for our continued growth. We want to continue to invest and acquire properties that have built audiences and unique capabilities to add even more value to our clients. This, in turn, will help decision makers get all the information that's relevant to them to be able to analyze and make good buying decisions. We’ll build upon our prominent media outlets: Toolbox.com, MarTechAdvisor. com, and HRTechnologist.com, the go-to sources for professionals in tech, marketing, HR, and finance, the latter of which we recently acquired. Also, we will continue building out various robust data capabilities such that we are able to quickly analyze and find the right buyers at the right time. We’re excited about what our growth means for our clients and the added value we will bring in early 2019 as we continue to expand the influence and reach of our products and services.