Demandbase One vs. LinkedIn Marketing Solutions

Demandbase is a must have at our company. From an advertising standpoint it has allowed us to scale our ABM strategies and exceed benchmarks in our display ads. Our sales users are spending less time researching accounts and more time selling as Demandbase makes it easy for them to get alerted when accounts are showing intent and engagement with our business. I'm looking forward to the release of the multiple account journey product update, which will allow us to see how accounts are engaging with our other product areas and where we are missing the mark with engaging with those accounts who may be showing buyer signals with a particular GTM

Incentivized

Although it offered great features, we didn't really see a lot of traffic or results from the ads we placed. Working in hospitality, we had to strategically time and place our ads around holiday seasons and it can be difficult to predict a marketing campaign. Depending on your market, LinkedIn may not be the best avenue to advertise with.

Incentivized

• The Demandbase UI is user-friendly, easy to navigate and super intuitive.
• Ad Targeting and budgeting is very concise, the platform tells you how much reach and spend you can expect for each campaign.
• Person-based ad targeting, they are one of the only platforms that offers this which is a game changer.

• Targeting - they have done a great job of allowing you speak to ideal audiences
• Support - dedicated customer service and account advising is always accessible and very responsive
• Curation of professional audiences - one of the biggest advantages to the platform is that its users are for the most part are professional

Incentivized

• Under the "highlighted" section there are only 6 accounts to see. It would be nice to have more than 6.
• The engagement is rated in "minutes" while that's not really what is being scored. It's a little confusing as to how their engagement is scored.
• It would be nice to be able to mute or hide of some contacts that we have already spoken to so that it opens space for other prospects.
• Overall happy with the product

Incentivized

• The Campaign Manager is not good. It seems like the Campaign Manager (where you create and manage your self-serve ad campaigns) is buggy and doesn't have a good flow. Contrast with FB Ad Manager of the Google Adwords/Ads interface, which has a much more simple process to create and edits campaigns, ad groups, ads, keywords, audiences, budgets, etc. LinkedIn Campaign Manager seems to actively work against you trying to make changes to your campaigns.
• LinkedIn Campaign Manager offers three options: sponsored content, InMail, and text ads. LinkedIn used to offer other ad services that you couldn't access unless you had a "managed ad account" run by LinkedIn Staff with a dedicated monthly ad spend. It seems most of those "hidden" features have disappeared, though you still have to contract with LinkedIn to offer dynamic ads. It would be better if LinkedIn empowered marketers to create the ads they want. (Perhaps with a dedicated acct. manager like how Google Ads works.)
• This is silly, but it isn't easy to navigate to Campaign Manager. I have a bookmark for Campaign Manager because if you want to click there through LinkedIn, it takes 2 or 3 different screens to get to Campaign Manager. In my opinion, when you click the "Work" dropdown from the LinkedIn header (by your profile picture) you should have a link to Campaign Manager.
• LinkedIn, in recent months, has made substantial changes to the Ads platform and Campaign Manager. Though these changes work to address some of the above issues, LinkedIn still has quite a ways to go before their platform is on par with their competition.

Incentivized

Relatively inexpensive service for a decent current awareness service. They have added little in sales functionality in the past year as they focused on building a marketing version of the product. Except for the addition of broader European coverage last spring (thin Equifax records), the database was static over the past year.

InsideView was extremely user-friendly. I was able to quickly understand how to efficiently use the software and get the most out of the service. I only had a short time to quickly learn how to use the functions offered by InsideView, and I felt confident within the first day of my understanding and ability to successfully use this tool.

in terms of promoted content reporting and usability, the platform is not as flexible or easy to use compared to more established social platforms like Facebook. However, it does offer plug-ins to Google Data Studio which makes pulling and manipulating data easier. My main usability gripe comes when looking at organic performance of a company page. There isn't an easy way to export organic performance data.

Incentivized

Seems to always work.

It's pretty fast.

We had an intro session with a customer success rep and were given a rundown of the platform and it was absolutely perfect. The rep was able to show us advanced search options and shortcuts that cut our search time.

So, everything what I just said previously adds up to the value of LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. Definitely recommending it to a friend. It has its things to improve but its nothing major or nothing to worry about. So I give a 9 because it still has that, some user interface glitches that can be improved but do not damage the experience that you have with it.

Incentivized

She was fine, but we only had one session

Seeing the demo during the sales cycle, not much training was needed due to this application being plug and play.

We had to work with InsideView for some custom configurations example we have a custom field in Salesforce called ha location that needed let's say NJ to spell out New Jersey and make certain fields mandatory. They were easy to work with though.

Incentivized

In my previous company, I was using both Linkedin and ZoomInfo, both of them were good, but there was a lot of restrictions with the basic versions, and when we shifted to the LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and ZoomInfo the quality improved but there was not much to get like InsideView. In my current company, at first we were using LinkedIn, but now I appreciate the decision made by our seniors to shift to InsideView. It is my personal opinion that I feel InsideView is better than LinkedIn and ZoomInfo.

Incentivized

If you want more precision in B2B targeting, then LinkedIn is without question the better alternative. However, as I established before, I've rarely seen LinkedIn campaigns be successful for anything other than brand awareness/thought leadership. And that's almost 100% what Twitter is for. Twitter campaigns almost always have a cheaper CPC AND CPM than LinkedIn and accomplish the same thing, so I would say go with Twitter. At times LinkedIn campaigns are just so you can tell someone at a higher level that you did precise targeting to the exact audience they wanted and check that box, because it's easier for them to understand how you'd do well on LinkedIn, and more difficult to tell that story on Twitter. But I honestly prefer Twitter and its platform for B2B awareness campaigns. Heretic, I know, but it's how I feel after several years of experience with both. Facebook is bottom of the barrel for B2B in my mind, so I'm not really going to discuss it. I would take LinkedIn over Facebook for many reasons, but Facebook is an option too, but more for SMB and just covering all bases, not as a primary choice for B2B marketing.

Incentivized

• Save me time doing company research from an average of 25 mins to an average of 7 mins for large ICP accounts.
• Save me time by integrating the contact research without jumping out of InsideView to do it in a separate app.
• A morning 10 mins scan of the target company news feed gave me a high level view of the most important news that I need to know regarding my prospect accounts and their respective industries.

• We have seen a marked increase in inbound agent calls since we began LinkedIn marketing.
• LinkedIn marketing is an excellent way to put your content in front of people that are actually going to read it, this has led to a major increase in our content being consumed and acted on.

Incentivized