Item: Terminus ABM Platform
Rating: 5
Author: Justin Roodman

Overall Satisfaction with Terminus ABM Platform

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use the Terminus ABM platform as a marketing tool to develop potential customer awareness and to try to "stay in front" of prospects we are actively pursuing. The platform is primarily used for display advertising, using banner ads of assorted common sizes, which can be delivered based on prospect company, position within the company, and intent topics.

Pros and Cons

Pros

They offer banner design services, and their pricing is pretty fair.
The learning curve is simple with their platform.
They produce a lot of educational content that can be useful for marketing ideas.

Cons

Support times are iffy. We've had slower replies and resolutions to issues since they acquired Sigstr and now support both products.
Display advertising generally has low ROI, in part due to "banner blindness". If you're not continuously developing engaging creatives, you're going to see very little return with this platform.
Their UI needs serious work. Some options are locked after you move to the next screen in their campaign wizard (nothing should ever be locked in draft) and unless they've recently changed it, you can't delete dead draft campaigns - just archive them.
There are a few serious discrepancies in the analytics when it comes to identifying which end companies have people who have viewed your ads (i.e. Microsoft has huge numbers because Azure is their product).

Return on Investment

It's EXTREMELY hard to assess total ROI with display advertising unless you're getting clicks on your ads. Even then you probably want additional tracking metrics such as Google Analytics, form fills, etc.
Our sales guys like the engagement spike reports, which can be useful for prompting them to reach out to their contacts.

Alternatives Considered

Triblio

I ran through a demo with the Triblio rep about a month ago. The platform seems to be very comparative to Terminus when it comes to the primary functionality. You can do display advertising to individuals based on company and other criteria. In talking with the Triblio rep, it sounds like their UI might be a little more user friendly (for example not locking options on a prior screen when using their "wizard"). Triblio also features a "custom landing page" experience option that interested me and I'd consider using. Terminus lacks this.

Likelihood to Recommend

If you're looking for a display advertising option, then Terminus is one of the major players - for better or worse. They source intent data from a third party (Bombora, I believe) so you have some targeting options available to you beyond company and position within. Advertising costs are in addition to the base contract price for their service so that's something to keep in mind if you're trying to work within a smaller budget. Since this is display advertising, the billing method is CPM (cost per thousand impressions). Their ad network does include the option to do Sponsored Posts with LinkedIn (although you can do that on your own honestly).

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Terminus - Just a Mediocre ABM platform