Demandbase Alternatives: 3 Platforms for More Effective B2B Marketing

Although Demandbase has positioned itself as a leading B2B demand-side platform (DSP), its shortcomings can hinder the effectiveness of B2B marketing campaigns:

Imprecise targeting: While Demandbase allows advertisers to target by job level and role, it does not enable direct engagement with specific contacts or track engagement accurately. This makes precision targeting difficult, potentially lowering your marketing ROI.
Steep learning curve and lengthy implementation: Demandbase’s extensive features can be challenging to navigate. Onboarding, training, and full integration often require significant time and resources, delaying your ability to see results.
Platform sluggishness and technical issues: Users frequently report slow reporting, laggy responsiveness, and recurring bugs, all of which disrupt campaign management and impact performance.
High pricing: Compared to other sales intelligence platforms, Demandbase is expensive, creating a significant barrier for smaller businesses trying to scale their marketing efforts.
Integration challenges: Demandbase’s integrations with Salesforce and Pardot are often cumbersome, with users citing poor documentation and limited support as major roadblocks.
Limited reporting functionality: The platform’s reporting tools lack flexibility for in-depth analysis, often requiring users to export data for meaningful insights.

Given these challenges, many B2B marketers are seeking more effective alternatives. There are several platforms designed to offer more precise targeting, better integration, and improved reporting capabilities—each providing unique solutions to the shortcomings of Demandbase.

Influ2: A Person-Based Marketing Platform That Strengthens Sales-Marketing Alignment

Influ2 enables businesses to engage key decision-makers on a personal level across multiple channels, including LinkedIn, Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Instagram. By delivering highly targeted marketing messages based on individual interactions, it helps companies drive more meaningful engagement.

Key Features of Influ2

Direct, person-based engagement: Influ2 allows you to reach specific decision-makers by name, running campaigns precisely tailored to each individual across various online platforms for a highly personalized approach.
Seamless sales-marketing alignment: The platform enhances coordination between sales and marketing teams by providing actionable insights on who has interacted with which ads. This enables sales teams to follow up with relevant information while giving marketers visibility into whether sales reps have acted on those interactions.
A holistic approach to measuring marketing success: Instead of focusing on specific touchpoints, Influ2 measures the broad impact of marketing across the entire buyer journey. It tracks ad impressions and interactions within 15 days, helping capture the influence of earlier engagements that might not lead directly to conversions but still significantly affect the decision-making process.

How Person-Based Targeting Works

Effective advertising isn’t just about reaching a broad audience—it’s about ensuring the right individuals see and engage with your ads. Person-based targeting focuses on delivering ads to specific people rather than broad demographic groups, making it a powerful strategy for B2B marketing.

However, many advertisers struggle with native platforms and traditional tools that fail to provide true contact-level targeting and engagement tracking. Influ2 addresses these limitations by enabling precise targeting of individuals, tracking ad views and clicks without requiring form fills, and directly connecting engagement to revenue impact.

Aligning Marketing and Sales for Better Lead Conversion

Aligning marketing and sales is essential for SaaS companies aiming to accelerate growth. Many businesses struggle with marketing generating MQLs that don’t convert, while sales teams rely on cold outreach to key decision-makers.

The solution? A unified approach where marketing supports sales with targeted content that engages decision-makers directly. Influ2 plays a key role in this alignment by allowing marketing teams to engage the right decision-makers with highly personalized content, ensuring sales teams connect with prospects who are ready to convert.

To ensure both teams are targeting the right prospects, focus on:

Identifying the specific accounts you want to reach.
Defining the key buying groups within those accounts.
Pinpointing the individuals within each buying group.

Once these details are established, you can import your target audience directly from your CRM into Influ2, making it easier to engage the right decision-makers with person-based advertising.

Integrating Influ2 with HubSpot: Importing Your Contact List for Targeted Advertising

Setting up Influ2 with HubSpot allows you to sync your contact lists for precise person-based targeting. Follow these steps to connect your accounts and start running highly targeted campaigns.

Connect Your HubSpot Account to Influ2

Click on your name in the top right corner of your Influ2 dashboard and go to Account Settings.
In the CRM Integrations section, click on Connect HubSpot Account.
Log in to your HubSpot account and authorize the connection.

Select Your Target Lists from HubSpot

Open the campaign dashboard in Influ2 and navigate to the Setup tab.
Locate the HubSpot module in the Audience Discovery section.
Click the Add button—a list of your HubSpot contact lists will appear.
Select the lists you want to sync with Influ2. The system will begin syncing them automatically.

Configure Your Integration Settings

CRM Target Lists: Select which lists you want Influ2 to import from your HubSpot CRM.
Export Signals: Define what engagement actions (such as clicks or views) should be sent back to HubSpot as events.
Create Leads for Unmatched Contacts: If a contact in Influ2 doesn’t exist in HubSpot, it will be automatically created.

Monitor Engagement Data in HubSpot

Once your campaigns go live, Influ2 will track engagement and send signals back to HubSpot. Engagement data, such as ad views and clicks, will appear in each contact’s activity timeline in HubSpot.

Launching Ad Campaigns

Once you’ve defined your target audiences, the next step is to structure the customer journey. This journey outlines the decision-making process prospects follow, guiding them from awareness to conversion.

For example, a B2B SaaS company offering a project management tool might begin with an outreach phase aimed at encouraging prospects to sign up for a free trial. The next phase focuses on converting these trial users into paying customers by showcasing the full range of premium features.

With a clear framework in place, the company can create tailored ads for each stage of the customer journey. This is where contact-level advertising shines, allowing for personalized ads based on where each individual is in their journey.

Measuring Campaign Success with Marketing-Influenced Revenue

Influ2 provides a more comprehensive view of marketing’s role in driving sales. Unlike traditional attribution models that focus solely on the last touch, Marketing-Influenced Revenue (MIR) accounts for all touchpoints that contribute to a potential buyer’s decision.

Through its platform, Influ2 tracks interactions across various marketing channels and connects those interactions to eventual revenue. This provides companies with a more accurate picture of how their marketing activities drive sales, ensuring better decision-making and a clearer connection between marketing efforts and revenue outcomes.

Why Choose Influ2?

Influ2 takes B2B advertising to the next level with a contact-based targeting model that goes beyond traditional account-based marketing. Instead of targeting entire accounts, Influ2 focuses on individual decision-makers, ensuring hyper-personalized engagement and better results.

Key Advantages:

Person-based targeting: Delivers ads directly to key decision-makers, improving engagement and conversion rates.
Real-time behavioral insights: Provides sales teams with real-time data on ad interactions, helping them prioritize high-value leads.
Seamless integration: Works with major CRM platforms like HubSpot to streamline campaign management and lead tracking.

By leveraging Influ2, B2B marketers can overcome the limitations of Demandbase and execute highly effective marketing campaigns that align with sales objectives.

6sense: AI-Driven Account Intelligence for Predictive Targeting

6sense empowers B2B marketers with cutting-edge AI-driven insights to identify and engage in-market accounts before they explicitly express interest. By harnessing predictive analytics, behavioral intent data, and seamless integrations with leading CRM and marketing automation platforms, 6sense enables businesses to prioritize high-value prospects, refine marketing strategies, and maximize return on investment (ROI).

Unlike traditional demand-generation approaches that depend on reactive strategies, 6sense takes a proactive stance by identifying signals from anonymous website traffic, content engagement, and third-party intent data sources. This ensures marketing and sales teams focus their efforts on prospects who are already in the buying journey, leading to higher conversion rates and shorter sales cycles.

Precision Targeting with Predictive Analytics

Traditional account-based marketing (ABM) platforms often rely on static data, providing limited visibility into real-time buyer intent. 6sense, on the other hand, analyzes buying signals across multiple channels, including:

Search Behavior: Tracking keyword searches related to your product category or industry, even if the prospect hasn’t visited your site yet.
Website Visits: Identifying anonymous visitors and mapping them to known accounts, enabling marketers to recognize potential buyers before they fill out a form.
Third-Party Intent Data: Aggregating intent signals from external sources, such as content consumption on industry blogs, research reports, and review sites.

This AI-driven analysis allows marketers to:

Identify Anonymous Website Visitors: Convert previously unknown traffic into actionable insights by associating behavior with specific accounts.
Prioritize Outreach Based on Buying Stage: Assign scores to leads based on engagement and intent signals, ensuring sales teams focus on the most promising prospects.
Deliver Hyper-Personalized Content: Customize messaging and content based on the prospect’s interests, ensuring a higher likelihood of engagement and conversion.

For example, if a prospect from a targeted enterprise account frequently visits your pricing page, downloads a whitepaper, and searches for competitor comparisons, 6sense will flag them as a high-priority lead, triggering automated engagement workflows.

Sales and Marketing Synergy

Marketing success isn’t just about generating leads—it’s about ensuring sales teams have the right insights at the right time to engage and close deals. 6sense seamlessly integrates with major CRM and marketing automation platforms, including Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo, and Microsoft Dynamics, to provide real-time visibility into prospect engagement.

With automated workflows and AI-driven recommendations, sales reps receive alerts when key accounts show strong buying intent. This enables them to:

Engage Leads with Contextually Relevant Messaging: Send personalized outreach emails or LinkedIn messages at the exact moment a prospect is actively researching solutions.
Focus on High-Intent Accounts Instead of Cold Outreach: Minimize time wasted on leads with low buying intent and concentrate efforts on prospects most likely to convert.
Close Deals Faster by Addressing Prospect Needs Proactively: Identify pain points based on behavioral data and position solutions before the competition.

For example, if a decision-maker at a Fortune 500 company reads multiple blog posts about a specific feature, the sales team will be notified and provided with suggested talking points tailored to that feature. This level of alignment ensures that marketing efforts translate directly into revenue-generating opportunities.

Enhanced Performance with AI-Powered Automation

Beyond intent-based targeting, 6sense optimizes marketing campaign execution through AI-driven automation. The platform’s predictive analytics engine continuously refines targeting criteria, optimizing ad spend and improving conversion rates. Key automation capabilities include:

Automated Lead Scoring: Assigns dynamic scores based on engagement, behavioral trends, and intent signals to ensure only high-quality leads are passed to sales.
Personalized Content Recommendations: Uses AI to deliver custom-tailored messaging and assets based on a prospect’s previous interactions and content preferences.
Smart Budget Allocation: Adjusts ad spend in real time, shifting investment toward high-performing campaigns and audiences while reducing spend on low-impact efforts.

For example, if an ABM ad campaign targeting mid-market SaaS companies shows high engagement but low conversions, 6sense will automatically adjust ad creatives, audience segments, or budget allocation to improve performance. This eliminates guesswork and ensures every dollar spent drives measurable impact.

Optimizing the Buyer Journey with Multi-Touch Attribution

6sense offers robust multi-touch attribution models that provide a holistic view of the buyer’s journey, rather than oversimplifying it with last-click attribution.

By analyzing engagement across email, paid media, organic search, and direct outreach, marketers can:

Identify High-Impact Channels and Content: Determine which marketing efforts resonate most with target accounts.
Adjust Strategies Based on Real-Time Data: Shift resources toward channels with the highest ROI.
Accurately Attribute Revenue to Marketing Efforts: Show leadership tangible proof of marketing’s contribution to revenue growth.

For instance, if an enterprise deal closes and 6sense identifies that the prospect engaged with a LinkedIn ad, attended a webinar, and responded to a nurture email, marketers gain insights into which tactics were most effective in influencing the decision.

Why Choose 6sense?

6sense transforms B2B marketing from a reactive, guesswork-driven approach into a proactive, data-driven strategy that maximizes efficiency and results. By leveraging AI, predictive analytics, and seamless CRM integration, businesses can:

Increase Conversion Rates: Engage prospects at the perfect moment with the right message.
Shorten Sales Cycles: Equip sales teams with actionable insights that accelerate decision-making.
Optimize Marketing Spend: Eliminate wasted budget and focus resources on high-intent opportunities.

In a competitive B2B landscape, having access to predictive intelligence and AI-powered automation isn’t just an advantage—it’s a necessity. 6sense enables companies to stay ahead of the competition by identifying, engaging, and converting the right accounts at the right time.

RollWorks: The Ultimate ABM Automation Platform for Scalable Growth

In today’s competitive B2B landscape, Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is essential for driving personalized, high-impact campaigns that deliver measurable results. RollWorks, an advanced ABM platform, empowers businesses to scale their marketing efforts with precision, efficiency, and data-driven insights. By combining robust automation, intelligent targeting, and seamless integrations, RollWorks helps marketers zero in on the accounts most likely to convert, delivering exceptional ROI across multiple channels.

Targeting the Right Accounts

RollWorks takes ABM to the next level by enabling businesses to target accounts with unparalleled accuracy while scaling efforts across a wide array of touchpoints. With access to comprehensive firmographic data, behavioral signals, and purchase intent insights, marketers can strategically build account lists based on key attributes such as company size, industry, and readiness to buy. Key benefits include:

Comprehensive Account Lists: Combine firmographic data with behavioral signals to identify accounts primed for conversion.
Multichannel Engagement: Reach accounts across a variety of channels, including display ads, email, and social media, ensuring a consistent message.
Intent-Driven Prioritization: Use intent data to focus efforts on accounts that are actively showing interest in your products or services.

This multifaceted approach ensures marketing teams are targeting not just any account, but the right accounts at the right time, elevating both the efficiency and effectiveness of your campaigns.

Automating Campaigns for More Scalability

With RollWorks, marketers can scale their ABM efforts without compromising on personalization or quality. Automation is at the heart of the platform, helping businesses maintain a balance between reach and relevance. Key features include:

Smart Segmentation: Automatically classify accounts by engagement levels and intent, allowing for highly targeted campaigns.
Dynamic Content Delivery: Deliver personalized content tailored to each account’s behavior, interests, and engagement.
Cross-Channel Orchestration: Manage integrated campaigns across email, display, and social platforms all from one centralized dashboard.

These automation capabilities reduce manual labor, ensure consistency, and enable marketing teams to handle large volumes of accounts without sacrificing the personal touch essential for ABM.

Measuring Campaign Impact with Advanced Analytics

RollWorks elevates campaign measurement by offering deeper insights into the performance and impact of ABM strategies. The platform provides powerful reporting tools, enabling businesses to track every aspect of their ABM campaigns:

Account-Level Insights: Track performance for each individual account across channels, assessing engagement and sales funnel progress.
Attribution Modeling: Understand the effectiveness of each touchpoint in the buyer journey, enabling you to optimize your strategy for better results.
Customizable Dashboards: Create tailored reports to track key performance indicators (KPIs) specific to your business needs, offering real-time visibility into campaign performance.

These analytics provide marketers with a 360-degree view of their campaigns, allowing them to continuously refine and optimize their strategies for sustained growth and greater ROI.

Why Choose RollWorks?

RollWorks stands out as an all-in-one ABM platform that helps B2B marketers drive scalable campaigns. Key benefits include:

Advanced Targeting: Zero in on high-converting accounts using firmographic data, intent signals, and behavioral insights.
Effortless Automation: Scale personalized campaigns with smart segmentation, dynamic content, and cross-channel orchestration.
In-Depth Analytics: Gain actionable insights with account-level tracking, attribution modeling, and customizable dashboards.

RollWorks offers the precision, efficiency, and insights that Demandbase lacks, making it a viable alternative for B2B marketers seeking a more data-driven and scalable account-based marketing (ABM) solution.

Selecting a Demandbase Alternative

Demandbase can be costly, difficult to learn, and has targeting and integration limitations.For many organizations, tools like Influ2, 6sense, or RollWorks offer better targeting, easier integration, and AI-driven insights, making them more efficient choices for B2B marketing.

Reach out to us at The Metasuite if you want to explore other ABM solutions and find the best fit for your business.