The convergence of marketing with advertising technologies and advertising has been the talking point of 2014, and Demandbase is right at the center. With its technology, Demandbase connects the advertising it serves to a company with the sales activity that results, a full-funnel view that brings both components together. “The marketing technology focus is moving from managing the marketing funnel to the exploration and discovery stages of the buyer’s journey,” explains Laura Ramos, Forrester vice president and principal analyst, “and to be able to engage with and identify buyers earlier in their decision-making process.”

Using an amped-up version of reverse IP lookup, marketers can choose specific companies or industries to target through advertising. They can personalize their content according to the company they want to reach, creating advertising copy and customized Web sites that speak directly to their industry. In an age where B2B buyers do more research than ever before reaching out to sales, such customization can make a difference.

Demandbase is bringing these capabilities together with its new B2B marketing cloud, which enables marketers to see their advertising investments in terms they care about, such as missed opportunities and cost per sales lead. “This is the first marketing cloud designed specifically for B2B,” Demandbase CEO Chris Golec says. He also touts the “sales-marketing alignment” that results from using the technology. By only targeting the right companies, lead quality is naturally higher.

“[Demandbase is] in an exciting position,” Ramos notes. “A lot of B2B marketers are just starting to realize that their campaigns, targeting, and email lists are not as efficient and working as well as they should be. They’re now [asking] ‘How do I better segment, target, and analyze and understand if I am connecting with the right people?’” Demandbase is one solution to that problem, and customers are responding.

When it was founded in 2006, Demandbase was solely optimizing Web sites for B2B companies. At the end of 2012, it created company-targeting advertising, which enables marketers to reach potential leads before they even visit the Web site. It even offers those ads on behalf of marketers, using its own real-time bidding engine optimized for B2B advertising. It now delivers 10 billion ads daily, and manages 1 billion Web interactions, or page views of Web sites, a month. Recurring revenue has grown 94 percent year over year. The company counts Salesforce.com, Adobe, and Oracle, which all have their own marketing clouds—among their customers, perhaps the most telling endorsement of all. —Sarah Sluis