For quite some time, ZoomInfo has been thought of as a contact database platform that helps sales reps find their best customers.
That makes sense — we’ve been building out our best-in-class data engine for over 15 years, and we invest hundreds of millions of dollars annually to improve and enhance our foundational data.
But that’s only the beginning of how we help businesses go to market.
We recently launched a new brand campaign to increase awareness of our broader go-to-market capabilities, which help sales, marketing, and operations teams find, acquire, and grow customers through a unified platform.
Here are the ins and outs of our new brand architecture, including the research and KPIs it’s built on, and how you can do the same at your company.
Why Did We Decide to Run this Campaign?
Historically, ZoomInfo has been strongly associated with sales and data, including our No. 1 G2 rated intent signals.
We needed to tell the story of our transition to a robust platform that helps you unlock insights, engage customers, and win faster through data, multi-channel outreach, and automation.
We also wanted to recognize the evolution of how businesses go to market. We’ve learned that agility, efficiency, and automation are among the most important capabilities for sustained success, regardless of economic conditions.
Going to market today means having a modern strategy with superior data that fuels every plan, action, and metric. It means having a consolidated, integrated tech stack. It means aligning sales and marketing on goals and personas. We’ve made these adjustments with our internal teams, and now we’re bringing them to our customers.
Finally, we wanted to invest in ZoomInfo’s brand equity, rather than breaking our solutions out into their own individual brands. We’ve built these products into a cohesive platform, and that should be reflected in our brand.
To do this right, we knew that we needed a deep understanding of our prospects and customers. That understanding kicked off a year of thorough market research.
Laying the Groundwork
Every single decision made about this campaign was backed by research, both from experts like the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and from direct customer feedback. We partnered with marketing research firm Kwantum Analytics to understand our brand perception in the market, and get a better sense of the problems and triggers that lead customers to search for new GTM solutions.
We conducted a survey of roughly 500 B2B sales and marketing leaders and asked them about their thoughts, feelings, and emotions experienced before and during the GTM purchasing process. We found that the issues and troubles that they were trying to solve were remarkably similar: quality of data and leads, platform difficulty, and poor integration with other platforms. The majority of survey participants also felt frustrated, fatigued, disengaged, uncertain, and taken advantage of by poor quality platforms and misrepresentations by providers in the GTM space.
The survey results informed all of our new messaging and will influence every piece of collateral we create, brand-related and otherwise.
Breaking Down Our Messaging
For our messaging rollout, we established a mission statement, tagline, and three brand pillars.
Our mission statement — “Modernize go-to-market for all” — is the foundation, adjusted to better reflect how we serve our entire customer base. This mission calls out ZoomInfo’s two main areas of focus: create a GTM platform that can power an entire business, and make it accessible to everyone — from startups to Fortune 100 companies.
Our tagline — “How business goes to market” — feeds into this statement. As founder and CEO Henry Schuck puts it, we believe that taking a modern approach to GTM is the most effective way to drive growth and achieve success.
Our brand pillars — Unlock Insights, Engage Customers, Win Faster — spell out how we fulfill our mission. They highlight our commitment to an unparalleled data foundation, true customer engagement, and the value of our efficient platform. These pillars will influence all of our external marketing collateral.
Our brand messaging is consistent and distinctive. This is important, as research shows consistent brand presentation not only improves message retention, but is strongly associated with increased revenue.
Taking Notes from B2C
When it came time to convey our new message, we looked to consumer marketing strategies for inspiration. We wanted to ensure that we were targeting customers across all of our marketing channels, including social, display ads, events, and email. Our new ads are designed to appeal more to customers’ emotions, much like B2C companies, reflecting research that shows emotional appeals can help B2B brands establish entry points in their category. We also wanted to take our messaging a step further by advertising on TV, an untapped market where a lot of our ideal customers could be reached.
How We’re Measuring Success
There are a few essential KPIs that we’ll be monitoring for this campaign. And while we’re eager to see quick results, we’re in it for the long haul. As Rosser Reeves says in his Reality in Advertising book, a good campaign that is consistent over multiple years is way more effective than a perfect campaign that lasts a few months or a year.
Mental Availability & Brand Awareness
A big reason for this campaign was to increase our mental availability, or the likelihood ZoomInfo will be thought of in buying situations. We will be measuring this in two ways:
We’ve been leveraging BlueOcean to look at how people are thinking about us relative to our competitors and the broader market. This technology lets us track signals across the broader web to see how we are improving over time relative to our share of voice (SOV).
We’ll be running biannual surveys of sales and marketing leaders to see if we are changing the associations they have with the category, us, and our competitors. Our goal is to increase the frequency with which buyers connect ZoomInfo to the key drivers of their purchase decisions.
Thought Leadership
We’re looking to solidify our place as a thought leader among business leaders, marketers, and sellers. We’ll keep an eye on our social engagement and our media coverage. We’ll be soliciting feedback from analysts and customers to make sure we’re hitting the mark here.
Ad Perception
We are working with LinkedIn’s Edge program and System1 to understand the perception, brand recall, and emotional impact of our ads.
Conversion Improvement
Over time, we’ll be measuring how our campaign efforts impact conversion rates, whether those are click-through rates on ads, website performance, deal win rates, or retention rates. This will be harder to directly attribute, but we believe will be longer-term beneficiaries of our efforts.
How Business Goes to Market
We want to help every business take their products to market, and that starts with creating greater brand awareness for ourselves and our full offering.
By using our platform to unlock insights, engage customers, and win faster, we’re able to show our audience what they can achieve with ZoomInfo — we’re not just talking about what’s possible, we’re showing you.
And by rooting our campaign in a deep understanding of our customers’ evolving needs and challenges, we’re betting that can deliver lasting value that helps us all grow together.