A new tool from Oceanos offers an independent analysis designed to harvest external data and information to build and maintain relationships. The Oceanos List Intelligence Portal is designed to deliver customized educational content, including campaign information, such as list research proposals and post campaign metric reports. Marketers access the List Optimizer tool, which is designed to provide a systematic approach for third party data. The tool is designed to offer a more effective way to scrub personal and competitor domains, among other outlets to optimize data usage.
DemandGen Report recently caught up with Oceanos President Brian Hession for more details on the portal’s contents and what list building resources marketers should tap in 2010.
DemandGen Report: What is the overall objective of the List Intelligence Portal?
Brian Hession: The number one objective of the List Intelligence Portal is to deliver customized educational content to demand generation marketers. We have both prospect and client portals.
We have two “prospect” portals. The largest portal includes over 5,500 marketers and is focused on educating and building Oceanos brand awareness. The second prospect portal is focused on nurturing and includes folks that have engaged with Oceanos but have not converted to clients.
The client portals include campaign information (list research proposals, creative assets, and post campaign metric reports). Because we don’t own or manage any data, we work with our clients to design the list strategy and help them understand what is working and what is not. Oceanos sees a great opportunity to firmly establish itself as the market leader with this positioning.
DGR: Can you describe the overall significance of the portal’s contents? How they relate to nurturing key business objectives?
Hession: The client portals help us build and solidify relationships. The portals were launched in August 2009, so we are viewing the client portals as a long-term demand creation strategy. For some of our clients, we’ll have 30-40 projects summarized within their portal. We are confident that our clients will find value in these archived campaigns.
The portals push case studies, white papers, our published articles and our quarterly List Intelligence Report, providing a continuing flow of list intelligence.
DGR: How are the offerings tailored for marketers’ specific needs? Are there any additional resources portal users can request?
Hession: The client portals provide us an opportunity to push customized content to specific clients. For example, this could be a new list to the market or special media opportunities that would be of interest to the client.
DGR: Moving into 2010, what are some of the key tactics you are recommending to your clients centered on list building?
Hession: It starts with the identification of the target accounts and then implementing a systematic approach for leveraging the data sources that contain the appropriate decision makers and influencers. We are in the final development stages of the List Optimizer. We have an automation specialist and a small team of application developers building a proprietary piece of software that will enable Oceanos to build a list with greater precision from across multiple data feeds. It’s a sea-change approach to list building and it has been a couple years in the making.
DGR: Where should marketers increase investment in list building resources?
Hession: They should increase “time” investment in identifying target accounts. We see very few marketing groups that can collect intelligence from their sales group that we can then leverage within the list strategy. In 2010, we are going to focus more on educating our clients on how this information could be utilized to optimize demand creation.
Marketers can sign up for the List Intelligence Report here.
