ZoomInfo Zooms Marketers to Prospects

ZoomInfo, the source of business information on people and companies, last week launched ZoomInfo Lists. The company calls it a powerful direct marketing tool that provides email, phone, and print direct marketers with the ability to create targeted marketing campaigns from a CAN-SPAM compliant database, updated daily, of millions of heavily indexed people and companies.

Among the features of the new service are the ability for marketers to email targets as many times as they want over the course of a year; the option to focus campaigns to specific audiences based on its 24 categories of information; and in-depth profiles of prospects including their career history, education, and memberships on boards or trade organizations.

What’s behind the new service is ZoomInfo’s semantic search engine and artificial intelligence and natural language algorithms, which CTO William Wechtenhiser says are the force multipliers in helping marketers target their campaigns to those who are likely to be most interested in their offerings, most likely to respond to it -- and indeed most likely to want to be found by the marketer.

“We’ve got 50 million people who are very heavily indexed, associated with companies, and we have a lot of information on those companies themselves. So to slice and dice this on semantic principles that are interesting to your business is pretty cool,” he says. Even when this results in smaller lists of prospects, the value is they are the prospects they actually want to contact.

At a very high level, ZoomInfo takes unstructured or semi-structured content off the web and alters it into structured data that can be semantically searched, Wechtenhiser explains. There’s a lot of sloppy stuff on the web, so the challenge is keeping its data complete and accurate. Semantic and natural language technologies such as sentence-based extraction and information unification enables ZoomInfo to make sense out of two different profiles of a person named Tom Smith, for example, so that it can conclude whether they might be the same person.

“There is lots of data on the web that contradicts each other, either because something is old or false or it was a typo,” or for other reasons, Smith says. “At the end of the day we get our best guess of who this person is, or who the company is,” so that marketers -- or other searchers -- are able to get results that correctly correlate that information based on the criteria they set. ZoomInfo looks at hundreds of millions of web pages and gets tens of billions of facts from them. For example, it can see a sentence in a press release that says something like John Smith left Company A and joined Company B, and has a new title, and use that information to update its records so that the existing John Smith’s data is updated rather than duplicated.