MarTech Interview with Anwar Mai, Director, Product Management at ZoomInfo

Anwar Mai, Director, Product Management at ZoomInfo shares pointers on how marketers today can effectivly diversify their marketing strategies for better impact:
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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat, Anwar, tell us about yourself and more about your role at ZoomInfo…

Thank you so much for having me. My name is Anwar Mai and I’m the Director of Product Management for our Marketing & Advertising products at ZoomInfo. I’ve been in the role since 2022. Prior to ZoomInfo, I held product roles at eBay and Intuit. I have been in the digital marketing and advertising space for over 20 years.

I lead an extremely talented team of product managers and engineers, developing the foundation of ZoomInfo’s advertising product, which includes data pipelines and infrastructure, features to our own bidder, our integration with The Trade Desk, and optimizations to leverage our best-in-class data to execute display ad campaigns.

We’d love to hear more about ZoomInfo’s Integration with The Trade Desk and how it benefits end users?

 Previously, we were limited to delivering only display advertising in the U.S. The key benefits of this integration for ZoomInfo MarketingOS customers are:

• more inventory in current markets
• access to more premium publishers (such as on the most-read news sites and streaming platforms)
• access to new channels (video, audio, Connected TV, native)
• an ability to reach international audiences by delivering ads across the globe, which was a capability specifically requested by ZoomInfo customers.

We plan to leverage all that The Trade Desk offers. Combined with the proprietary data and intelligence Zoominfo is constantly developing, we will optimize our customers’ ad spend budgets while delivering business outcomes.

In all, how is the MarketingOS feature in your platform a one-stop shop for modern marketers?

MarketingOS is an account-based marketing (ABM) platform that helps modern marketers target, engage, and convert leads into buyers through insight-driven orchestration, personalized engagement across multiple channels (including display, social, email and SMS), and access to ZoomInfo’s world-class B2B data. Marketers can build dynamic audiences, create automated campaigns that are delivered via our in-house DSP, The Trade Desk’s DSP, or through social media (i.e. LinkedIn and Facebook), and track campaign metrics and ROI through advanced reporting to see all of your campaign results in a single location.

MarketingOS aligns Sales and Marketing teams by enabling both departments to work from a single source of truth, and instantly trigger go-to-market activities based on signals with ZoomInfo Workflows, as well as offer a cohesive ecosystem that allows marketers to target effectively while reducing wasted ad spend. The ZoomInfo SalesOS platform then allows Sales to engage and close customers with the largest, most accurate, and refreshed database of contact and company insights, intelligence, and real-time purchasing intent data.

When it comes to optimizing online marketing tactics in a crowded B2B marketing space like the one of today, how do you feel today’s marketers need to drive differentiation?

Personalization is a great marketing tactic to capture your audience’s attention with customized ads to landing pages or even chat interactions. With today’s tools, marketers can easily deliver personalized experiences at scale.

Another way to drive differentiation is with high-quality data. B2B marketers can use precision targeting to reach relevant prospects and reduce wasted marketing efforts.

Lastly, diversifying your marketing strategies to include different channels and new ad formats, such as video, will help you expand your brand awareness and recognition, adapt to new trends in digital marketing, and nurture leads at different stages in the buying journey with tailored messaging.

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Can you talk about some of the ways in which you’ve seen leading brands within the B2B tech segment capitalize on unique omnichannel messaging – what takeaways from these references would you highlight for our readers?

Leading B2B tech brands leverage a multi-faceted approach to engage your entire audience. These brands understand the importance of reaching their target audience through the entire engagement funnel, starting with display and social advertising. It’s important to diversify the channels you use to increase engagement and ensure your messaging is being seen at various stages in the buyer’s journey.

These brands have also capitalized on tools such as chatbots to book meetings in real time, de-anonymize website traffic to better understand which companies are visiting your website, and use lead capture software to optimize form submissions. These all contribute to better data-driven insights that ultimately create more timely interactions and tailored content.

Can you comment on the growing use of AI in this space and thoughts around AI and the future of martech?

AI has been present in the space for some time, though it is still just scratching the surface with regard to its potential impact on the future of martech. It is ever-evolving and the quality of the data sourced for AI continues to improve. The power of AI is unquestionably dependent on the quality of the source data, a detail that is frequently overlooked by businesses trying to implement it.

At ZoomInfo, our existing AI helps us optimize ad budgets, but new optimizations will help our customers intelligently communicate with prospects along all the steps of the funnel.

The opportunity for AI in martech is immense and exciting. Leveraging intelligent contextual targeting to grab users’ attention, then continuing the conversation all the way down the funnel, capturing intent, and feeding value back to prospects are exciting developments in the space. Using AI to create media and messaging, reporting, and analysis, and producing recommendations on next best actions. AI is not the end-all, be-all, but it’s a great starting point to spark inspiration, content, and conversations.

Last month we attended Dreamforce, where generative AI was a heavily covered topic. Our customers shared that they love SalesOS and using intelligence to generate sales-qualified leads. We have a lot of opportunities with MarketingOS to reach more of our SalesOS customers and we’re already adding more generative AI-driven insights across all of ZoomInfo’s products.

Before we wrap up, take us through five must-dos you feel every B2B marketer needs to follow on a daily basis, to drive growth in a unified manner.

Here are five must-dos every B2B marketer needs to follow on a daily basis to drive growth:

1. Leverage buyer intent data to create targeted audience lists. For example, ZoomInfo allows marketers to build dynamic audiences and activate campaigns triggered in real-time based on spikes in intent data, focused to the buying groups of targeted accounts.
2. Set up daily check-ins with your sales team. Sales and Marketing alignment is crucial to prioritizing ready-to-buy accounts and closing more deals. Share new marketing offers and campaigns that are launching, follow up on MQLs to see if your leads have closed or not, and have your Sales team keep you informed about what is happening in the field. You can proactively practice social listening, but there’s no better feedback than from the voice of your customer.
3. Take a full-funnel approach with end-to-end campaigns. There’s a saying that it requires at least eight touchpoints to make a sale. But it’s also important to create an advertising strategy that encompasses the entire funnel and find solutions that offer a 360-degree view of buyer’s interactions, so you know when to target the right buyer at the right time.
4. Track business impact from campaigns with revenue-based KPIs. Traditional KPIs can be effective, but for a B2B marketer, you’ll want additional KPIs to measure your advertising campaign performance, such as campaign reach, return on ad spend, and connecting closed-won deals to ad spend along the funnel. This will help you ensure your campaigns are being shown to a majority of your target audience and you’ll know how to better optimize your budget.
5. Experiment. A/B test your ad copy or test different messaging in your email campaigns to see what messaging resonates the most with your audience. By checking your KPIs and metrics, you will be able to see what’s working and where you need to iterate in order to make your campaign a success.

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