That the only way to compete with Google is to outpace them in a vertical that they haven't yet developed means that the significance of niches in search engine marketing is huge. Well, it seems that the B2B search ZoomInfo is shoring up its niche efforts to corner the business user markeing in advertising. Specifically, shortly after striking a partnership with Xing, a business social network, ZoomInfo is launching an advertising platform that will allow their unique advertisers to target their users according to those users' demographics. If these ads will be simultaneously distributed across the Xing network, ZoomInfo might have a chance at aA href="http://blog.searchanyway.com/2007/09/zoominfo_surviving_the_faceboo.html">surviving the Facebook effect after all. As the press release explains:

New York City (PRWEB) November 5, 2007 -- At the ad:techNew York '07 conference, business information search engine ZoomInfo™ announced plans to launch the industry's first bizographic advertising platform - a website traffic analysis and advertising targeting platform based on people's 'business demographics'. Bizographic targeting will initially be available to advertisers on www.zoominfo.com. ZoomInfo plans to launch an end-to-end suite of products for marketers to leverage bizographic advertising across a larger network of websites in 2008.

ZoomInfo is a business information search engine that currently has comprehensive profiles on 3.5 million companies across thousands of industries, and almost 40 million professionals. Based on that deep understanding of business information, ZoomInfo has developed a proprietary mechanism for tracking and associating bizographic information - industry, company, title, functional area, education, sex, location, etc. - on business people in a non-personally identifiable way.

Bizographic advertising provides highly-targeted demographic and behavioral advertising. As a result, ZoomInfo empowers marketers to target their online advertising based on the audience of a site instead of the content. For example, if a company wants to reach technology decision makers for an IT product offering or high-income individuals for a platinum credit card offer, it could use ZoomInfo's bizographic advertising to target directors of IT or CEOs respectively.

This isn't the first time ZoomInfo has taken a significant step in the direction of catering to the markets of both business users and business advertisers. In September alone they took two major steps in the direction of augmenting their brand name presence in the community of business users. First, their opened up their API, making it considerably easier for others to develop applications that could leverage their database of information on businesses and business professionals. Secondly, they partnered with Xing, a social-network/directory/search-engine for business professionals.

The question, then, is whether those two previous moves will be enough to stimulate demand for ZoomInfo's bizographic advertising platform. Many business professional are already using Facebook (sometimes exclusively) for business networking purposes. Facebook, moreover, tends to have more exhaustive demographics on users than any other portal. It follows, then, that advertisers of business services would be able to more accurately target users on Facebook, the second largest social network site, than they would be able to through ZoomInfo.

The flip side of this coin, however, pertains to ZoomInfo's relationship with Xing. Essentially, ZoomInfo is likely poised to begin distributing the more targeted ads over the Xing network. As the press release that announced the partnership explained then:

Waltham, MA (PRWEB) September 7, 2007 -- Business information search engine ZoomInfo™ and XING AG, the operator of XING -- one of the foremost networks for business professionals -- today announced the ability for users to co-register with both sites and manage their digital identity. Now professionals can manage their online identity while creating a XING profile to network with other professionals.

If users of either site are co-registering, it follows then that not only will these bizographic ads be seen by ZoomInfo users, but also by Xing users. Since Xing is the portal with demographics generated from user profiles, moreover, it is likely safe to assume that ZoomInfo will be targeting users rather accurately with their bizographic platform. It is possible, then, that the revenue stream from these targeted ads will enable both ZoomInfo and Zing enhance the experience that they are providing users with, and eventually surpass business-network-search competitors such as LinkedIn. In other words, ZoomInfo's previous product developments may, indeed, be enough to stimulate demand for this latest advertising product.