Buyer Intent Data
Article | September 11, 2023
The pandemic has catalyzed an en-masse move to hybrid workforce models across industries and functions, including marketing teams. Add to this the broad changes in consumer behavior and market expectations resulting from the disruption of the last 15 months. How has all of this change impacted marketing priorities?
While DX has been a priority for a while now, what’s changed is the race to connect customer experience (CX) to the DX initiative. Over the last year digital engagement has been at times the only way to find, get and keep customers. Starting with overhauling virtual shopfronts — aka brand websites — to investing in more advanced data-driven marketing decisioning engines, making CX central to the digital strategy has become primary.
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Core ABM
Article | June 20, 2023
ABM is B2B marketing with a higher ROI. It involves going after fewer accounts with a more personalized approach. So, account selection is vital. No matter the budget, if you fumble the ball in the account selection process, your campaign is bound to fail. Guesswork is not an option. You need to stringently research your ideal accounts based on your ICP (ideal customer profile).
In an interview with Media 7, Maliha Aqeel, Director of Global Communications at Fix Network World, talked about the common mistakes companies make while implementing brand strategy. Not budgeting your ABM strategy correctly may be one of them.
"One of the most common mistakes companies make is implementing a brand strategy that isn’t aligned to the organization’s overall business goal."
Businesses that want to transition into ABM are often confused and have several questions about ABM implementation. One of the most important questions they have is about budgeting.
According to a 2016 report by SiriusDecisions, 33% of companies allocated at least 30% of their marketing budgets to ABM. In 2017 that number increased up to 52% — a 57% year over year increase. Their 2019 State of Account-Based Marketing Study showed that the average ABM budget is around $350,000 excluding head count costs.
Going by these statistics, how much should you invest in your ABM strategy? It is common to finalize a strategy way in advance. Allocating budgets to a certain strategy and then deciding to execute ABM can be a pain.
Before deciding on your ABM budget and streamlining your ABM funding strategy, consider the following factors:
Factors to Consider for ABM Funding
Know Your Target Accounts
Business size, decision-makers, departments, positions, interests, demographics, get all the information you can on your target accounts. Make sure you are investing your money in the right target accounts. The bigger your target account, the more stakeholders, and departments there are to manage. This may considerably increase the cost and complexity of your campaign.
Your Advertising Budget
Zero in on the platforms you want to use to engage your target audience. Once you do this, you will get an idea of how much you need to spend to reach your audience on these platforms and get maximum engagement.
Additional marketing techniques like seminars, webinars, conferences, and other events should also be considered in your ABM funding.
Brand Awareness
Gather information on how well your target accounts know your brand. If they already know your brand, then you are saving time and money on creating a new relationship from scratch. However, if your brand does not have a good reputation or reach, creating new leads requires more resources than creating new opportunities.
Your Product’s Complexity
If your product or service complexity is high, you need to work harder to explain its advantages and benefits to convince the stakeholders of your target accounts. This effort is directly proportional to the amount of money you need to spend.
Your Customer’s Needs
The customer’s need for your product or service defines how much you need to spend on advertising. If there is no urgency or if there are many similar solutions that they have used in the past, it becomes difficult to convince them to use your product or service. In short, if they don’t need your product, you need to spend a better part of your budget on impressing them.
Your Competition
The more competitors you have, the more aggressive your campaign needs to be. An aggressive campaign will need a bigger budget. It gets trickier if your competitors already have an established relationship with your target account.
However, if you have the target account’s CLV (customer lifetime value) figured out, you can easily determine how much you need to spend on pursuing a particular account.
Technology Integration
To deliver hyper personalized account-based experiences, you need to find suitable technological platforms to launch your ABM strategy. Platforms like ABM Unified Workforce are an ideal start because of their unified approach to strategy implementation. Consider allocating a part of your budget to technology integrations so you remain up-to-speed with modern implementations like marketing automation. It will also help you optimize your campaign results.
ABM Partners
You need knowledge, human resources, and technology to launch and successfully run account-based marketing campaigns. Alternatively, you can also hire new staff or train the people you already have. Partnering with an ABM agency is also a great option. It not only saves you the time and effort of finding the right marketers, but it also delivers the results and metrics you expect. There are many service providers in the market who can help you kick-start your ABM campaign.
Funding Your ABM Strategy
Now that you know the factors that should be considered for your ABM funding, let us look at some tips to enhance your budgeting.
Identify Target Account CLV
In ABM, less is more, so identify target accounts based on their CLV. It may require three or more years for your ABM campaign to show results, so make sure you periodically assess your target account’s CLV before making big investments.
Harness Technology
Tie your technology budget with sales. Support your goals and streamline your processes by using martech. Collaborating with specialized agencies that have talent and technology can uplift your ABM campaign. Not only do agencies quickly launch your campaign, but they also save you the trouble of recruiting new staff. However, make sure you engage a trustworthy agency with the best technology offerings and expertise.
Get Approval and Support from Stakeholders
Get your stakeholders on your side by justifying your budget with a list of target accounts and their projected value. If you are planning to implement ABM, then you should already have a preliminary version of your ABM funding proposal ready.
Measure Your Performance
Use relationships, reputation, and revenue, the three crucial R’s to measure your performance. These should be your benchmarks and should be assessed periodically.
Conclusion
ABM funding takes effort and time but doing it diligently can bring an increase in ROI, brand awareness, revenue, and confidence in ABM.
FAQ
What is the first step in your ABM funding strategy?
The first step in your ABM funding strategy is to know your target accounts through stringent research.
What are the three important Rs for measuring ABM performance?
The three important Rs for measuring ABM’s performance are relationship, reputation, and revenue.
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Buyer Intent Data
Article | March 6, 2023
Recently, Contentgine, a content-based marketing agency, released its latest ‘Top 5’ research ranking for popular artificial intelligence (AI) related content consumed by B2B decision-makers. The content assets, mostly e-books, that made it to the list focus on predictive analytics, cloud-based machine learning (ML) technologies, deep data analytics, and more.
But why are B2B decision-makers so curious about AI and ML?
They want to use AI and ML-based solutions effectively to streamline their business processes and improve their marketing strategies.
Digital transformation, heightened consumer expectations, and changing buyer dynamics govern the way B2B decision-makers utilize their resources. Let us look at what is making them seek AI and ML-related content on such a high scale:
AI Simplifies Decision-Making
A survey conducted by SurveyMonkey concluded that 6 out of 10 B2B decision-makers experience decision paralysis—difficulty in choosing an option from a few viable ones—more often than expected. Furthermore, reaching a consensus becomes cumbersome if too many stakeholders are involved in the decision-making process. In such sticky situations, AI algorithms come to the rescue. They leverage heterogeneous data from social media, reports, website activity and more, to offer insights on management and resource allocation, assist in troubleshooting problems and aid strategic development. They alleviate issues that insufficient data and a lack of proper tools to measure metrics pose. They present a clear picture in front of the decision-makers to enable them to make an informed decision.
Assists in Lead Generation
Forget archaic, standard prospecting tools. You can effortlessly conduct lead generation research using various complex parameters with AI-powered tools. You can also analyze customer behavior, create dynamic, intuitive, secure and valuable lead lists. Sifting through massive lead generation data to discover the client profiles that match your ICP gets easier. On the other hand, ML helps with demand prediction, churn prediction, local optimization, and sentiment analysis, so you can offer an excellent customer experience to your leads. AI lead generation tools such as Conversica, Drift, and LeadCrunch can have conversations with your leads, collect their email addresses, and qualify them even before handing them off to the sales teams. AI-powered lead scoring can help you identify intent signals that your marketing teams might have missed.
Optimizes Content Strategy
Let’s face it. You don’t want to sell Eskimo ice. Irrelevant content sabotages your chances of creating a lasting relationship with your prospects. Your content should align with your customer’s needs and pain points. Thanks to machine learning, deep content personalization is possible. ML can analyze content assets on your website and send the relevant ones to a prospect at the right time based on their position in the buyer’s journey.
AI and ML Are Changing the Game for B2B Businesses
According to an O’Reilly survey commissioned by MemSQL, 71% of executives said that ML and AI are game-changers for their business. B2B decision-makers are investing their resources in exploring the advantages of AI and ML in-depth. They are keen to implement AI systems and ML-based solutions to eliminate human errors, continuously analyze vast amounts of raw data, and harness structured solutions to problems they face in executing their business processes.
VMWare Uses Acrolinx to Streamline Content Program
AI-enabled content solution Acrolinx offered VMWare real-time dashboards on the results of its content activity. The qualitative report helped VMWare focus its resources on making its content better so that it could get more conversions.
Closing Thoughts
“AI will increasingly determine which firms win and which firms lose.” - Phil Clement, former CMO of Aon.
“AI will increasingly determine which firms win and which firms lose.” - Phil Clement, former CMO of Aon. AI and ML can significantly impact business operations and marketing campaigns in the B2B domain. To have a competitive edge in the market, understanding their importance and figuring out where and how to use their power will no longer be a choice but a necessity.
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ABM Accounts
Article | June 2, 2021
The application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and other advanced technologies is inevitable and necessary to achieve the potential of account-based marketing (ABM). However, I consider technology to be more of an enabler of ABM, while the driver always remains the same – enhancing the customer experience by helping clients sustain and grow their business in this dynamic digital era. The goal is not for AI to make marketing decisions but to enable marketers to make better decisions by leveraging the strength of AI in analyzing a large amount of data quickly to share action-oriented insights.
AI can be a friend or foe, depending on what decisions we make while evaluating and implementing AI. Following are key questions organizations should answer before deploying an AI-based marketing strategy.
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