Account Based Data
Article | June 29, 2023
If you’ve been keeping up with new terms in B2B marketing, by now you’ve likely heard of account-based marketing (ABM). The term itself has been around for years, but with recent advances in technology, this tactic is now being adopted at a much larger scale than ever before. Still, surprisingly, I find that many B2B marketers are in the dark when it comes to ABM. So here’s a quick look into the future of B2B enterprise marketing, and why I think account-based marketing will be one of the biggest revenue drivers for B2B businesses in the very near future.
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Programmatic ABM
Article | June 9, 2022
Account-based marketing in healthcare helps marketers reach institutional decision-makers based on intent and target accounts. However, ABM becomes a bit more complex in the healthcare domain where the needs, regulations, and procurement processes vary widely, and so do the ways healthcare providers communicate. For an ABM strategy to work in this domain, effort, time, tailored content, and deep customer insights are necessary.
ABM Strategy in Healthcare
Here are the co-ordinated steps you need to take to implement ABM in the healthcare domain:
Getting Buy-in
Get buy-in from sponsors at the highest level and coordinate with functional stakeholders. Create client-centric teams and decide on KPIs that matter.
Identify Key Accounts
With the help of sales representatives and relationship managers, identify key HCP accounts that can benefit from your ABM strategy.
Conduct Extensive Research
Deep-dive into research on these key accounts, their history, buyer journeys with you. Find out their current and future needs and issues, and their status within the market.
Tailor Your Content
The research will help you tailor the content for your content marketing strategy. Address the decision-makers with content that solves their pressing issues to get the conversions you want.
Analyze & Adjust the Strategy
Analyze campaign results from time to time (preferably quarterly). Based on your identified KPIs, check what is working and what isn’t bringing the expected results. Adjust your strategy accordingly.
What to Expect from ABM in Healthcare?
Salesforce recently conducted research among healthcare marketing professionals. The results showed that 70% believed connected customer journeys positively impacted client loyalty and willingness to recommend products to others. So, ABM could be a great way to increase your revenue and get a higher ROI as compared to any other marketing strategy.
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Buyer Intent Data
Article | October 7, 2022
The only constant thing about account-based marketing (ABM) is its evolution. ABM goes beyond plain sales and marketing. It is a strategic and dynamic approach to marketing. It influences B2B buyers who are savvy, digitally native, and educated buying committee members who are otherwise difficult to target, let alone convert.
ABM has evolved from pure one-to-one ABM to one-to-few and one-to-many. We know how ABM is now ABX, which harnesses intent data and programmatic advertising for better results.
Consider a company that wants to implement account-based marketing on its key accounts. If every aspect of this organization revolves around the needs, demands, and requirements of its key accounts, it becomes an account-centric enterprise.
In the first part of this article, we will discuss how an account-based approach on an organizational level can enhance your ABM strategy and help you create relationships that deliver mutual value and growth.
Building an Account-Centric Organization
Transforming an entire organization into an account-centric one is overall an eight-step process. Let us look at the first four:
Two-fold Approach: Check Your Foundation
Examine your foundation before implementing an account-based strategy. Ensure that your tech stack is optimum and that the right employees handle the right responsibilities. Secure the internal buy-in needed to get your ABM program up and running.
Adaption: Make Your Changes Eventually
Make changes to your current strategy only when required and over time. It is unnecessary to completely revamp your organization to align it with your ABM efforts. Ideally, make changes based on your performance. Always focus on the target account so all your teams— demand generation, events, sales, and marketing teams— will have the mindset to target your ICP. The correct approach is to enhance your processes as you go.
Awareness: Train and Educate Your Teams
Your entire team should live and breathe ABM. Align your sales and marketing teams. Other teams should match their processes to best suit the target accounts’ needs. Train and educate your teams, so they can easily adapt to new ABM processes and don’t feel blind-sided.
Analysis: Data Matters a Great Deal
Understand your data. Constantly review, acknowledge, and adjust your processes based on the data at hand. Then, support it with the knowledge of your salespeople. Get their input and advice on which accounts to engage with for optimal results. Then, bring them into the decision-making process for outstanding results.
It’s a Process
Building an account-centric organization requires time and commitment. In the next part of this article, we will discuss important aspects that impact and govern the success of your ABM strategy.
Stay tuned to read the next part of the article.
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ABM Accounts
Article | July 14, 2021
B2B marketers meticulously craft content plans to include an attractive landing page, a remarkable eBook, and paid ads for maximum engagement. They write the slickest nurture emails, supporting blogs, and over-the-top articles. Nearly tens of thousands of dollars and a couple of months go into the campaign creation, but it stops abruptly.
Why?
How can this be? The data collected for the eBook was filled with insights that made them shudder. The strategy was executed to perfection but didn't make any sense!
Does this situation sound familiar to you as well? You must have faced the same! It often happens in B2B companies when sales and marketing are not fully aligned on their goals, messaging, and targeting audience. When you spread a wide net for lead generation, most of the leads may not be relevant. So, what should we do?
Here comes the protagonist of the B2B marketing story:
Account-Based Marketing (ABM)
ABM curtails the time spent on irrelevant accounts while decreasing overall money spending. In addition, as businesses, after the pandemic, are starting to realize the potential of personalized campaigns, ABM is rapidly becoming the go-to strategy for B2B tech companies. As a result, they are aiming to improve their marketing and sales alignment.
Importantly, ABM demands sales and marketing alignment. It ends those hair-tearing, soul-destroying arguments on which leads to focus on. Now both teams have to keep the hyper-targeted focus on specific accounts, which will result in time-saving, the flow of quality leads, and, thus, your ROI will be up.
But before going about creating effective ABM campaigns, let's quickly read the factors to consider while implementing ABM.
Factors to Consider to Implement ABM
Get your Sales & Marketing teams to work together
To create an effective ABM campaign, marketing and sales teams must converge and act following a shared strategy. Furthermore, to expect excellent results, teams involved in the campaign should use the same data from diverse sources. Thus, it creates a data-inspired ideal customer profile (ICP).
To Identify Accounts
For defining target accounts, consider these factors:
Revenue potential: Your target audience should fall into your product or service's price line.
Best fit accounts: Find accounts and individual buyers who are aligned with your marketing personas.
Importance of Strategy: Aim for accounts that match your company's business strategy. Identify if they are your ideal customer or not.
Product requirements: Start with the low-hanging fruit, which means identifying accounts that can make precise use of the solution you're offering.
To Establish KPIs
To know whether you are rocking with your ABM campaigns, it's crucial to decide your KPIs. You can consider the following to confirm it:
How many companies match your customer personas?
Account and role-specific conversion KPIs such as booked meetings created deals, and purchases completed.
The accounts that visit your website or engage with the content types.
Thus, you'll have to track KPIs at every stage of your ABM funnel to determine the success of your campaign.
Prepare Multi-Channel Content
Relevant and engaging content is the root of every marketing campaign. Still, marketers should personalize ABM content so that they can timely reach each target. So, it's essential to keep the process of messaging focused on the account's pain points, budget restraints, and additional demands.
It is because your campaigns are hyper-targeted, where you'll need to spread them across multiple content channels to offer numerous opportunities. Doing so will help to gain engagement, and then you can calculate budgets for clicks and channels. In addition, blend touchpoints such as paid ads, blogs, personalized email, text messaging, and multi-touch SDR strategies will help create effective ABM campaigns.
Here are effective steps to execute an effective ABM campaign.
5 Steps to Create Effective ABM Campaigns
Build your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
As Account-based marketing is more like spearfishing, you need to be conscientious about who you target. It is because this type of marketing revolves entirely around who you reach out to. So, it is imperative that you pick companies that would benefit the most from your product or services and be your top-tier customers if they get converted to purchase your service. Hence, the first and most foundational thing for an effective ABM campaign is knowing who you need to target.
Many companies enjoy massive audiences. Therefore, they can increase revenue if they successfully reach them. However, with B2B SaaS companies in marketing, when they try to please everyone, they usually end up pleasing no one. It is because they produce standard messaging that doesn't speak to any group of people. So here, it becomes vital to build your IPC before creating an ABM campaign strategy.
Invest in the Right Account-Based Marketing Tools
To create successful account-based marketing (ABM) campaign, you need to have the right tools to help your team effortlessly execute your ABM strategy and monitor its progress simultaneously. Here are some of the best tools that you can use effectively:
ZoomInfo
Using a platform like ZoomInfo helps you quickly search companies based on their industry, number of employees, and current services. Then, you can easily set ABM campaigns based on information collected through ZoomInfo and proceed further to target.
SalesIntel
SalesIntel is a sales intelligence platform. It provides your sales team with verified numbers of the target account. Using this platform, your team can evade gatekeepers and increase the chances of securing a targeting process.
Everstring
Everstring's platform enables your ABM team to develop a predictive behavior model where target accounts can be identified and be more likely to convert into sales.
Create Relevant Content
Now, you have your ICP and personas penned down; it's time to communicate. But how do you make sure that you are effectively communicating with each account? And how to properly showcase the value that your solution provides to drive for their companies?
The secret lies in applying information gathered in each stage in the customer journey: Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion.
For an effective account-based marketing campaign, create content for each of these stages—general product & company information for Awareness, technical details for Consideration, and urgency for Conversion. Every piece of content in each step should be designed to appropriately educate prospects on their buying journey and push them to the next phase.
Here are some content types for the most successful ABM campaigns:
Emails to each persona (includes initial outreach, follow-ups, responses, and more)
Landing pages that provide information and facilitate actions
Thought leadership blog and articles for the Awareness stage
Product-specific pages for consideration
Testimonials for the Conversion stage
Organizing your content in such a framework enables you to find and fill content gaps while creating a comprehensive plan to address each persona in the customer journey.
Include Messaging Channels
You can use many avenues to engross prospects in an ABM campaign. Any medium that you use to communicate directly can be effectively utilized.
So, it's essential to focus on the most popular ABM channels like LinkedIn, Email, and telecommunication. Each method has its benefits and effectiveness to get your message to the right people in the right way. Here, you will understand how to go with it these channels:
LinkedIn
LinkedIn is the most utilized channel for ABM campaigns because of its messaging capability and enrichment abilities. It consents you to send messages for free. Additionally, you promptly gain all of their professional information when you connect with a contact, including roles and email ids.
However, the best part of LinkedIn outreach is you are considered as a person, not a bot, when you reach out to contacts. In addition, you have a profile and a resume, which humanizes you. Due to these factors, LinkedIn is one of the most accurate and up-to-date B2B outreach platforms available, as everyone constantly updates their LinkedIn profile with professional milestone information.
Having being beneficial, keep in mind that there are some limitations with LinkedIn—you can send approximately a hundred connections per week. This being said, you can use this channel for the most important contacts on your list.
Email
Email's largest advantage is that it doesn't have a character limit on initial outreach messages. Thus, you can write as much as you want. However, some trade-offs go along with that freedom.
As email being cheap, automatable, easy to use, and can reach thousands of contacts at a time, it's utilized by almost every B2B marketer. But, at the same time, this results in the clogged inbox situation, creating spam filters due to high levels of outreach competition. In addition, this makes consumers suspicious of emails received from unrecognized senders.
But the good news is that you can purchase email tools to help manage your email outreach campaigns. These can automate email message sending to ensure that you're constantly optimizing your outreach to prospects. Emails are a must-have for an effective email outreach campaign, which will exponentially surge your reach, make you smarter with analytics, and create an effective ABM campaign.
Telecommunication
Phone outreach is the most effective channel to outreach. It also gives you a chance to really get to know your prospective customer and their fears and dreams so that you can:
Figure out if your product would be a good fit for the customer.
Know how to quickly and effectively communicate the value of your product to that customer.
Retarget
Once you set up accounts with the proper channels that you plan to push people to with your ABM outreach, you can create simple retargeting ads that guide them further through the customer journey. These ads will result in Calls to Action that offer case studies or white paper resources on your solution or industry to give your prospects market insights and real-world examples of how your solution can benefit companies.
On top of it, when getting your logo and message in front of prospects again, retargeting ads perform splendidly compared to traditional methods. For example, a recent MarketLand article explained that retargeting ads often have Click-Through-Rates of "0.30%-0.95%, which is 3-10x costlier than the industry average."
Resultantly, you must pay close attention to who your audience is that you're serving these ads to, as well as where and how often you're delivering them. It may seem overwhelming at first, but it'll get easier over time. A properly executed account-based campaign will provide the results you want. Doing this will allow you to reap the enormous rewards that retargeting can bestow upon your ABM campaign.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is an ABM marketing campaign?
Account-based marketing (ABM) strategy concentrates resources on a set of target accounts within a market. The campaigns designed are to engage each account, basing the marketing message on the specific attributes and needs of the account.
How do I make an ABM campaign?
Follow these steps to make an effective ABM campaign:
Create a team that is dedicated to ABM only
Clear your goals and then make a strategy
Find your technology
Identify the right accounts
Pick the right channels
Execute your campaigns
Measure everything
Choose messaging platform
Spread relevant content (messages)
Why is ABM important?
ABM supports structure marketing efforts and resources on your key accounts to drive the most revenue. Doing ABM will maximize the efficiency of your B2B marketing resources. It will also help build the communication channel with sales to have an aligned sales and marketing organization.
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