Core ABM
Article | June 20, 2023
Large companies in the B2B domain have adopted account-based marketing. They shook up their conventional content strategy to integrate an ABM-centric approach into client-facing content. Tailored content that caters to target accounts can help you achieve higher revenues. Here are five ways for you to fuse your ABM strategy with intelligent content marketing:
Deep-dive into Researching Your Target Account
Note positives about your target account, like high revenue, quick payment, hands-off implementation, etc. Find where your target accounts meet with similar industry profiles. Identify trends and conversations. Interact with these collectives and media outlets to identify pain points your product can solve.
Determine Key Decision-makers
Map the decision-makers' behaviors in the target account. Your content strategy should target vulnerable decision-makers. Find out about their lives, online habits, hobbies, professional philosophies, online communities, and social networks in real life.
Develop a Personalized Content Strategy
Create pillar content explaining how your product solves client problems. Link clustercontent to this pillar to explain its concepts. Each pillar of your pillar-and-cluster content strategy can target a different decision-maker persona. Personalized ABM increases deal closure by 2% and reduces marketing campaign costs by 40% (Source: Terminus)
Use Targeted Landing Pages to Capture Leads
Use pillar content to target ideal accounts. Targeted ad campaigns can drive prospects to lead-capture landing pages. Create landing pages where customers enter contact info for content. Sales and marketing teams can better target leads based on the landing page where they are captured.
Improve Your Content Process
Relevant content helps you reach your target account profile. You need to release content regularly and correctly. Many marketers use marketing automation content tools to achieve this.
Wrapping It Up
Supporting your ABM strategy with a robust content strategy tailored to target your key accounts can get you the conversions you expect.
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Account Based Data
Article | June 29, 2023
6sense, the leading platform for predictable B2B revenue growth, today announces the results of the commissioned Total Economic Impact (TEI™) study conducted by Forrester Consulting examining the potential return on investment (ROI) by deploying the 6sense Revenue AI solution. The TEI study shows organizations using 6sense Revenue AI can achieve an ROI of 454% over three years, recouping their investment in less than six months with ROI increasing steadily thereafter.
These results align with 6sense’s own analysis of customer data which indicates a significant increase in revenue growth obtained within the first two quarters of prioritizing 6sense Qualified Accounts (6QA) which are prospects in-market to buy a solution and represent an ideal fit.
“As sales and marketing teams face increasing challenges to predictably grow pipeline and revenue while optimizing resources, our customers rely on 6sense as their unique competitive advantage to help them align on targets, maximize efforts, and significantly scale growth,” said Jason Zintak, CEO of 6sense. “We believe Forrester’s findings confirm that applying AI-driven insights to prioritize and target the right accounts at the right time with 6sense Revenue AI increases revenue and drives efficiencies across sales and marketing.”
According to the study participants, before using 6sense Revenue AI their organizations’ traditional marketing and sales efforts had languished while costly time and resource investments no longer provided results. Frustrated revenue teams were ineffective, often using point solutions requiring significant manual effort while delivering little value. They selected 6sense to create pipeline more efficiently and predictably.
Leveraging 6sense Revenue AI to capture buying signals and target the right accounts at the right time, the TEI study’s composite customer experienced the following benefits:
Increased sales revenues: Interviewees reported that 6sense identified 6QA opportunities were more likely to close and had higher average contract values. By increasingly focusing on prioritized accounts, revenue teams delivered significant gains in profits for their organizations.
2X increases in average contract value
4X increases in win rate
31% increases in opportunity volume
Decreased costs: Interviewees cited using 6sense to market and sell more efficiently and effectively. Acting on insights provided by 6sense unlocks significant resource optimization gains, including:
40% reduction in aggregate costs to qualify opportunities
40% reduction in effort to close opportunities
20-40% reduction in time to close deals
Study participants reported a wide range of optimization and cost reduction benefits using 6sense Revenue AI including sales productivity gains from enhanced insights and better prioritization, tech stack consolidation, improved conversion rates across the buyer’s journey, reduced customer acquisition costs and optimized marketing spend. One interviewee indicated their customer acquisition costs dropped by nearly 50% within two years of implementing 6sense.
“6sense Revenue AI is the first and only platform to apply the power of data, machine learning, and automation across the entire buyers’ journey to provide a better customer experience and produce the kind of pipeline that converts to revenue. This means the entire revenue team makes insight-driven decisions, prioritizes time and resources more effectively, and realizes better outcomes,” said Amar Doshi, SVP of Product and UX at 6sense. “Our customers repeatedly claim results similar to those that participated in the TEI Study.”
To develop the study, Forrester interviewed nine 6sense customers, identifying the benefits, risks, and outcomes they experienced while using the company’s product experience platform. Forrester’s (TEI) consulting practice develops business value justification analysis to help organizations understand the financial impact of a technology investment. The TEI methodology has been used for over 20 years by technology organizations. It consists of four components to evaluate investment value: cost, benefits, flexibility, and risk.
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Programmatic ABM
Article | June 9, 2022
Personalized engagements are the foundation of account-based marketing. Without customized and relevant content, B2B marketers cannot steer target accounts towards conversion, nor can they create a lasting relationship with them. That said, tailoring messaging for every contact on a target account’s buying committee can be overwhelming because each contact is at a different stage in the buyer journey.
Marketing teams struggle to achieve optimal success at ABM because they cannot scale their content personalization efforts to create engagement to ease the work of the sales teams.
You can easily overcome these challenges with conversational ABM. Let us take a look at how:
Creates Meaningful Engagement
Buyers have evolved from engaging with marketing emails, ads, whitepapers, and webinars. They expect personalized two-way conversations that focus on their requirements and pain points. So it is no surprise that 90% of customers want to use messaging to communicate with businesses (Source: Twilio Customer Survey).
How does conversational ABM create meaningful engagement?
Did you know that when you contact a lead within the first hour, you are seven times more likely to qualify the prospect? (Source: Harvard Business Review)
Conversational ABM engages customers with real-time conversations using chat bots, voice bots, or interactive web pages. B2B companies engage in conversational ABM through social media, websites and paid advertising. These AI-powered conversations replace static lead capture forms with one-on-one conversations with target accounts. Target accounts can get in touch with your business and receive instantaneous responses. As they move through the funnel, they can have a seamless, personalized, consistent experience, thus increasing the likeliness of conversion and ensuring a holistic customer experience.
Accelerates ABM Revenue
Conversational ABM drives engagement towards revenue-generating actions. It fuels your pipeline with leads who want to take the next step. Apart from doing this, conversational ABM also brings your sales and marketing teams together and enhances the personalization quotient of your content. It routes your leads effectively through instantaneous responses and increases annual contract value (ACV) because your sales reps understand exactly what your customers want. Additionally, it automates messaging based on specific account attributes. These features help you put your ABM strategy into action and get the sales you want.
TLDR: Game-changing Attributes of Conversational ABM
Helps you know the moment a target buyer arrives on your website
Alerts your sales team for immediate conversation
Supports live chat, voice calls and screen sharing option
Scales your personalization strategy for content
It is available around the clock
Increases ABM revenue through meaningful engagement
Ideal Conversational ABM Solution Features
Matches contacts to best personalized conversation
Validates contact’s interest and qualifies them
Initiates a prompt, two-way dialog; takes regular follow-up
Uses insights to improve account segmentation and personalize content accordingly
Summing It Up
While implementing ABM, building thousands of messages and managing hundreds of workflows can be tiring. Conversational ABM can save you time and let you tailor key parts of your conversation with a specific account to make your ABM strategy work better.
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Core ABM
Article | January 3, 2022
ABM influences key accounts that show buyer intent. This influence is internal (B2B through personalized content) and aims to sway decision-makers who green-light a purchase.
In an interview with Media 7, Mark Emond, Founder & President of Demand Spring, talked about the importance of content in marketing.
“Content is at the heart of great marketing today. It needs to educate, inspire, and convert. It must be tied to the unique rational and emotional needs of each target persona.”
ABM’s focused approach leads to faster lead conversions and a higher ROI. However, B2B marketers still face the following challenges in their marketing strategy:
Maximizing Marketing Efficiency
B2B marketers must consistently drive higher ROI on their efforts while working within a limited budget.
Improving Customer Experience
Cutting through the noise of thousands of competitors and delivering an enhanced customer experience is challenging.
Generating Trust in Customers
Marketers need to humanize their approach and reach a level of undeniable authenticity to generate trust in the minds of customers.
Why Should You Use Influencer Marketing in ABM?
According to a CSO Insights report from Marketing Charts, brands fail to incite enough trust in their target audience. Interestingly, it is what the subject matter experts and third-party influencers from the industry say that counts. So, external influence is driving purchase decisions. Internal influence, though crucial, cannot sideline external influence and how it impacts sales and key decisions.
When you integrate ABM with influencer marketing, you co-create relatable, impactful content with relevant influencers to encourage your target accounts to move ahead in the sales funnel. An influencer becomes a credible touch point, powerful enough to convert a lead. The influencer’s performance-oriented content resonates with the target audience, engages, educates, and informs them of the strong points of your business, creating a strong foundation for lead conversion.
Here is how it can help strengthen ABM strategy:
Increases Content Authenticity
The words of a trusted subject matter expert or third-party niche content creator hold more weight than static website content or brand ads. Their followers trust them and consider their views authentic. If such relevant influencers create content with you, your target audience is bound to be positively influenced. This leads to higher conversions and ROI, qualitative reach, and better engagement.
Attracts New Audiences
Influencers attract new audiences that are similar to your ideal customer profile (ICP). Interactions, content promotions, and publicity can create brand awareness generate more interest in your brand.
Encourages Brand Advocacy
Positive reviews, customer success stories (voice of customer), testimonials, and word-of-mouth publicity that comes from influencers and their followers promote brand advocacy. Influencers also create incentives for referrals, thus bringing in better engagement.
Humanizes the Buyer Experiences
B2B storytelling is the key to conversions. It has more impact than any other form of advertising. Influencers humanize the buyer experience by sharing their opinions, reviews from other businesses, and highlighting success stories through their content. This content is impressive as compared to any other content the brand hosts and promotes.
B2B Influencer Content is Priceless
B2B influencer content has high value because it has third-party credibility that attracts trust across all brand channels. Another advantage is that you can easily access the creativity of the influencer without having to hire someone. All the content that influencers publish on their platforms is brand content, highlighted with the voice of the customer. Influencer marketing generates traction and engagement for businesses.
Integrated Influence
Influence can be integrated through social media marketing, content marketing, PR, SEO, branding, and ABM.
How to Create a Powerful, Influencer-based ABM Marketing Strategy?
Brainstorm a Strategy
To make the most of influencer-based ABM marketing, you need to streamline a process and strategy. Find the answers to these two crucial questions:
1. Who influences your target audience?
2. Which topics interest your target audience?
Once you find the answers to these questions, you can zero in on a relevant influencer and approach them to participate in creating/co-creating high-quality marketing content (text, podcast, video, interactive). Integrate the content and publish it on brand channels, and influencer channels. Promote the content via blogs, ads, other influencers, and brand sites to target your key accounts. Monitor the promotions (URLs, engagement) and adjust the campaign for maximum output. Most importantly, create and nurture relationships with industry influencers for future campaigns.
Understand the Demand
Understanding the demand of the target audience through keyword research and data analysis can boost the results of an influencer marketing campaign. Offering audiences solutions to their problems or information that will help them scale their business assist in lead nurturing and conversions.
Identify Ideal Influencers
Choosing a suitable influencer can help kick start your influencer campaign powerfully. An ideal influencer should be proficient in their domain, passionate about content creation, capable of publishing content across platforms, popular in the industry with keen followers, and knowledgeable and eager to promote content across different channels in different formats.
You can employ software to identify and qualify relevant influencers who create credible, high-quality content on the topic you want to promote. Filter influencers based on how much they charge and how well they align with your company values and brand voice. Focus on creating a long term association.
Shuffle the Content Formats
By shuffling between marketing content formats like blog articles, live video, third party analyst reports, videos, case studies, webinars, podcasts, industry presentations, infographics, and interactive content, the target audience can be engaged on multiple channels, and data can be collected to analyze which formats work best.
Remain Connected with Influencers
As a B2B marketer, you should connect one-on-one through email, phone, or in-person meetings with influencers frequently. You should monitor and engage with influencers on social media when they mention your brand.
By interacting with and sharing relevant influencer content on social channels, you can build a community and promote advocacy through continued partnership and engagement. Additionally, you can recycle content made by influencers to show you value the association.
Sixty-three percent of marketers believe they would have better marketing results with an influencer marketing program, while seventy-four percent of marketers agree that it improves customer and prospect experience with the brand.
How Cherwell Software Witnessed a 437% Year-over-year Increase in Content Shares?
Colorado-based Cherwell Software is an IT Service Management (ITSM) company. It engaged TopRankMarketing to create an influencer marketing campaign with the aim of increasing brand awareness, targeting CIOs, CTOs, and IT Directors of companies for business, and increasing sales and revenue.
With the help of the content 15 ITSM thought leaders created and amplified across five channels, Cherwell Software saw a 170% growth in their audience views and a 437% year-over-year increase in their content shares.
Key Takeaways
In B2B marketing and ABM, influencer marketing can help reach customers you would have otherwise missed. Engaging in an influencer marketing platform to maximize ABM strategy outputs is crucial to remaining ahead in the race.
FAQ
What characteristics should a good B2B influencer have?
A good B2B influencer should be proficient, passionate, popular, a dedicated content promoter and creator.
How does influencer marketing help B2B marketers?
Influencer marketing can help B2B marketers target key accounts by leveraging content created by industry experts.
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