Buyer Intent Data
Article | September 11, 2023
Have you browsed about account-based marketing and how successful it has proved for businesses? Do you wonder whether your business fits in the ABM strategy? And even if you practice ABM, what is to be done differently for your business?
Well, we have answers to all your questions.
As Clive Armitage, CEO at Agent3, said,“We have to act as the eyes and ears of marketing innovation for our clients; they trust us to help them navigate the pace of change in the way that the process of marketing is evolving.”
Thus, your marketing and sales team should be on the same page to deliver an excellent and personalized customer experience.
The implementation of ABM in different industries may be different but the challenges faced are somewhat the same.
The baisc challenge for ABM are personalization and quality content.
So, let us dig deeper into how ABM works for different industry segments. And also focus on how each industry should strategize for successful account-based marketing.
How Is ABM Different for Different Industries?
Every company has different products to sell to various companies. Also, if you sell the same product to distinct companies, you need a unique tactic for every organization.
Account-based marketing is crafting such individual approaches for every client that matters.
For example, if you are an advertising company and you need a luxury car brand account, your ABM strategy will be different for different car brands. It can also be designed differently for every decision-maker.
Thus, you have to be very focused and delicately plan strategies for the target account.
Apart from the people you target, also keep in mind the industry segment that you target. It will help to align strategies with both brands.
Now let us discuss some different types of ABM strategies that work for distinct industry segments.
Types of ABM Strategies (with Real-time Examples)
ABM is a beneficial strategy for all types of companies. But it works wonders for organizations that target large companies who have relatively long sales cycles.
According to the State of Account-Based Revenue Engine 2019 report, organizations saw a whooping 91% improved ROI post-ABM implementation.
Hence, let us see how different ABM strategies have their way of working.
Events
Events have proved to be the most successful of all the ABM strategies.
Once target clients accept the personalized invites to the events, the sales team can easily have in-person meetings. Also, a souvenir, gift, or a creative way of a follow-up meeting should be an incorporated strategy of the event.
Example:
Thomas Reuters is an organization that provides news and information tools for professionals. Their challenge was retention and expansion with their key accounts. Thus, they created an event opportunity for these accounts.
In these events, the top executives of the exclusive accounts could speak. And Thomas Reuters would quote them in whitepapers, blogs, and more.
It ensured that the sales team would be in contact with the key accounts all year round. Thus, it increased retention and built good relations.
Webinars
A webinar is an option when the physical presence of clients at a similar geographical location is not possible.
But a webinar allows curating a more personalized experience and at convenient times with less utility of resources.
Example:
HotJar Lightning Talks conference is a webinar hosted by HotJar. This webinar gives the speaker maximum of five minutes to address a particular topic. Thus, no long presentation but just a short glimpse of informative or marketing strategies.
Businesses participate in the webinar to present the challenges and solutions to their prospective clients.
Thus, HotJar had many B2B clients participating in the conference and, the idea became a big hit!
Direct Mails
Gifts, marketing material, and creative packages sent through direct mail are a success in ABM. However, account-based marketing requires personalization and direct mail is the best tactic to deliver that.
Example:
Billing Tree is a technology-driven payment processing organization.
It faced the challenge of scheduling meetings with the targeted accounts. Thus, they mailed 100 locked cases secured with two combinations of padlocks. These cases contained US$ 100 Amazon gift cards. Billing Tree gave the combination once they got the appointment with the account.
And once the client opened the case, the lid had a video player embedded in it that played the video pitch for the account.
Billing Tree generated an account engagement rate of 60% with the ABM strategy of direct mail.
Advertising
Personalized advertising has become an easy thing, thanks to IP targeting and re-targeting technology. It allows you to target the big fishes rather than the traditional wide net fishing.
Example:
DocuSign is an eSignature transaction management and solution provider company. It wanted to generate more traffic and click-through rates to form gated content.
The company executed personalized ad campaigns to the target accounts that contained industry-specific images, content, and peer logos. And with detailed web analytics, they targeted the accounts at specific times.
This personalized ads ABM strategy boosted DocuSign’s age views by 300% with a massive conversion rate!
Personalized Website Experience
Technology these days has expanded its horizons to provide incredible experiences, and personalized website experience is one of those. Once you get the technicalities right, your target accounts can have an out-of-the-world personalized experience when they visit the desired page or the website.
Example:
Savi provides sensor analytics solutions for organizations. Their main client bases are the ones that give critical decisions based on the location and status of people. Thus, Savi has to deal with private and government organizations.
Therefore, as a part of specific marketing and sales strategy, they personalized their home pages differently for different clients.
Thus, when government organizations the homepage was:
And for the corporates, the page was:
Ways to Implement ABM
According to the 2020 State of ABM Report, 94.2% of respondents have successfully implemented this marketing strategy.
Thus, you too can implement account-based marketing with these simple steps.
Identify your high-value clients.
Conduct extensive research on those clients.
Strategize your personalized ABM campaigns.
Implement the account-based marketing strategy.
Analyze the campaign regularly.
Importance of Personalization
Personalization is a crucial part of account-based marketing. Your extensive research about the clients helps you craft unique, creative, and personalized content for them.
A personalized experience ensures an enriched and engaging customer experience.
If a campaign exclusively provides solutions to pain points, clients become customers for life. It also helps to develop good relations.
Remember, account-based marketing is not only about conversions but also about creating brand awareness and relationships.
As Andy Bacon, VP Consulting at Momentum, has quoted, “ABM is all about building better quality relationships; the ROI will follow.”
Frequently Asked Questions
Do different industries need different account-based marketing strategies?
The meaning of account-based marketing is to provide tailored solutions to exclusive clients. So yes, different industries will require different ABM strategies.
One should use distinct and personalized approaches to target different people of the same organization. However, you have to ensure that the marketing message is the same for all, despite the personalization.
What are the different types of account-based marketing methods?
The different types to implement ABM strategies are:
Events
Webinars
Direct Mails
Advertising
Personalized Website Experience
Social Media
What role does personalization play in ABM?
ABM is all about personalization. The more personalized your content is, the more likely the chances are for conversion.
Imagine someone selling you a product designed just for solving your problems. You do not even need convincing if it is the answer to all your pain points. That is the same way in which ABM works.
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Programmatic ABM
Article | June 9, 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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Buyer Intent Data
Article | June 20, 2023
Since the introduction of account-based marketing, B2B marketing has evolved. According to Forrester, as of 2025, "account-based marketing" will be overtaken by "account-centric marketing," which will be the way most B2B companies find, plan, manage, and measure purchase and post-sale actions.
A Brief
The marketing departments of multibillion-dollar corporations were early users of ABM. Over the years, they have made significant investments in their ABMprocesses and technologies. The exercise worked flawlessly for them. Their business circumstances made them ideal candidates for ABM, for instance lengthy sales cycles, high transaction sizes, and several decision-makers in purchasing committees. They have now realized that shooting in the dark and probably what sticks around is not the ideal method to develop a sustainable GTM process for their organizations. Moreover, they're debating whether to maintain their investment in inbound marketing methods and alternatively abandon it entirely!
On the other hand, smaller businesses are lagging behind in ABM implementation. They are aware that their existing spray and pray procedures are inefficient and require immediate improvement. They are powerless to ignore the continual buzz about the benefits of ABM and the larger good it may unlock for their firm. And yet, they are confused about how to begin. Additionally, they will learn how to integrate ABM into their current marketing processes. They exist in a perpetual state of contradiction, torn between the fear of missing out and the danger of prematurely disturbing the apple cart (the switch to ABM). Their meager marketing budgets and resources do little to aid them in decision-making.
As a result, marketing teams (large and small) are faced with a fundamental question: "Should I abandon inbound marketing methods in favor of ABM?"
The answer is a strict no! Both are essential.
Why Are Marketers Skeptical of the Efficacy of Inbound Marketing Strategies?
Current inbound B2B marketing practices are fragmented and generic, attracting the wrong types of leads. With a heterogeneous set of digital touchpoints, each with its own data silo, insights are dispersed throughout the organization, owing to multiple native dashboard management and data collectors.
What's behind the inbound demand funnel?
Inbound marketing is majorly concerned with attracting users or customers to your business's offerings. Three stages comprise the inbound funnel: attract, engage, and close. It enables marketers to communicate with each of these categories on a value-based basis. Things get muddled when there are a lot of digital touch points for inbound marketing strategies, like search engine optimization, social media marketing, digital and offline branding, and so on. This results in the decentralisation of insights. Marketers increase interaction through the use of social media and landing sites.
The sales team generates leads through email campaigns.
Client Relationship Managers respond to inquiries via automated content management systems.
Due to the dispersed nature of the touchpoints, the issue is ensuring that communications are consistent and personalized across the various account segments.
What's behind the ABM funnel?
Identify: Identify the accounts that most closely match your company's ideal customer profile criteria.
Engage: Use personalized and specialized content to reach out to and nurture those accounts, and urge them into conversion.
Establish and Expand: Attract new customers and uncover possibilities to expand existing accounts through a variety of customer marketing methods such as cross-sell, upsell, and retention.
ABM & Inbound Marketing - the Convergence of the Funnels
A common misunderstanding is that an ABM funnel and an inbound funnel are opposed. ABM and inbound marketing are not mutually exclusive strategies. Indeed, they complement one another. Both are facets of the same coin.
B2B marketers use ABM and inbound demand generation to have maximum impact. These two tactics combine to create a new funnel known as the "dual funnel." The dual funnel strategy entails maintaining a high-volume demand generation funnel in addition to a highly targeted account-based funnel. Both funnels function in tandem to engage a target demographic with a high level of intent and an inclination to buy.
This dual funnel strategy enables the identification of target accounts and the provision of tailored experiences through account-based approaches.
In a mature ABM program, marketers keep an eye on target accounts, retire underperforming ones, and replace them with new high-intent clients found and qualified through the inbound demand generation funnel, which is how they find and qualify new clients.
Conclusion:
When these two procedures are integrated, inbound marketing successfully generates leads. Additionally, account-based marketing focuses on customizing and delivering one-on-one messages and engagements to target accounts. Optimize your inbound marketing approach to generate the highest quality leads across all channels. When you set up your ABM funnel, only use it to get the most qualified leads. Then, use it for highly personalised and targeted marketing.
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Core ABM
Article | June 6, 2022
Here’s a (somehow) well-kept secret about ABX: it can create immediate wins for your teams.
When you and your teams start laser-focusing on the right prospects and customers — at the right time — it doesn’t take long for the wins to start piling up.
Why?
A winning ABX strategy will leverage an AI-powered customer data platform (CDP) that has an existing database of critical information such as:
What your ideal customer profile (ICP) looks like
Accounts you might not know about that are in-market and ready-to-buy
The websites, keywords, and topics your buyers research most
The signals your buyers give off when they’re ready to buy
When you leverage this historical data, it’s like flipping on a spotlight on your most important accounts and everything they’re doing.
Let’s look at why a CDP is so important for an ABX strategy and how you can switch your thinking from, “When will I start seeing ROI?” to “How will I capitalize on all of these opportunities?”
How CDPs Bolster Your ABX Strategy
Pursuing an ABX strategy means fine-tuning your revenue activities (marketing, sales, operations) to target very specific accounts.
The critical data you need about those accounts comes from your CDP, which houses all of the interactions you have with your prospects and customers.
That information includes:
Web pages they visit
Webinars they attend
Content they download
Calls they have with your sales team
The CDP ingests all of that data and starts to learn what your typical buyer looks like, the patterns they follow, and what signals they give off when they’re ready to buy.
Over time, and with enough data from your interactions, this information becomes very powerful and enables your teams to start honing their strategies. All of your revenue activities become more efficient because you’re reaching the right buyer at the right time.
There’s a problem with traditional standalone CDPs, however. They can’t look backwards.
They can only begin collecting data once implemented, and therefore take some time to start uncovering patterns and delivering results.
But what if you could unlock the CDP-version of a flying DeLorean that empowers you travel into the past and unlock those missing puzzle pieces — without waiting for your CDP to ingest enough data?
Win Fast with a CDP Full of Critical Data
The key to unlocking fast wins for your ABX strategy is to utilize a CDP with historical first-party and third-party data.
Your buyers have searched keywords related to your offerings, attended industry events, and read third-party review sites long before you implement a stand-alone CDP. Why should you have to wait for the platform to catch up and uncover those insights that are hiding in plain sight?
6sense’s embedded CDP grants you instant access to all of the historical data that our AI-powered platform has collected for years.
Previously anonymous accounts that have been researching topics that match your offerings
A detailed ICP based on real, historical data
Insights into which of your prospects are actually in-market and ready-to-buy
Clear evidence on which accounts and buyers should be prioritized
We call uncovering this information lighting up the Dark Funnel™. When you shine a light on your Dark Funnel™ your teams can immediately start reaping the benefits. It won’t take months or even weeks to get your first wins — within days you can see a positive impact on your pipeline.
Your sales team will get leaner and meaner. No need to spend hours trawling through LinkedIn to find the one uncovered gem of a prospect. As soon as you leverage an embedded CDP loaded with historical data, you’ll discover exactly who your next target should be. Your inside sales team can focus on personalizing outreach, not figuring out who to talk to.
Your marketing team will begin improving their engagement numbers without increasing their spend. When a Director of Sales at “Ready-to-Buy Corporation” has been performing some under-the-radar research, the marketing team will receive an alert and can start targeting that person with ads that address their specific pain points.
Software development company PTC is a good example. It has used 6sense to uncover more than 1,500 net new high-intent accounts that have generated $18 million in pipeline.
“With 6sense, our team has driven outbound success by being empowered, motivated, and eager to strategically prospect to the right targets with relevant messaging,” says Brenda Souto, High Velocity Sales Manager at PTC.
Conclusion
Traditional standalone CDPs help you capture the interactions you have with your prospects and customers. All of this data is very useful to build a focused and efficient ABX strategy.
But, a standalone CDP lacks historical data and trends — meaning it can take longer to see wins and ROI.
An embedded CDP with a treasure trove of previous interactions, buying signals, and trend data can instantly prioritize your target accounts. Within days your teams will know much more about your buyers and how to target them with the right message at the right time.
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