Buyer Intent Data
Article | March 6, 2023
As Account-Based Marketing (ABM) continues to grow and develop into a powerful marketing strategy, the conventional question remains: How to prove and measure my results?
Diving into your account-based marketing metrics to understand your results is all about asking the right questions. The metrics focus on quality over quantity. This means that looking at engagement levels above traffic volume and opportunities over leads have a close association with sales. Thus, it summarizes activity metrics and outcome metrics together.
If you implement a new sales methodology without adopting new sales metrics, you’ll have a much harder time tracking the progress of your marketing efforts. That’s why the companies, shifting to an account-based framework, should update their KPIs, as these are the leading indicators of success.
So, the account-based marketing metrics highly focus on the activity of an individual lead and look at crucial accounts that would likely drive the most revenue for your organization.
How are Account-Based Marketing Metrics Different?
The rate at which digital marketers have moved towards the ABM model by creating successful ABM campaigns is quite surprising. While many thought, ‘Will this thing stick?’ or ‘Is this just a whim that will go away in the future?’
But it’s 2021, and ABM has become even more popular in the B2B world as marketers see value in targeting accounts and not only leads.
Recent research from SiriusDecisions states that 93% of marketers consider ABM extremely important to their overall organizational success. With any marketing strategy, you are going to be asked whether your campaign is performing well or not. It indeed takes time for the programs to run for any marketer who has built an ABM strategy. So, what should you consider more in creating an ABM strategy?
Think quality, not quantity
A team working on the ABM model understands the priority—influencing customers who matter as crucial accounts. So instead of focusing on new lead creation, ABM focuses on activating and engaging the right leads (even if it’s smaller in number).
Similarly, your ABM team needs to focus on growing revenue from every single account. This means what would your team value more: ten random marketing professionals downloading a whitepaper or having a meaningful conversation with a decision-maker?
It’s About Engagement
SiriusDecisions states that there has been a 24% increase in the average B2B sales cycle length since 2019. It means that the larger the deal size, the longer the cycle. With such a lengthy process, you need to measure what’s happening during the progressing phase.
So, how do you do that?
It is engagement on which you need to focus on. Track how deeply the right account gets engaged with your brand. This way, you’ll have a measurable way of showing development in your business.
Engagement in ABM results in immense benefits for most businesses. Here is a list of the latest ABM statistics that shows companies that utilized the strategy saw incredible results, such:
200% rise in ROI
50% of sales teams were more productive and able to optimize qualified leads
30% boost in revenue
66% augmented the number of leads generated
83% saw amplified engagement from targeted leads
Shorter sales cycles grew by 27% and more
However, such benefits of implementing an ABM strategy are only the results of a successful ABM approach, as it’s not an easy task for every organization. The only way to ensure that your business’s ABM efforts are successful is by meticulously monitoring the most important metrics.
The 4 Crucial Metrics to Track
Reading further, you will come across the six crucial types of account-based marketing metrics.
Engagement
How are your prospects get interested and engaged?
The more attention they pay to your company, the more committed they tend to be. Measure the time they spend with your brand or on your website. Monitor when they respond to your marketing programs socially or when they use your product and connect with your sales team.
As one of the account-based marketing metrics, the amount of engagement will be the closest and essential. Therefore, your focus should be to measure how contacts are involved with your content, including the type of content. The following areas will help you understand it deeply:
Email metrics: Track the activities of your audience with your email marketing campaigns. You will want to know the open and click-through rates and look at the number of responses received from each email. Also, how email recipients are sharing your messages with others.
Social metrics: You can check with contacts from your targeted accounts if they have liked, shared, or commented on your posts. Are they following your business page and social accounts?
Consumption rates: Similarly, you can look at how contacts from your targeted accounts consume your online content, specifically information provided on your website and blogs. This shows several page views, average page time, and specific content being viewed and downloaded.
Offline Activity metrics: Beyond your digital information, track your targeted accounts engaging with you offline. Are they attending events you sponsor, readily contacting, and responding to direct mail?
Therefore, these account-based marketing metrics' primary goal is to know where your contacts are in their buying journey. In fact, through these metrics, you can uncover what information (content) your website lacks to support communications in their research.
Awareness
Do your prospects are aware of your company’s name and offerings? Web traffic is an ethical reflection of keeping prospects aware, specifically, traffic coming from within your target accounts. You should also track whether your contacts are opening your emails, attending your events, and contacting through calls, or using any other medium you provided.
Target-Account Reach
Are you able to reach specific target accounts in the right way? Where do you lack in your efforts?
These account-based metrics help you to track success by channel. In case of point, in a webinar campaign, you would measure its success by analyzing event attendance. So, track the percent of target accounts that have successfully enrolled in each program as well. And, finally, track your focus. What is the percentage of all program successes coming from key accounts? This will help you understand how many target accounts reach you through your ABM campaigns, ABM strategies, and other marketing functionalities.
Influence
Your marketing strategy’s influence on a targeted account will be measured mainly by your interactions with each account. However, some of the account-based marketing metrics mentioned above will help check your ABM strategy's influence metrics. But the big question is whether your efforts are working or not. To understand this, you need to evaluate some parameters such as:
The conversion rate for contacts in your targeted accounts
Converting of your targeted accounts in the marketing funnel
Frequency and volume of meetings or calls with each account
With whom you have the discussions— account influencers or final decision-makers
Finally, the results of your meetings
These parameters will divulge what efforts are working and where you need to change your approach or the information you provide to make your business successful.
Types of Account-Based Sales Metrics
Marketing and sales often measure success differently. Account-based metrics can help bring these closer by aligning their focus on a specific list of target accounts.
With an Account-Based Sales Development (ABSD) strategy, there are two types of metrics. These would help you understand whether your sales team is performing well in an account-based sales plan or not.
Activity-based sales metrics
You need to check and understand whether your sales team is doing various marketing activities in the right way or not. This will be specific for each account to be targeted and includes activities like task completion, emails, contacts per day, account coverage, meaningful conversations, and appointments.
Outcome-based sales metrics
It is generally considered under post-sale account-based marketing metrics. Now the time is to track the result of the activities mentioned above. Also, include the rate of accounts accepted from the pipeline created and revenue generated.
In short, the goal is to measure the monetary value of each transaction and to track your performance and successes over time in business. This information is also helpful in identifying new accounts to target.
To know how read through in the next!
Value
Measuring value is more important than your total sales volume, as it is a part of ABM metrics. The goal is to understand the worth of each account to your bottom line—how they compare to other accounts and see the performance of each sales representative. In this context, your account-based marketing metrics should uncover the following:
What is your average selling point value?
What is the average account sales volume?
What is the swelling value of each account?
What is the total sales volume?
How much revenue generated?
What is the value of each deal?
Having a clear answer to these aspects reveals the most tangible insights into your results. By looking at specific accounts, you can measure where you are growing, where opportunities exist and show underperforming accounts. Thus, it will make your work accordingly.
Retention
As account-based marketing metrics measure quality over quantity, retention is one part where this comes into play. In addition, it measures the possibility of a targeted account and their satisfaction level.
Measuring retention is a decent indication of the strength of your account relationships. Accounts that stay for a long term are generally satisfied. Thus, they provide the most value to your business.
On the flip side, dissatisfied accounts won’t stay with you very long. But they are virtuous indicators of areas you need to change and improve — either with the process, products, or account types.
ROI
The most crucial account-based marketing metrics is your return on investment (ROI). Eventually, you measure your ABM campaigns and marketing strategies—if they are effective. So, ROI is the percentage of your investment to earnings.
What makes these account-based marketing metrics so challenging in reality? Several factors influence each transaction or sale. Take a step back and consider these questions:
Has your closure rate improved over the past month, quarter, or year?
On average, how long does it take to close a sale?
What was your ROI for each campaign you launched?
The purpose behind considering these aspects is to know what marketing campaigns were successful and better understand inclusive marketing and sales effectiveness.
Putting all ABM Metric to Work Together
A successful ABM strategy requires various activities, technologies, and outlooks for B2B marketing or demand generation. Here, the use of ABM metrics becomes important for measuring pre-sale success and revenue potential. For this, B2B marketing organizations should monitor post-sale metrics to track client satisfaction.
Therefore, by monitoring the entire ABM funnel, you can incessantly optimize marketing activities and improve customer relationships for your business.
Conclusively, account-based strategies present an incredible opportunity for organizations to make marketing and sales more relevant, focused, and effective. However, to apprehend the benefits, it’s important to measure what matters.
Frequently Asked Questions
How is account-based marketing success measured?
To measure account-based marketing success, here are some important ways:
Understand targeted accounts and needs
Regularly check content analytics statistics
Account engagement
Rate of interactions
Amount of in-depth conversations
Conversion metrics
Sales cycle lengths
What are excellent ABM metrics?
Awareness, engagement, conversion, and outcome are some of the excellent ABM metrics. Putting them together, a business can arrive at a complete set of elementary account-based marketing metrics and attracts more customers.
How are ABM campaigns measured?
The value of your ABM campaigns is scaled by the lifetime value of each targeted accounts. When measuring these, elements such as customer retention, awareness, reach, pipeline velocity, and influence are responsible for making an ABM program successful.
What are key metrics in marketing?
The various key metrics in marketing are:
Viewership metrics
Lead-based metrics
Engagement metrics
Pre-sales metrics
Post-sales metrics
Conversion metrics
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "FAQPage",
"mainEntity": [{
"@type": "Question",
"name": "How is account-based marketing success measured?",
"acceptedAnswer": {
"@type": "Answer",
"text": "To measure account-based marketing success, here are some important ways:
Understand targeted accounts and needs
Regularly check content analytics statistics
Account engagement
Rate of interactions
Amount of in-depth conversations
Conversion metrics
Sales cycle lengths"
}
},{
"@type": "Question",
"name": "What are excellent ABM metrics?",
"acceptedAnswer": {
"@type": "Answer",
"text": "Awareness, engagement, conversion, and outcome are some of the excellent ABM metrics. Putting them together, a business can arrive at a complete set of elementary account-based marketing metrics and attracts more customers."
}
},{
"@type": "Question",
"name": "How are ABM campaigns measured?",
"acceptedAnswer": {
"@type": "Answer",
"text": "The value of your ABM campaigns is scaled by the lifetime value of each targeted accounts. When measuring these, elements such as customer retention, awareness, reach, pipeline velocity, and influence are responsible for making an ABM program successful."
}
},{
"@type": "Question",
"name": "What are key metrics in marketing?",
"acceptedAnswer": {
"@type": "Answer",
"text": "The various key metrics in marketing are:
Viewership metrics
Lead-based metrics
Engagement metrics
Pre-sales metrics
Post-sales metrics
Conversion metrics"
}
}]
}
Read More
Buyer Intent Data
Article | June 20, 2023
In any company, there is a sales function and a marketing function. They are supposed to work together to help the organization secure business, earn revenue, and facilitate growth.
Oftentimes, because of the nature of their business, sales and marketing work at cross purposes and they lose focus on their ultimate objective of identifying, creating, and retaining customers.
In this article, we will discuss how sales and marketing can work together to form an effective B2B sales funnel.
But first, let’s explore the roles of sales and marketing within an organization.
Sales are the function of driving revenue with salespeople who follow a defined sales process. A typical sales process involves a research phase to ensure that the intended customer is a good fit to the company’s Ideal Customer Profile, a discovery phase where the salesperson gets to know the customer, understand their needs, and see where their solution can help solve the customer’s problem, a demonstration phase where the seller lets the buyer envision how their solution for a product or service can satisfy the buyer’s need.
A proposal phase is proactive and where the seller provides the customer with an outline of the work they will undertake and at what price. Sometimes a seller will instead be responding to a buyer’s request for a proposal (RFP). Up until this point in the sales process, prospective customers are referred to as “suspects,” meaning that they may be a good fit, but they have not expressed any interest in the company’s solutions and the company has not proposed any ways in which it could be of service. However, once a salesperson provides the prospective customer with a proposal, that prospective customer becomes known as a “prospect.”
In sales, the measurement of potential revenue and its progress towards realization is called a sales “funnel.” In a sales funnel, the probability of the salesperson closing the sale is now weighted with percentages demonstrating the likelihood of success. In the sales process, opportunities are weighted based on their probability of closing. This is called opportunity management and it looks something like this:
0% of the prospect is identified by researching the intended sales target company.
10% of the prospect is prequalified as a potential good fit in alignment with the company’s Ideal Customer Profile (I.D.C.).
25% of the prospect is qualified via a discovery call, and the opportunity is loaded into the sales funnel.
40% is when the buyer agrees to a demonstration, shows genuine buying interest, and is open to receiving a proposal.
50% is the assessment phase where the seller determines if the buyer has Budget, Authority, Need, and the Timeframe for implementation, (B.A.N.T.). Another component of the sale to be addressed at this phase is “why,” as in, “Why is the buyer making this purchase decision, why is my company being considered, and why is this timeframe for implementation important?”
60% is when a proposal is submitted to the buyer for consideration. (Pro tip: A good salesperson will have the boilerplate components of the contract pre-vetted by legal and IT when the proposal is initially submitted to the buyer so that the contract does not get held up at the bottom of the funnel by any issues not within the buyer’s control when it is ready to close).
75% is the negotiation phase where the buyer/decision-maker(s) asks clarifying questions that show an intent to purchase or express some objections that the seller will need to overcome to move the sale forward.
90% is when both parties agree to all the conditions of the purchase and the final contract is submitted for signature.
100% is when the sale is closed and the revenue can be recognized.
If the funnel can be trusted, and oftentimes that’s a big “if” because salespeople are not always disciplined in opportunity management, then revenue recognized can be forecasted beginning at 75% of probability.
At every phase of the sales funnel, sales are conducted by calling, emailing, texting, or other outreach to prospective and existing customers to guide them towards making a purchase. The process might be consultative, taking place over a long period and involving multiple decision-makers in which the salesperson learns about the customer and their pain points, and then helps them understand how their product or service offering can provide a solution.
Sales could also be tactical and a very short process involving just a single conversation with a salesperson before an agreement is finalized.
Although technology and social media have certainly influenced how sales are conducted, the essential steps of the sales process have pretty much remained the same.
Whereas sales are hands-on, marketing is a much more comprehensive process that does not generally interact with an individual customer but is designed to increase awareness of a brand or product to target customers as a group.
Unlike sales, the methods, tactics, and channels used by marketers have evolved tremendously over the last fifteen years. Marketing today is primarily digital and includes content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, organic website traffic, search engine optimization, pay-per-click advertising, and the use of influencers and brand ambassadors.
The objective of the marketing department is to generate leads for the sales department. These leads start as “marketing qualified leads” (MQLs) and although these prospective buyers are not yet ready to purchase, they have expressed interest in a company’s product. When properly nurtured by the marketing department, these prospects become “sales qualified leads” (SQL’s) and are handed off by the marketing team to the sales team when they are likely to make a purchase.
This nurturing can occur via social media, email distribution, or other communication from the marketing team to keep the prospective client interested and engaged.
It would seem so easy for marketing to cultivate leads and hand them off to the sales team. However, this is often not the case. Too frequently marketing and sales are simply misaligned.
Just consider these statistics:
According to Upland, 55% of marketers don’t know which collateral their sales colleagues are most likely to use.
LinkedIn reports that only 46% of marketers describe sales and marketing as “highly aligned” at their company.
The Precision Marketing Group states that 25% of businesses describe their sales and marketing as either “misaligned” or “rarely aligned”.
This lack of synchronization between marketing and sales causes poor execution and lost opportunities.
According to LinkedIn’s Art of Winning Report, an estimated $1 trillion a year is lost due to a lack of sales and marketing coordination in the US alone.
An industry survey by InsideView found that the six biggest obstacles to sales and marketing
working together were:
Lack of accurate/shared data on target accounts and prospects (43%)
Communication (43%)
Use of different metrics (41%)
Broken/flawed processes (37%)
Lack of accountability on both sides (25%)
Reporting challenges (21%)
Simply put, marketing and sales need to collaborate more effectively to better manage today’s sales funnel. But how?
According to digital marketing strategist, Sujan Patel, there are three levels of marketing alignment:
The Emotional Level: Your Sales and Marketing teams should be working cohesively together and supporting each other. They should not be working at cross-purposes.
The Process Level: There need to be clear, measurable, sustainable, and repeatable processes in place to ensure that everyone within both the marketing and sales teams is pulling in the same direction and working in the same way.
The Feedback Loop Level: Marketing doesn’t always produce awesome leads. Sometimes they might suck. Nobody’s perfect. That’s why sales need to communicate back to marketing so there is a feedback loop between the two teams to either encourage good leads or stop wasting company resources on bad ones.
An effective partnership between sales and marketing is the #1 success factor attributed to achieving revenue goals. (Source: Heinz Marketing - Performance Management Report)
So, how can we get sales and marketing to work better together? It starts with having a project plan in place.
The first step is for sales and marketing to agree on what the ideal customer profile (I.D.C.) of a target customer should be. They need to agree on the characteristics that define the type of company (not the individual buyer or end-user) that will find the most value in their product or service offering. If done correctly, prospects that are aligned to the company’s IDC are most likely to become long-term customers who will give significant value back to the business in the form of possible subscription fees, upsells, and referrals. An easy way to identify the IDC of a company is to look at a list of their current best-performing customers and determine what attributes they have in common.
The next step is for sales to explain to marketing the steps of the sales funnel, how it works and what marketing resources are needed to migrate the prospective customer through it. Too often, marketing is concerned with branding and outreach, and they do not allocate sufficient resources to the sales team to give them the resources and collateral they need to expedite their sales.
Once sales and marketing are aligned regarding who the IDC of a company is and what marketing resources should be allocated to support the sales team, an organization can take its game up a level and begin to pursue account-based marketing (A.B.M.) opportunities.
Account-based marketing is when marketing and sales teams work together in a focused approach to target best-fit accounts and turn them into customers. When done correctly, marketing and sales teams meld their expertise to locate, engage with, and close deals with high-value accounts that offer a high ROI to their company.
The primary components of account-based marketing include:
Reaching the right accounts
Engaging across marketing channels
Determining effective metrics and measurements
According to LinkedIn research, businesses with strong sales and marketing alignment are 67% more effective at closing deals, 58% more effective at retaining customers, and drive 208% more revenue as a result of their marketing efforts.
So, whether an organization is pursuing a traditional marketing approach or a more targeted account-based marketing strategy, it is essential for marketing to work more closely with sales in vigorous and meaningful ways.
Today’s buyer is more knowledgeable and has access to more information about a prospective seller, their competition, and the marketplace than ever before. As a result, sales leaders need to demonstrate subject matter expertise in their area of commerce and leverage the content, tools, and resources that the marketing department can provide them to enhance their sales efforts.
Although good salespeople will find a way to close business, having the support of a well-synchronized marketing team behind them will help accelerate the sales process, increase revenue, boost profitability and facilitate greater customer satisfaction.
Read More
Buyer Intent Data
Article | August 23, 2022
Data-driven strategies for increasing time to market, pipeline, and revenue impact.
The B2B environment is incredibly complex, so it’s no surprise that more than three-quarters of B2B buyers describe their purchasing journey as very complex or challenging. A significant majority (67%) of the B2B buyer’s journey happens digitally, but B2B buying does not play out in any predictable, linear order. Unfortunately, much of today’s ABM technology lacks the capabilities required to provide personalized experiences across multiple channels, platforms, buying centers, geographies, and lines of business. This puts the target account into an undesirable linear campaign and assumes all accounts progress through the funnel at the same speed.
Instead, customers engage in “looping” behaviors during a typical B2B purchase, revisiting multiple buying stages at least once. Buying stages do not happen sequentially but rather simultaneously. This means that ABM success depends not only on a deep understanding of its audience’s needs but also on precisely orchestrating the delivery of the right message in the right channel at the right time - and on a global scale.
In the face of these complexities, ABM is rapidly maturing as a practice. New research shows that almost half (45%) of companies consider their ABM programs to be fully adopted versus experimental – up a third compared with 2020. But even as ABM programs mature, the headwinds of change are accelerating, leaving more than two-thirds of ABM marketers thwarted in their mission to drive significant revenue impact.
B2B marketers must contend with and overcome a slew of challenges that can feel beyond their immediate control. A recent study by Demand Metric and MRP found that more than three-quarters of marketers’ report that the pace of their campaigns has intensified over the past year. That percentage is higher still, at 83%, at enterprise companies that operate with high levels of complexity on a global scale. Four in ten marketers report that changing account profiles poses a challenge, as does the emergence of new channels and demand for new content formats.
Responsive buyer experiences and relevant content across channels have always been the top criteria for mature, high-performing, omnichannel account-based orchestrations. But much of today’s conversation revolves around linear, top-down campaigns, where the target account is placed in a marketing or sales play, operating within a siloed platform throughout the buyer’s journey. The result is often antithetical to the desired buyer “experience.” Addressing this reality requires rethinking how marketers engage with accounts.
The most mature account-based orchestrations are adaptive, understanding a target’s changing needs, aligning content to those desires, and delivering personalized experiences consistently across multiple channels. This demands a new approach to data management, better use of intent and predictive insights, and fully synchronized orchestration.
To make meaningful connections with prospects and customers amidst these changes, enterprise marketers are evolving their ABM initiatives to focus on highly personalized experiences tailored to the account level and individual locations and buyer roles. Increasingly, ABM leaders employ a set of principles and processes that are consistent from company to company – giving others a blueprint for success. The most critical steps for marketers to achieve significant results with their ABM programs include:
Collaborate Closely Across the Organization
Enterprise marketers must share insights widely across interdisciplinary teams. This allows campaigns to be coordinated across shared accounts. A study of top ABM performers found that nine in ten reported close cross-functional collaborations between marketing and sales. ABM leaders need to establish a standardized measurement framework so everyone is working toward the same goals and success.
Establish a Single Source of Truth
Not only are ABM leaders’ teams highly integrated, but so is their data. A single view of data allows for a deeper understanding of audience needs and improves collaboration. Eight out of ten (80%) top performers use data from three or more systems to guide their ABM practice, and even more, 84%, say that their tech stack is mostly or completely integrated. This is more than double the number (30%) of those whose ABM impact was negative or couldn't be measured.
Deliver Messages Consistently - and Across Touchpoints
Successful ABM marketers can customize the buyer’s experience based on the specific product or solution under consideration and factor in their stage within the buying journey. Almost half of leading ABM practitioners (46%) go beyond personalizing messages by industry to adapt their messages to the recipient’s job role and stage of the customer lifecycle. Highly personalized content delivered at the right time is more critical than ever since customers often skip “steps” on the buying journey and require digital experiences to adapt accordingly.
Grasping at New Buzzwords Isn’t the Answer
Calling an initiative “ABX” instead of “ABM” doesn’t make it easier to execute successfully. In fact, in a rush to accelerate the delivery of 'account-based experiences', the platforms that support it have become a critical bottleneck, creating yet another siloed system. This not only adds to the complexity but also undermines the outcomes it is intended to improve.
Today’s B2B marketers face unprecedented challenges but the enterprise must approach ABM as a guiding strategy rather than a limited tactic. Synthesizing data across multiple sources, eliminating tech and people silos, and taking a collaborative approach to ABM can give marketers a deeper understanding of what target accounts need and where to deliver it. The right tech solutions can trigger omnichannel actions based on account insights, simplifying the complexity of ABM and executing mature, omnichannel orchestrations that have a measurable impact on revenue.
Read More
Core ABM
Article | February 22, 2022
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.
Read More