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 Analytics
Article | August 3, 2022
The pandemic has catalyzed an en-masse move to hybrid workforce models across industries and functions, including marketing teams. Add to this the broad changes in consumer behavior and market expectations resulting from the disruption of the last 15 months. How has all of this change impacted marketing priorities?
While DX has been a priority for a while now, what’s changed is the race to connect customer experience (CX) to the DX initiative. Over the last year digital engagement has been at times the only way to find, get and keep customers. Starting with overhauling virtual shopfronts — aka brand websites — to investing in more advanced data-driven marketing decisioning engines, making CX central to the digital strategy has become primary.
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Buyer Intent Data
Article | March 6, 2023
Account-based marketing has gained momentum incredibly in the B2B industry. ABM promises a higher conversion rate than any other marketing strategy. It is the best personal approach to B2B marketing.
If you are new to ABM, here is a little introduction to the strategy. ABM is creating a funnel of your clients and filtering the ones who have higher chances of conversion. Once you have the required data, your sales and marketing team can collaborate to create marketing campaigns for these exclusive clients. This strategy can overcome many challenges faced by the marketing and sales team.
Generally, the challenges faced by your businesses can be to
Drive retention with the key accounts
Deliver relevant content to exclusive customers
Boost conversion percentage with the clients most likely to convert
Build a strategy for a personalized marketing approach
Once you know what ABM is and implement it correctly, your business can easily overcome these challenges. Thus, we have provided some insights on how to overcome hurdles and excel in your ABM campaign.
How to Excel in Your ABM Campaign
According to B2B data-driven companies, personalization is the biggest challenge to succeed in ABM. Nowadays, B2B clients demand personalization like B2C clients. Now, this is a difficult task as business clients have access to business profiles. Thus, the sales and marketing teams have to develop unique ideas and make extra efforts to personalize campaigns.
So basically, this means utilizing the available data in the best way possible. But sometimes, that takes up a massive investment in terms of time and resources.
Abhi Yadav, Founder & CTO of Zylotech, says,
“Drawing intelligence from data is like pushing a boulder uphill. In most cases, it takes a team of data engineers & scientists an enormous amount of time that comes with a hefty price tag.”
So how do you minimize efforts and still excel in your ABM campaign strategy?
Well, we have six lessons that organizations have learned while implementing ABM in their marketing strategy. Some of these lessons are answers to why a particular strategy failed.
Put Yourself in Your Customer’s Shoes
If you have limited access to personal data but have plenty of professional data, put it to the correct use. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and look at the challenges they are facing at present. You can also think about their future problems and provide solutions to avoid them. Once you think like your customers, strategies and solutions become a simple task.
For example, if your targeted client is the MD or CFO of a healthcare sector. Determine how the pandemic has impacted their revenues or how they need to manage personal and government financing in these challenging times. Also, you can provide visionary solutions about future implementations for the healthcare sector.
Flip the Funnel
The traditional funnel of awareness, interest, consideration, and purchase needs to change. The implementation may work even today, but the conversion process takes time. Thus, it’s time to flip the funnel.
Flipping the funnel is the new strategy that is uprooting the traditional funnel. This method implies putting targeted organizations on the top of the funnel and then broadening it. First, it means to target the people of the organizations, then ways to connect them, and then the broadest part is to provide them with appropriate solutions.
This funnel strategy has proved to work wonders in the ABM strategy.
Personify is the leading constituent management and engagement (CME) platform. Their challenge was to create a funnel for better insights into their target market.
Their solution was to partner with product marketing and sales for an ideal customer profile (ICP). Thus the top of the funnel was sorted. Then they researched and set up personalized digital ad campaigns and sales strategies. Thus, these creative campaigns increased their brand awareness, engagement, and conversions.
They increased their on-site visitors by 39 times by implementing this strategy.
Make the Best Use of Technology
There are a plethora of tools available to strategize and implement ABM. But organizations do not make full use of these tools, leading to wastage of time, resources, and resources.
Survey the market and know there are tools developed to optimize ABM strategy and keep track of account-based metrics. Implement these tools, and you will notice that your work gets executed faster and in an intelligent way.
P.S. Human-assisted AI technologies help organizations to build compelling campaigns and optimize revenue operations.
Streamline Your Processes
Sometimes organizations do not realize that ABM requires streamlining processes with the regular ones. ABM strategies require experimentation. You have to select the strategy that suits you and your organization in the best way. Thus, ensure that your teams do not get overwhelmed by the process.
Thus, define roles, responsibilities, and the entire execution plan when the target accounts are shortlisted.
VersionOne, a cloud-based agile application life-cycle management (ALM) software provider, simplified the process by implementing data-driven approaches. Thus, VersionOne gave both teams access to monitor the ABM strategy and the success of the targeted accounts. Thus both the teams worked in collaboration and focused on segmentation. This helped in building a proper pipeline between the sales and marketing teams.
This doubled VersionOne’s sales by streamlining the processes between the sales and marketing teams.
Focus On Retention
ABM is not only targeting exclusive clients and converting them. But you have to track and retain them. Many a time clients convert and the organization forgets to follow up. Thus, it creates a void for current and future clients, as the success rate is incredibly defined by retention.
For example, small gestures like regular surveys, emails regarding workflow, and more can play an essential role for the clients to know that you care.
Do Not Refrain from Outsourcing
Outsourcing is a great way to ease out tasks and get a filtered list of high-value clients. Also, companies that specialize in data-driven technologies can provide you with more relevant information about the clients than your in-house team.
So, avail services from experienced companies and industry leaders in providing you with the best list of relevant clients. These professional organizations know the pain-point of the clients, which helps you in planning your ABM strategy.
That’s All Folks
We hope we have provided you with solutions to the hurdles that you face while strategizing ABM. Remember, ABM strategy cannot be mastered overnight. So set goals, implement ABM, learn from the results and repeat- it is that simple!
Frequently Asked Questions
Which is the best way to succeed in ABM?
The key idea is to focus on the personalization and retention of the clients. Your ABM strategy is likely to succeed if you provide personalized solutions to your exclusive clients. Success in your ABM strategy depends on your team, your account-based marketing campaigns, and the level of experimentation you do.
Is it okay to outsource for account-based marketing?
If your organization does not want to invest the time, resources, and technology required for ABM, it is good to outsource it. These third-party organizations can help you provide you with a list of the best clients and their information.
How important is ABM strategy?
ABM is an essential strategy as it helps to shorten the sales process and increases the conversion rate. In addition, it helps an organization concentrate on the most exclusive clients and retain them, thus generating better revenue and ROI.
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Core ABM
Article | June 15, 2022
Recently, Contentgine, a content-based marketing agency, released its latest ‘Top 5’ research ranking for popular artificial intelligence (AI) related content consumed by B2B decision-makers. The content assets, mostly e-books, that made it to the list focus on predictive analytics, cloud-based machine learning (ML) technologies, deep data analytics, and more.
But why are B2B decision-makers so curious about AI and ML?
They want to use AI and ML-based solutions effectively to streamline their business processes and improve their marketing strategies.
Digital transformation, heightened consumer expectations, and changing buyer dynamics govern the way B2B decision-makers utilize their resources. Let us look at what is making them seek AI and ML-related content on such a high scale:
AI Simplifies Decision-Making
A survey conducted by SurveyMonkey concluded that 6 out of 10 B2B decision-makers experience decision paralysis—difficulty in choosing an option from a few viable ones—more often than expected. Furthermore, reaching a consensus becomes cumbersome if too many stakeholders are involved in the decision-making process. In such sticky situations, AI algorithms come to the rescue. They leverage heterogeneous data from social media, reports, website activity and more, to offer insights on management and resource allocation, assist in troubleshooting problems and aid strategic development. They alleviate issues that insufficient data and a lack of proper tools to measure metrics pose. They present a clear picture in front of the decision-makers to enable them to make an informed decision.
Assists in Lead Generation
Forget archaic, standard prospecting tools. You can effortlessly conduct lead generation research using various complex parameters with AI-powered tools. You can also analyze customer behavior, create dynamic, intuitive, secure and valuable lead lists. Sifting through massive lead generation data to discover the client profiles that match your ICP gets easier. On the other hand, ML helps with demand prediction, churn prediction, local optimization, and sentiment analysis, so you can offer an excellent customer experience to your leads. AI lead generation tools such as Conversica, Drift, and LeadCrunch can have conversations with your leads, collect their email addresses, and qualify them even before handing them off to the sales teams. AI-powered lead scoring can help you identify intent signals that your marketing teams might have missed.
Optimizes Content Strategy
Let’s face it. You don’t want to sell Eskimo ice. Irrelevant content sabotages your chances of creating a lasting relationship with your prospects. Your content should align with your customer’s needs and pain points. Thanks to machine learning, deep content personalization is possible. ML can analyze content assets on your website and send the relevant ones to a prospect at the right time based on their position in the buyer’s journey.
AI and ML Are Changing the Game for B2B Businesses
According to an O’Reilly survey commissioned by MemSQL, 71% of executives said that ML and AI are game-changers for their business. B2B decision-makers are investing their resources in exploring the advantages of AI and ML in-depth. They are keen to implement AI systems and ML-based solutions to eliminate human errors, continuously analyze vast amounts of raw data, and harness structured solutions to problems they face in executing their business processes.
VMWare Uses Acrolinx to Streamline Content Program
AI-enabled content solution Acrolinx offered VMWare real-time dashboards on the results of its content activity. The qualitative report helped VMWare focus its resources on making its content better so that it could get more conversions.
Closing Thoughts
“AI will increasingly determine which firms win and which firms lose.” - Phil Clement, former CMO of Aon.
“AI will increasingly determine which firms win and which firms lose.” - Phil Clement, former CMO of Aon. AI and ML can significantly impact business operations and marketing campaigns in the B2B domain. To have a competitive edge in the market, understanding their importance and figuring out where and how to use their power will no longer be a choice but a necessity.
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