Core ABM
Article | June 20, 2023
Empathy is an emotion that many marketers invoke when they are developing their positioning and messaging for various campaigns. They consider questions such as: “If I put myself in the buyers’ shoes, what do I think they think or feel about this particular pain point?” “Do I understand the challenges they are facing?” “How can I help them overcome this issue and provide long-term value?” Over the last few years, many B2B marketers have leveraged account-based marketing (ABM) to address these questions with specific use cases and examples tailored to their target accounts, in order to boost engagement and drive high-value conversions.
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Programmatic ABM
Article | June 9, 2022
Inbound Marketing
Businesses put effort into designing their inbound marketing strategies to seek growth opportunities. In inbound marketing strategies, target audiences are attracted, engaged, and delighted by businesses by using valuable content. They also communicate with the customers regularly through inbound sales calls and keep the customers happy through timely and prompt assistance.
Businesses use an inbound marketing strategy that they have trusted for years, while some still struggle to grasp the power of inbound marketing. In both cases, if the strategy doesn’t show the expected results, it becomes a matter of immediate concern.
Why Should You Conduct an Inbound Marketing Audit?
In an interview with Media 7, Daniel Englebretson, Founder of Khronos, talked about rise of AI in ABM and the success of marketing programs.
“The best programs, and the best marketers, have built their success on the back of rapid iteration and a long history of testing, learning, and continuously improving.”
Continuous improvement in marketing can happen only when you carry out regular assessments or audits of your marketing strategy, inbound, and outbound.
A marketing audit looks at the business environment, strategy implementation, systems, organization, productivity, and function of the strategy. It is undertaken when there is a change in leadership, the business is lagging compared to competitors, has rapid growth or is terribly stuck, or when a design overhaul is planned.
Here is why you should conduct an inbound marketing audit:
Identifying Weaknesses
If an inbound marketing strategy suddenly stops working, you need to find its weaknesses and remedy them in time to get the best results. This is called “strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats” (SWOT) analysis.
An audit will help you analyze the effectiveness of the channels and the tactics you use as compared to industry standards and find out the reasons behind ineffective lead generation. An effective audit also rigorously checks the marketing tools your team uses.
You can make adjustments and improvements to the strategy based on the audit. You can look into channels like websites, paid search, email marketing, social media, and organic search to assess the performance of your strategy.
Spotting Growth Opportunities
When expanding the business, introducing a new product or service, conducting an audit can add great value to your plan. You can evaluate your business position, rate your customer satisfaction and engagement, know how well you are exploiting your existing opportunities, and if you are using the right channels and messaging to get in touch with your target audience.
If you find anything amiss, you can promptly deploy resources to course-correct your team and work towards a better ROI through the inbound marketing strategy.
Reaffirming Goals
Reaffirm your marketing and business goals by assessing important data-driven perspective metrics like keyword ranking, post engagement, customer acquisition cost (CAC), email click-through rate, and lead quality. For example, if your website is not optimized for SERP and doesn’t grab the attention of your users, it could be the reason behind ineffective lead generation. In such a case, you can re-evaluate your content strategy.
Things like text-to-image ratio on web pages, irrelevant images, and weirdly placed call-to-action (CTA) buttons can affect the user’s journey. If some pages are unresponsive on mobiles or tablets, then the audit will help you find those and implement appropriate solutions.
Knowing what is working and what isn’t helps you know what you need to do next to get optimum results from your inbound marketing strategy.
Keeping Your Team Motivated
Every team is a defined stakeholder in the company's success. Right from the sales team, customer experience, IT architects, c-suite, product developers, to your marketing team, everyone will know their strengths and weaknesses through the audit. A regularly conducted marketing audit will keep your teams motivated to perform their duties well.
Boosts ROI
Boost your ROI by ditching things that do not work. Allocating resources to your business strengths instead of your marketing weaknesses will help you get the ROI you expect. You can also focus on introducing new plans to revive the part of the strategy that is no longer working. It can be anything from redesigning a few website pages to hiring a new SEO expert.
What Does a Strong Inbound Marketing Audit Look Like?
A strong marketing audit yields results that enhance your strategy, improve your ROI, and help you step up your game so you don’t fall behind in the race with your competitors. These are the characteristics a strong inbound marketing audit will have:
Autonomy
An effective audit should be autonomously conducted by a third-party auditor so you do not skip the hard parts and the management completely cooperates in the process. The more stringent the audit, the better the understanding of potential growth opportunities, managerial snags, and resource allotments.
Perfect Structure
The audit has to be systematically structured to cover all bases, like contact channels, business environment, customer experience, design, engagement, SEO, SMM, and sales management, so no crucial elements are missed.
Conducted Regularly
Conduct the audit at regular intervals of time, at least once a year. It should be a part of your marketing calendar or your strategic marketing plan.
Business-specific
The audit should factor in the technology, expertise, and experience of your business. It should consider factors like political, legal, and socio-cultural issues that arise from the location of your business. Competitors, best practices, and conditions should also be considered.
How Eclipse Software Saw a 370% Increase in Organic Traffic in a Year
Manchester-based software company Eclipse Software hit a snag when their online presence wasn’t translating into revenue, leads, or ROI. They hired Noisy Little Monkey, a service-based digital marketing agency in the UK, to help them boost their online presence. Noisy Little Monkey ran a marketing audit for them and found issues like page speeds and content offerings, and they ran campaigns using gated content. As a result of such campaigns and website improvements, Eclipse Software saw a 370% rise in their organic traffic in a year, with a conversion rate of 3.7%.
Key Takeaways
An inbound marketing audit is crucial for identifying the strengths and weaknesses of your marketing strategy. It can tell you which areas need improvement, how to allocate your resources better, and how to increase your growth opportunities and ROI through data-driven perspectives and more to achieve better results.
FAQ
At what time interval should you conduct an inbound marketing audit?
Every business should conduct an audit once every six to twelve months.
What are the characteristics of an inbound marketing audit?
An inbound marketing audit should be autonomous, periodically carried out, systematic and business-specific.
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Buyer Intent Data
Article | March 6, 2023
Metrics, Analytics, and Insights in ABM
It is a fact that ABM gives a higher ROI as compared to other marketing strategies. If you are a marketer who has painstakingly built an ABM strategy from scratch, you would understand the amount of time it takes to execute it and for it to show measurable results. How do you measure the success of your ABM strategy? You need to understand the metrics, analytics, and insights. Marketers use these terms interchangeably, but there is a difference between them.
By using raw data points, metrics show you the incremental changes in how target accounts interact with your brand.
Analytics compares the metrics over time to show you how your ABM strategy is performing.
Metrics and analytics together help you gain insights into what is working and what isn’t.
Insights help you take action to improve your ABM strategy.
To measure the success of an ABM strategy, you need to use ABM Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) metrics. ABM KPIs track the performance of your strategy with respect to customer service, marketing, efficiency, revenue, and employment statistics.
In an interview with Media 7, Abhi Yadav, Founder & CTO of Zylotech, talked about the importance of customer intelligence in marketing:
Tracking every point of engagement is critical in delivering a holistic view of where buyers are actively engaged and what’s working.
Defining ABM KPIs
Use the SMART criteria to evaluate the effectiveness of a KPI. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-Bound.
By identifying how well the KPI fits into these criteria, you can define it. Find answers to the following questions to define your KPI:
Is your goal specific?
Is your goal measurable?
Is it attainable?
Is it relevant to your business?
Is the goal time-bound?
A well-defined KPI should be a part of your marketing analytics strategy to accurately track the performance of your ABM strategy.
KPIs You Should Measure to Track ABM Success
Sales Funnel Metrics
Measuring sales funnel metrics can quickly pinpoint where your ABM strategy has fallen out of alignment with your business goals. They can be classified into three types:
Upper Funnel Metrics
Upper funnel or top-of-funnel metrics track the engagement rate of the leads within your target accounts. They assess the time taken for a lead to complete specific actions like opening your emails, receiving, or responding to direct mail, visiting your website, and more. You can pinpoint which leads are closer to buying based on the increase in engagement. These metrics also help you know which accounts don’t know anything about your company. You can improve your strategy to capture these accounts.
Is there a huge gap between the products and services your target accounts want and the ones you offer? This gap is the white space. Find your white space by identifying where you lack engagement within your accounts. Should you consider targeting different accounts? Eliminate the white space once you find the answers to these questions. Your goal should depend on the size of the company and the number of ICPs you are targeting.
Middle-of-Funnel Metrics
These metrics help measure the impact of your campaign on your top accounts. Are your target accounts having productive meetings and engagements with your sales team? Swiftly moving your leads to the sales team is an indicator of an effective ABM campaign. Also, you should measure the quality of the campaign based on how many leads move to the next stage of the funnel.
Bottom-of-Funnel Metrics
For the bottom-of-funnel metrics, measure average selling point (ASP) to gauge if you have targeted the right accounts with your campaign. If you have a higher close rate within your ABM accounts that means your campaign is performing well. As compared to other marketing strategies, ABM helps businesses increase their close rate.
Customer Churn Rate
The customer churn rate, also known as the attrition rate, is the number of accounts that have stopped doing business with you over a period. It should be as low as possible. It is a metric to measure the quality of the relationship you have with an account. ABM is a qualitative marketing strategy. If your churn rate is high, then reevaluate your products and services and confirm that you are targeting the right accounts. Understanding your target accounts better is the easiest way to decrease your churn rate.
Content Engagement
Content management is of paramount importance while running an ABM strategy. With this KPI, you can track the engagement each piece of content brings. The pieces that don’t perform well should be scrapped or improved to better suit the needs of your target accounts. Email open and click-through rates point towards ineffective subject lines, content, and CTAs.
Form Fills
Form fills are important for collecting data that helps with nurturing and engaging leads. Track your form fills to confirm if you are gathering information effectively. Adjust your campaign if you are not getting the expected results.
Conversions during the Customer Journey
A good way to show your customers that you care about them is to give them several opportunities to buy or sign up. It's important to keep track of the conversion rate for each CTA so that you can figure out where customers are losing interest in the sales process. Having this information will help you improve the customer journey.
Phone Calls and Scheduled Demos
Keeping a record of your phone calls and scheduled demonstrations is crucial to measuring your ABM success. You are creating a personal connection while interacting with the customer so they may take you closer to converting a deal.
Conversion Rate
Every ABM strategy’s aim is to drive sales and acquire new customers. As a metric, the B2B conversion rate is important because it helps you evaluate the success of your campaign and compare your performance to the previous year.
Customer Retention
Assess the health of your accounts by measuring customer satisfaction. A Net Promoter Score (NPS) can determine how satisfied your accounts are with your product or service. You can seek their feedback and use it to create better customer experiences and, in the future, design products and services to cater to their needs so you can retain your customers.
Average Deal Size
This KPI is primarily used by sales managers to understand how well they have utilized the opportunities that have come their way. It is calculated by dividing your total monetary amount of deals by the total number of deals that were converted. It can help the sales team understand what the average deal size is that they are looking at and what they can aim for.
Popular ABM Analytics Tools
The most popular and widely used ABM analytics tools are Microsoft Excel, LeanData, Salesforce, Google Analytics, Marketo, Engagio, DemandBase, and Terminus.
How ServiceMax Saw a 300% Increase in Their Conversions Using DemandBase
Using DemandBase’s Forms solution to collect user data, AI-powered DemandBase Site Optimization for data personalization, and DemandBase Analytics to understand traffic trends, bounce rates, conversion rates, and other critical website metrics, California-based Service Execution Management company ServiceMax, witnessed a 300 percent increase in their conversions, a 70 percent decrease in bounce rates, and a 100 percent increase in page views per session.
Key Takeaways
Measuring the success of your ABM strategy is crucial to understanding the strong and weak points of your strategy. A lot of trial and error goes into creating an effective ABM strategy. Define and measure your ABM KPIs to optimize your ABM strategy for better results.
FAQ
What are the most important ABM KPIs?
Some of the most important KPIs are upper funnel metrics, customer churn rate, and conversion rate.
What are some popular ABM analytics tools?
Popular ABM analytics tools include Salesforce, Google Analytics, Marketo, Engagio, DemandBase, and Terminus.
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Buyer Intent Data
Article | February 23, 2022
Harnessing the power of intent data to create effective account-based marketing strategies can help sales and marketing teams effectively achieve their goals. According to HubSpot, Google processes approximately 63,000 search queries every second. Of these queries, a significant few may be associated with your business. These web searches count as behavior, and they make up intent data. Intent data is of two types: internal (gathered from websites, automation systems, and other software like CRM) and external buyer intent data (review sites, competitor’s websites, forums).
Intent data is captured by buyer intent data tools. It provides insights into a customer’s behavior, interests, pain points, needs, and expectations. These insights can be leveraged to pinpoint users closest to making a purchase decision. You can then work to convert them into customers swiftly.
The Power of Intent Data
Intent data is the number one priority for account-based marketing strategies. Companies harness the power of intent data by integrating it into the workflows of their sales and marketing teams. With the help of intent data, they can tailor their interactions to the needs of their users and create valuable connections with them.
Primarily, intent data helps prioritize a list of target accounts that should be pursued for conversion. Furthermore, some companies also create specialized groups and targeted lists to hyper-personalize their content offerings to influence purchase decisions. Once the sales and marketing teams are aware of the position of a user in the sales cycle, they can focus on pushing them forward in the buying process with the help of personalized content.
Charles Crnoevich, Vice President of Partnerships & Business Development at Bombora defines intent data as:
“Intent data helps B2B teams better their prospect and customer experience at all stages of the buyer journey. From top-funnel ad messaging that meets prospective buyers in their initial research phase, to bottom-funnel sales messaging that includes context around specific product needs, intent insights give every touchpoint the ability to be backed by data. It eliminates room for human guessing and the risk of being irrelevant to your audience.”
Let us look at how intent data is transforming businesses and the importance of an intent data strategy to scale your business.
Target Account Selection
Relying only on basic firmographic data is a thing of the past when it comes to selecting a target account. Here are five steps that you can follow to create a target account selection based on the intent data you gather:
Defining Your ICP
Revenue should not be the only factor you consider while defining your ICP. Look at the cost to convert, lifetime value, and churn rate. Observe what your best customers have in common. Is it their company size, their domain, the challenges they face, or their growth rate? Once you know these details, consider finding a solution for their problems. You may have more than one ICP if you have multiple products, features, and services on offer.
Understanding the Intent
Based on the key signals like downloads, sign-ups, booked demos, or reading certain pages on your websites that buyer intent data tools record, you can understand the intent of the user. Once the intent is clear, you can gather your data with the help of buyer intent tools.
Gathering Relevant Data
Lead generation platforms like Leedfeeder, email marketing platforms like MailChimp, CRM platforms like HubSpot CRM, and marketing automation platforms like WebEngage are your sources of intent data. How you gather data depends on the platforms you are using. Most lead generation platforms will allow you to download the data in an Excel sheet or a CSV file. What is great about this kind of data is that you can always combine the spreadsheets from all these sources and clean up the inconsistencies.
Segmenting the Target List
Segmenting your target list is very important to understand which accounts are high intent. The other categories can be of medium or low intent. Filter out the low intent accounts first. These accounts aren’t quite ready to make any purchase decisions. Add them to your remarketing list or your account development team can nurture them. The medium and high-intent accounts can stay on your list so your sales and marketing can focus on them.
Targeting Key Accounts
Once your teams have the list of key accounts they need to target, they can create an effective strategy to approach these accounts and push them towards conversion. They can accelerate their conversion efforts with the help of email marketing, content marketing, advertising, and direct mail. Finding the right leads at the right time can help a great deal with targeting. With the help of B2B intent data, everything functions smoothly once you find the right key accounts.
Message Selection
The best part about B2B intent data is that it doesn’t miss any important information about the account, so your messaging strategy is based on facts and not speculation. Quality intent data will provide the prospect’s research history, going as far as including searched products and companies. The otherwise invisible, actionable prospect trends can thus come to light, and you can create messaging that can help you beat your competition.
According to a Gartner research study, more than 70 percent of B2B marketers will utilize third-party intent data to target their prospects or initiate engagement with buyer groups in selected accounts by the end of 2022.
Message optimization may not be at the top of the chart for the most impactful uses of intent data, but it does play an important role in helping content marketers be successful. Buyer intent data enables them to better align their sales pitches to accommodate the buyers’ interests and needs that they discover using the third-party site buyer signals.
Decreasing Churn Rate
By monitoring the intent data signals of clients who search your competitor’s website to find alternatives to the products or services you provide, you can know which clients need more attention and support. This information indicates that these clients do not find your product or services up to the mark or are not fulfilling their needs and expectations. You can set up triggers for such clients and ask for feedback from them to find out the shortcomings of your product or service. You can use the feedback as a guide for future product development and reduce your churn rate by retaining clients. Another interesting approach would be to provide your team access to reliable and clean intent data so they can make decisions to enhance the sales strategy.
Image Source: Orbitmedia
Sales Outreach
According to Gartner research, prospects spend about 50% of their time trying to find information from third-party sources. Usually, the sales team has to wait for a buyer to either fill out a form or perform a trigger action to be classified as a prospect. However, with buyer intent signals, prospect movement is revealed. The prospect’s intent indicators help the sales team decide when to outreach.
Enhancing Content Personalization
Use third and first-party data to create informed blog content, email marketing campaigns, and other content marketing initiatives to appeal to your prospects. By leveraging the intent data at hand, you can offer what the clients want in an appealing way. You can target their entire buyer persona by creating a more effective content strategy. Your content marketing team can know the topics they need to cover in their marketing efforts. It can also improve the existing content to make it more impactful.
Discovering New Leads
Whenever a customer searches for products or services that you offer or topics relevant to them, third-party intent data aggregators can track them and notify you about this customer. If this customer hasn’t already interacted with your business, then these are new leads your teams can pursue with appropriate messaging and tailored content.
Enabling ABM Strategy
In ABM marketing, knowing which accounts to target is the most crucial step. With the help of data insights on specific accounts, you can build a focused ABM strategy. You can analyse their research data and interpret their buying intent, and based on that, you can add them to your target list. Measure and test the content they interact with and what makes them move further along the sales funnel. You can find the content that isn’t creating any impact and replace it. Adapting an ABM strategy in real time becomes easy, so you are more customer-centric than ever before.
Improving Marketing Automation
Intent data tells you exactly where your prospects are in the sales funnel. Use this information to trigger certain actions to nurture these prospects. For example, once you find that a certain prospect has stopped consuming the awareness-stage content on your website and starts devoting time to consideration or conversion-stage content, you can trigger a change in the kind of marketing content you send out.
Targeting Keywords Effectively
Search engine marketers find long-tail keywords important because they are descriptive, relevant, and do a great job of implying the buyer’s intent. However, it is challenging for advertisers to target long-tail keywords because they do not have enough search volume. This affects ad visibility as compared to when high volume keywords are used. To get the same results with the long tail keywords, companies need to optimize many long tail keywords.
Automated bidding technologies can easily carry out this task. By using your third-party intent data, you can know the kind of long-tail keywords your audience is searching for. Use your website analytics to discover fresh information on keywords and then use it to target keywords or create relevant ads.
You can also automate ad personalization with the help of intent data aggregators that identify qualified leads based on information like domain and device advertisement. You can then place the right ads on your audience’s devices.
Now that we know how intent data helps with account-based marketing, intent based marketing, and other marketing endeavors, let us look at the key elements of an intent data strategy and how to make the most of it.
8 Key Elements of an Effective Intent Data Strategy
We have already established how important intent data is in B2B marketing in improving targeting, lead generation, lead nurturing, and overall customer experience. When it comes to creating an effective intent data strategy, you should follow these guidelines:
Align ABM Initiatives & Intent Data Strategy
In an ABM strategy, you can deploy intent data for account prioritization in the following ways:
Fuse intent data with your defined ICP
Identify your target accounts and check which of these are showing buyer intent. Your sales team can have relevant information to talk to these accounts and convince them to make a purchase.
Segment accounts showing intent but don’t align with your ICP
You can increase your sales pipeline by segmenting the new accounts by showing buyer intent but not aligning them with your ICP. This is especially useful for companies with a smaller database.
Define Your Goals and Strategies
Break silos and work towards the same goals. Get a buy-in from the higher-ups in the company and let the teams know what to achieve with the intent data. Share the intent data strategy with every team member, align the goals and metrics, and train those who need to know more about intent data.
Integrate the Data from Different Systems
Increase the efficiency of your intent data strategy by integrating systems like CRM to improve the visibility and performance of the funnel. A step-by-step approach goes a long way when it comes to an intent data strategy.
Start with a Small Pilot
Trial and tweaking your intent data strategy can be a good idea. Create an intent data framework for a small set of accounts and share it with a limited group of sales team members at your company. Streamline your processes through this pilot test. Once you know the intricacies of what works and what doesn’t, you can launch intent data strategies with other sales teams.
Collect Performance Metrics
Ensure you collect your conversion rate before rolling out a pilot program for testing. This way, you can compare the before and after. Monitor the performance metrics throughout the program. Your marketing and sales teams can go over the metrics together to see what tweaks are needed to the intent data strategy before multiple teams adopt one.
Gather Buyer Journey Intelligence
Identify trends through specific search terms, topics, asset types, features or product interests so you can create topic clusters for specific content that can be distributed throughout the funnel. You can do this by gathering first-party data from your marketing automation software, CRM, and other customer-data platforms. You can also interview customers to get any other useful information to understand a buyer’s journey better. You can also engage intent data providers to find out more about historical buyer journey analysis.
Monitor Important Topics
Select the right topics to monitor. The intent data will only work if you know which specific topic or clusters of topics will determine the status of a prospect. Choose the topics that are critical for success. Remember, the higher the use cases in a fuller, the lower the number of topics you should monitor. As you move down the funnel, be more specific about the topics you want to monitor.
Explore Potential Integrations
By integrating your intent data with the right platform, you can amplify the results of your intent data strategy. Since intent data supports the complete customer lifecycle and increases the value of your other martech software or sales-tech investments, it is important to explore integrations that may enhance your sales and marketing strategy. When used wisely, intent data can transform your business, one department at a time. It can also ensure customers’ satisfaction and help you scale your business faster than you ever imagined.
Ultima Generated ROI in Eight Weeks Through Cognism
Ultima, a UK-based infotech company led an example by generating ROI in just eight weeks using intent data provided by Cognism. "Our sales cycle is typically 6-8 months long. At Cognism, we saw ROI in 8 weeks from intent data and direct dials. One deal pays for a year’s Cognism subscription." - George Mckenna, Head of Cloud Sales at Ultima.
Conclusion
Creating an effective intent data strategy can be a game-changing factor for your business. With its implementation, not only will you be able to connect with your customers on a deeper level, but you will also be able to get higher win rates than your competitors that practice manual prospecting.
FAQ
How can you collect intent data?
You can collect intent data through signals like website clicks, social media ad clicks, length of time spent on a website, email newsletter subscription behavior, or frequent website visits.
What are the benefits of intent data in B2B marketing?
With the help of a good intent data strategy, you can find new potential leads, focus on companies already a part of your sales funnel, promote yourself to your customers early on in their decision-making process, prioritize your leads, and personalize your outreach. These benefits can drive your sales growth.
How does intent data help in ABM marketing?
ABM marketing is also intent-based marketing. Intent data for ABM is an asset as it helps with account prioritization (lowering the scale of the program to focus better on key accounts) and account activation through personalized and specific marketing messaging.
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