Core ABM
Article | June 20, 2023
Buyer intent data is sourced from either internal or external parties. When combined, it provides a comprehensive picture of how your targets behave online. Internal marketing teams provide first-party intent data through your company's website, automation platforms like CRM, or other in-house applications. Third-party data is gathered from buyer intent data tools.
According to a Gartner study, more than 70% of B2B marketers will use third-party intent data to target prospects by the end of 2022.
In an interview with Media 7, Laura Goldstone, Director, Communications and Branding Strategy at AdDaptive Intelligence, talked about the importance of correct messaging in sales and marketing once you know your audience.
“I think the newest trends revolve around being a strategic resource, aligning marketing and sales, and using analytics to tailor messages to your audiences’ preferences or funnel stages.”
Buyer intent data tools provided by intent data providers like Bombora, Slintel, and ZoomInfo collect high-quality intent data to help you identify the accounts that show buyer intent, making it easier for you to understand their requirements and deliver solutions through effective content.
Let's find out how intent data can help your ABM strategy by making sales easier.
Buyer Intent Data: 5 Impactful Ways It Can Help You Boost Sales
Let us look at five benefits of buyer intent data that can help you boost sales:
Create Effective Content
In ABM marketing, the marketing team supports the sales team by generating qualified leads through effective content that addresses the prospects’ needs. There are more than a billion websites competing for a prospect’s attention. Focusing more on engaging your intended audience than on your search rankings could translate to more sales. This B2B intent data will allow your marketing team to analyze the volume and quality of responses to various online 'triggers' like keywords and social engagement. This way, the marketing team eliminates the guesswork in analytics and content research. B2B intent data can assist your marketing team in its intent-based marketing endeavors. The team can develop hyper-personalized, relevant, and timely content that can be used in your sales process to engage with new leads.
Identify Buyer Groups
In the B2B domain, multiple decision-makers sign off on purchase decisions. Your key accounts might have buyer groups, and this may pose a problem for your sales strategy. You will need to appeal to multiple personas who will then make unanimous decisions when purchasing your products or services. When combined with accurate, up-to-date contact information, intent data can assist in segmenting the purchasing process into relevant stages. Buying intent is useful not only for tracking and analyzing individual target prospects, but also for tracking and analyzing entire organizations. Overall, sales teams can craft perfect messages for any target persona that crosses their path, thanks to quality intent data.
Improve Lead Qualification
After your sales and marketing teams have developed an ideal lead generation strategy, you'll want to target leads with purchase intent. The majority of leads generated may not completely align with your ICP (ideal customer profile). If your product or service isn't even remotely relevant to what they're looking for, an automation system that is a part of your ABM services can remove them from your lead list. By delving into their product research activities, using intent data in lead management and outreach helps remove some of these roadblocks. It is critical to have a nurturing system in place and implement a lead scoring process. Intent data reveals where these leads fall within your segmentation, how interested they are in your solutions, and how their purchasing process works, so your effort or time is not wasted.
Increase Customer Retention
The same buyer intent technology that is used to find new prospects and customers can also be used for customer retention. According to Brain and Company, a 5% increase in customer retention can result in a more than 25% increase in profit. Monitoring intent signals can help you identify when a current customer interacts with a competitor or looks for alternatives to your product. It allows you to engage with them earlier and provides you with another opportunity to maintain your customer relationships.
Boost Team Productivity
According to HubSpot research, 40% of salespeople say prospecting is the most difficult part of their job. Buyer intent data eliminates prospecting (such as connecting on LinkedIn, getting past the gatekeeper, and sourcing emails), which results in more sales for your company. The most effective buyer intent software solutions can provide not only company-level intent information but also contact information for key decision-makers (all whilst complying with GDPR rules). This means your sales team can get right to the point and use the most up-to-date business intelligence to engage in more conversations with the right prospects. B2B intent data keeps your sales team on top of their game by allowing them to analyze and comprehend prospects on a more granular level.
Cloudera Generated over 30 Significant Business Deals Using Intent Data
Cloudera, an enterprise management company, harnessed intent data from Bombora and Just Global to run a hyper-targeted account-based marketing strategy across its sales, advertising, and marketing teams. As a result, it generated over thirty significant business deals.
Conclusion
B2B buyer intent data can help you boost sales by accurately identifying target accounts that show buyer intent. Using buyer intent tools that give clean intent data can help your sales team generate revenue and scale your business.
FAQ
How does intent data help with sales?
With the help of intent data, your sales team can target and qualify leads swiftly and accurately as it provides all the crucial background information on the leads. Accurate targeting translates to more conversions and sales.
Where does the intent data come from?
Intent data is usually provided by third-party data providers through buyer intent data tools. These tools collect intent data from data-sharing points like B2B websites, media publishers, and other relevant sources.
How is intent data beneficial for improving an account-based marketing strategy?
With the help of intent data, you can personalize your website, focus on your inbound leads with respect to their engagement with your content, nurture leads with email marketing, and identify prospective customers who haven’t engaged with you yet. These factors can enhance your ABM strategy.
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Buyer Intent Data
Article | June 20, 2023
Account-based marketing, also known as ABM, is an effective yet efficient way to seek out high-value leads and close sales. A B2B marketer can align his sales and marketing strategies to break into the industry. However, there’s one thing that needs all the attention from the marketing team- the content.
The B2B marketers from around the world are shuffling their budgets to focus more on account-based marketing. As of now, 28% of the budgets were allocated to support account-based marketing.
When considering ABM, marketers often jump to the execution part instead of planning, identifying, and targeting the target accounts. Therefore, they fail to understand the critical needs of the clientele. The whole process of connecting with the customers with their accounts goes into vain.
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Account Based Analytics
Article | August 3, 2022
When it comes to ABM vs. demand generation, most businesses struggle to find the right balance. Swinging too far one way or the other can completely derail your performance — and your organization's trust.
Here are some things you can do to get the best of both ABM and demand generation:
Check If You Are Too Heavy on Demand
If you are someone who focuses more on demand, then you should:
Gather insights from data, intelligence, and signals to develop a strong ICP. A strong ICP will help you target the individuals that make up the buying committee.
Keep your TAL (target account list) short and base it on buying intent.
Build an ABM program that encompasses teams, channels, and activities to gauge output and refine the use case.
Engage the double funnel to understand where you should draw the line between ABM and demand generation.
Are You Too Focused on ABM?
For the account-based marketer in you, it must be very hard to think beyond your target accounts. To balance this out, you should:
Get more information on the channels and tactics that your buyers respond to.
Draft messaging that creates urgency around your target account’s pain points.
Test your content on a large audience to see which gets the most engagement.
Use these insights to find the right balance between your demand generation strategy and ABM.
Beat the Odds When Implementing Strategies
Issues like no alignment between your sales and marketing teams and a superior insisting on implementing 100% ABM may arise. To address such issues, you should:
Expertly measure your data so all your responses are data-driven.
Chase directional improvements instead of trying to perfect your strategies right away.
Define a single metric for success, so your teams work towards achieving the same goal.
Keep your efforts balanced when implementing demand gen and ABM strategies.
Conclusion
If you do not strike a delicate balance between your ABM and your demand generation plan, your SDR teams will get overwhelmed and may not reach the level of efficiency you desire. Remember, your demand generation program should supplement your ABM efforts and not drive them.
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Core ABM
Article | August 11, 2021 |
It’s hard to believe that a B2B marketer isn’t aware of the value of Account-Based Marketing (ABM) and has switched over as well. Being in a B2B business, if your priorities include efficacious alignment with sales, delivering higher quality and apter leads, and linking other marketing activities that hit directly to revenue, ABM is undoubtedly a practical part of your thinking. But, despite this, only because the benefits are understood doesn’t state that the process for building an ABM program always is the same.
ABM can feel daunting for several reasons, such as:
The complex task of pulling data together for target accounts
The science of profiling those accounts and categorizing audiences
The long-lasting task of personalizing content
And the effort involved in generating the momentum to make it all happen
However, it might be easy to assume that ABM is only workable for larger businesses with sophisticated analytics and resource to spare.
But the fact is ABM is already delivering value for a wide range of businesses. And those businesses find many essential ingredients for doing effective ABM. Out of which, a popular ingredient is LinkedIn.
It’s through LinkedIn tools that they are now integrating data from both sales and marketing. For example, by having LinkedIn-based marketing, they can now easily have a real-time view of accounts' engagement. It’s on LinkedIn where they find the targeting capabilities to deliver personalized content to the right target audiences. And it’s on LinkedIn where they can find the capabilities to scale ABM programs flexibly.
Footing of LinkedIn Account-Based Marketing
ABM strategy demonstrates benefits such as the ability to look at the impact of engagement in detail. It enables you to be precise about whom you are targeting and why. The more insight you can integrate while working with sales to plan an ABM program is the better.
The sources can come through various marketing automation platforms, ABM-specific tools, and ABM strategies. However, it’s unusual to spot an ABM program that doesn’t combine LinkedIn as a vital source of insight or, say, as a constant source of data collection and the crucial execution channel.
Its function across the various stages of an ABM program makes LinkedIn a worthy starting point for marketing teams to build an ABM strategy. Even if you are starting with confined in-house data, LinkedIn affords the essentials for prioritizing accounts, identifying the critical prospects to target, delivering personalized content, and tracking the impact of what you’re doing.
It’s one crucial foundation of ABM, which you can build on as you gain more insight.
What’s Inside—LinkedIn Account-Based Marketing
Many consumers decide to buy a product or service before ever encountering it personally. Of course, this also applies to B2B buying.
How is that?
People research in B2B as much as in B2C. In the age of social media, people purchase solely through research. Social media has empowered people to research more than ever before, and for B2B, this is oftentimes observed through LinkedIn.
People can research every single angle and aspect of a brand and company, from corporate social responsibility and community engagement to followers. In addition, they can research the CEO personally — what the CEO is saying, doing, and buying.
So, when people are deciding whether to buy from you, they research. The first thing they'll do is search for you through the LinkedIn profile. When people click on your LinkedIn, they’ll get a positive impression if you have positive content and recommendations and lots of positive engagement on your page.
Your content is positive and would lead when it shows long-form posts, short-form posts, videos, graphs, white papers, and figures that explain what you do, how you do it, and what you can do for people. When audiences are involving with your content, it's high time that you know what you are doing and are an expert in it.
When Media 7 interviewed Udi Ledergor, Chief Marketing Officer at Gong, he said,
“Our top channels for engaging our audience of sales professionals include our LinkedIn page, our highly engaged audience at our LinkedIn profile, and our enthusiastic list of email subscribers. To complement our digital channels, we supplement them with a good dose of content, which includes advertising, and other mediums not often used in B2B Marketing.”
Similar to this, when Media 7 interviewed Ed Breault, Chief Marketing Officer at Aprimo said,
“We are “humanizing” communications as much as possible, over the phone for voice, broadcast, media buying within different properties like LinkedIn. I think it’s a drive to strike a balance to create a complete experience for my audience. The foremost motivation to innovate should be solving a real-world problem your customers are experiencing.”
LinkedIn Account-based Marketing has created value to add for ABM strategies. However, LinkedIn targeting also plays a vital role for smaller marketing teams who have just stepped in their ABM journey and are hungry to gain meaningful insights to help plan their program.
Here are some crucial ways to use LinkedIn for targeting campaigns at the stages of executing an ABM:
Build a Personal Brand
One of the best ways to engage with essential accounts through LinkedIn Account-based Marketing is to have decision-makers as part of your existing system. If you already have a trustworthy relationship with them, they will be more probable to trust you and buy from you. You can take advantage of LinkedIn to build a personal brand, build solutions, and aware your accounts. There is no secret hack to using LinkedIn to expand your personal and company brand. Be authentic. Provide significance to your audience. Don't show up only to sell.
To build your brand, the best content type to post will solely depend on your audience. However, LinkedIn users are 10x more active in sharing videos than text-related posts. So, ensure creating your content in the format your audience wants to consume it.
Outline the Priority Accounts
You can’t stay relaxed after you assign a high-value account for your ABM program. You also need to spend time profiling the business, identifying important stakeholder audiences, and developing a plan for them.
The time you invest in understanding your top-priority accounts won’t only support sales, but you will also be creating relevant personas for your broader ABM program.
To know how to go about profiling accounts on LinkedIn, you need to know that the Buyer Circle feature within LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a perfect starting point for profiling your priority accounts. In this, you will be able to identify all of the decision-makers and influencers expected to be involved in a purchase decision.
Choose Types of Ads Ideal for LinkedIn Account-based Marketing
There remains a wide range of advertisement options similar to your target audience. Determining which ones will be the best fit according to your business can benefit your ads to land with an extra punch. Let’s understand it in detail.
Content Sponsored Ads
A sponsored content is proven to be one of the most effective ad types to engage the audience and is best considered an easy way to get started with LinkedIn account-based marketing.
In case of point, you can use an existing post on your company’s page or create a most relevant to your target audience. Content can include images, articles, videos, or presentations that win audiences’ hearts.
Likewise, carousel images are a particularly robust strategy that can help humanize your brand through your ads. With the ability to use several images that can link to multiple landing pages of the company’s website, you can share more of your company’s story.
Carousel-based ads can even boost your target audience to stop scrolling through their feed and interact with your ad directly to get in contact with your sales team.
LinkedIn Text Ad
A text ad only includes words. This means you can’t rely on fancy images to draw in leads. Instead, it’s all focused on a creative copy. Text ads can be valuable, especially because they may be cheaper than other ads, and where you can easily update the text to achieve the best ROI. So, if you are thinking of creating specific campaigns, use LinkedIn targeting options and see the results.
LinkedIn Display Ads
Right in line with LinkedIn account-based targeting, display ads let you target an extremely specified audience. In addition, with using a variety of content for your ads, like text, audio, video, or images, LinkedIn targeting becomes easier.
The benefit you get is that you can strengthen your brand and ultimately reach more professionals, decision-makers, and influencers worldwide.
LinkedIn Video Ads
Video has become a popular choice for brand content because video ads make up 35% of total online expenditure. It’s a simple yet effective way to deliver your company’s message in a creative and informative method. Luckily, you can also utilize video with your ads, as LinkedIn privileges this content format in the best ways. If nothing, begin with creating video ads on LinkedIn for targeting campaigns.
Generate Content that Works the Best
The ability to deliver customized content is the optimum truth for an ABM program—because everything pivots around it.
Personalized content is the bridge where sales meet marketing execution. If it is done right, it means that influencers and decision-makers engage with content that reflects the business’s needs and the priorities in its respective role.
Creating personalized content maximizes the engagement that it can generate. For example, in LinkedIn’s recent State of Sales survey, 87% of B2B buyers in Europe say they are more probable to consider products or services from a brand that engages them with content precisely relevant to their role.
Similarly, LinkedIn’s exceptional targeting capabilities play a prominent role in a lot of ABM strategies. LinkedIn account targeting ensures that, when you modify content to fit a priority account, you can deliver that content exclusively to that account
Keeping an attractive offer for an eBook, guide, white paper, or infographic can be perfect for drawing key prospects’ attention. It is because you never know how it might ultimately create an easy opportunity for a conversion.
How do you Now Convert Leads?
While you might upload your target list appropriately, create a captivating ad for your audience, and set up all options correctly, still you might have a remaining question in the back of your mind:
What if I don’t get conversions?
That’s the entire purpose of this, after all. You don’t want to fade off at the last step!
When lining up your ad for lead generation, you can indicate your target audience between sending them to your website’s external landing page or filling out a LinkedIn form.
While an impeccably executed landing page can convert leads, LinkedIn also might deliver different options to let them fill out a form, where their information will be swiftly and efficiently filled based on their profile. That’s what the power of LinkedIn account-based marketing is doing to other B2B business bodies.
Track Engagement for Best Results
In the last, it is an obvious step to take! The multiple benefits of tracking your engagement will be equally apparent. Tracking the results of your accounts through LinkedIn account-based marketing can aid you, and your account-based marketer to better understand who other prospects are required to be targeted within existing accounts. Also, you can track at an appropriate time, to give an extra gentle push in the funnel.
Activating real-time alerts so that your account-based marketer can get in touch with the accounts that have demonstrated interest in your business within an appropriate time frame. Doing this can help discover further opportunities that may have been missed otherwise.
Providing these alerts can enable your account-based marketer to perceive exactly when targeted accounts engage with your ads. Of course, this swells up your engagement score. From this, your team can take additional steps and use that information to determine which accounts aren’t engaging and think critically—why some offerings are working and how you can change the ads that aren’t responding.
Since every campaign is different, you will have to determine individual goals for each of the accounts. However, if your campaign is underperforming, there are steps you can always take to make improvements.
Ready to Start-up your ABM Process with LinkedIn?
Most business professionals are already strengthening LinkedIn for networking, inspiration, and knowledge sharing. So why not use the platform for everything of which it is worth able?
No other social media platforms are as specific and curated as LinkedIn. So, if you know whom you are targeting and looking for a new way to capture leads, it’s not too late to use LinkedIn Account-Based marketing techniques. Again because, people are researching you, whether you like it or not.
The great thing about LinkedIn Account-Based marketing is that you can take the bull by the horns and proactively craft your LinkedIn profile to guide their research on you. In this way, you are the one writing your narrative and deciding their opinion of you so that your social selling can take off.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the benefits of using LinkedIn for ABM?
The benefits of using LinkedIn for ABM are generating leads, driving website traffic, multiplying ROI, creating brand awareness, showing marketing potential, and marketing functionalities, among many others.
What is the top 3 reason to use LinkedIn for ABM?
Well, several reasons are evolving each day to use LinkedIn for ABM, but the reasons actually will give you results are:
Selection of targets
To profile priority accounts
Score leads
How to use LinkedIn ABM to generate leads?
There are some steps to follow to generate leads using LinkedIn ABM. Don’t miss out on these.
Firstly, know your audience
Find them on LinkedIn
Create a list of target accounts from their LinkedIn profile
Specify your accounts
Create content through keeping accounts and their business needs
Choose your ad type and specify to your audience
Post, tag, share throughout the platform
Track your engagement
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Create content through keeping accounts and their business needs
Choose your ad type and specify to your audience
Post, tag, share throughout the platform
Track your engagement"
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