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.
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Core ABM
Article | June 20, 2023
Introduction
The application of AI marketing technology is picking up pace because of its many advantages. According to a 2020 Deloitte survey, 74% of AI adopters agree that AI will be a part of all their enterprise applications by 2023.
What does an AI-based marketing strategy look like, and how do you make the most of it? This article gets into the nitty-gritty of AI marketing technology and how to implement it in ABM so you can maximize your business performance and outputs.
AI’s Role in Marketing
Thanks to its accuracy, B2C businesses use AI marketing technology to target their customers with product or service recommendations. The following are some use cases of AI-based B2C marketing:
Personalization
AI helps businesses with their 1-to-1 marketing strategies by personalizing their content to cater to every segment.
Event Communication
Emails informing customers of upcoming sales, special access, or exciting offers are sent out via AI technology. Weekend offer emailers, special discount codes, and new product updates are a result of event communication automation so that customers can be informed before time about upcoming events.
Real-time Content
Trending topics, investments, event promotions, webinars, customer feedback, product availability, bestselling combo, weather reports, and new blog post updates are provided in real-time to maintain an active connection with customers.
Businesses do this by using the ‘open time content’ AI technology. Manually executing 1-to-1 marketing strategies is nearly impossible, impractical, and does not see much success. AI helps streamline these strategies and executes them effortlessly.
What Goes into Creating an Effective ABM Strategy?
For an ABM strategy to work, businesses need to follow these steps:
Preparing for the ABM Strategy
Organizational readiness is crucial for implementing ABM. Make sure you have a budget and an achievable timeline to execute the strategy, team members who can anchor it, and an understanding of ABM metrics so you can make the most of it.
Synergy Between Marketing and Sales Teams
Your sales and marketing teams should be in sync and not at loggerheads due to account-level communication issues. Discussing the benefits of ABM with both the teams beforehand and coming to a strategic agreement to implement ABM can help them align their goals while executing the ABM strategy.
Identifying Target Segments
Your ABM strategy can do wonders for your business only if you have a precise segmentation of data. Use dimensions like business size, annual revenue, current spending, projected spending, targeted products, geography, open opportunities, closed opportunities, etc., to identify your target segments.
Zeroing-in on a Priority
Having a clear priority helps you streamline your ABM strategy. It should either be acquisition (acquiring new accounts), retention (retaining existing accounts), or expansion (expanding the scope of accounts). Without a clear priority, any ABM strategy may not yield expected results because the efforts won’t be concentrated towards a single goal.
Leveraging AI in ABM Strategy
In an interview with Media 7, Daniel Englebretson, founder of Khronos, spoke about AI’s impact on the future of ABM.
“From my perspective, B2B marketers have faced countless challenges that have formed the basis of new technology – problem brings a solution. I expect AI will solve identity resolution, resolve data challenges, and enhance targeting. I expect AI will address 1:1 content at scale, unlocking the rapid deployment of 1:1 brand experiences.”
Introducing AI into your ABM strategy can help you in the following way:
Content Personalization
Once you know your customer’s pain points and interests, you can focus on providing them personalized solutions, products, or services they desire. Of course, personalizing content is complex, but AI makes it easier by offering the technological capacity to deliver what your customer wants.
Efficient Resource Management
Without customer profiling, an ABM strategy cannot achieve the expected output. AI can assist with data crawling the internet to find out important customer information. Also, it segments data acquired from CRM, which gives you more information about a customer than any other generic data. This data is helpful for lead qualification and creating heavily personalized content for a customer.
Since AI does all the heavy lifting, you can allocate your resources to building and nurturing a relationship with the customer.
Automation
AI-based marketing in ABM generates automated insights for lead generation. It also highlights campaign performance related to specific, high-value accounts and suggests steps to engage a prospect.
Digital marketing and automation are a dynamic duo where AI brings about intelligent marketing automation. Efficient email campaigns are run when executed by automation. Email marketing companies like MailChimp target customers based on insights to achieve more conversions. When AI and big data use CRM data, large chunks of user information can be collected from different platforms. This information can help with formulating a successful ABM strategy.
ABM Optimization and Predictive Insights
To analyze intent, AI processes data in real-time and gives predictive insights to help with ABM optimization. As a result, it is easier to merge data from different sources with AI-enabled tools, achieve predictive analysis, manage recommendations in real-time, and understand competitor strategies through social media. AI can also interpret images correctly.
Enhancing Communications
Use AI for building a strong relationship with your customer. Personalizing communication by using customer data can be easily achieved with AI.
What Is the Future of AI-enabled ABM Strategy?
ABM, with an AI marketing strategy, has a bright future ahead of it. Demandbase recently conducted a survey in which they found that 80% of marketers had plans to integrate AI into their ABM marketing strategy. Another survey conducted by MarketingProfs concluded that businesses that used AI in their ABM strategies had 59% higher closing rates as compared to others. They saw a 58% increase in their revenue and a 52% increase in their conversions.
Ways Salesforce's AI Einstein Aided U.S. Bank in Growing Revenue
The U.S. bank used Salesforce’s sales cloud AI, Einstein, to boost their revenue. Their lead conversion rate increased 2.35 times after implementing Einstein. They were able to create a model to predict lead conversion. They did this by using Einstein to search through customized historical lead data.
“We work to build high-quality, personalized relationships between our customers and their financial advisors or commercial bankers. There is nothing that replaces that person-to-person interaction. What AI allows us to do is augment that relationship. We can provide our teams with better data and smarter insights, which helps them establish stronger relationships.”
– Srini Nallasivan, Chief Analytics Officer, U.S. Bank
Summing It Up
AI-based marketing can enhance your ABM strategy only if qualitative data is available. Therefore, businesses will need to have clear marketing goals and turn data into an asset.
FAQs
What are the challenges in the AI-based ABM strategy?
Managing, protecting, and enriching data obtained from CRM and other customer support systems can be challenging.
How can AI help in strengthening your ABM strategy?
AI helps with personalizing content, automation, ABM optimization, and providing predictive insights for lead conversion.
What does a strong AI-based ABM strategy do for your business?
A strong AI-based ABM strategy helps with account profiling, analytics, reporting and hyper-individualized content, which leads to increased lead conversion.
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Buyer Intent Data
Article | March 6, 2023
B2B buyer intent data provides insight into a user’s purchase intent. With this information, you can identify when a prospect matching your ICP is actively considering buying your product, or similar products or solutions. This intent data is collated from different digital sources that use cookies to analyze key intent search terms to zero in on when a prospect is in an active buying journey. With this information, B2B companies like yours can make campaigns that are very specific to these prospects and are more likely to convert them.
Let us take a look at how B2B buyer intent data can assist sales teams to achieve their revenue goals.
Identify High-Intent Target Accounts
In account-based marketing, a target account list has companies and accounts that are most likely to buy your product. This target account list helps your sales and marketing teams concentrate their efforts to push high-quality leads through the sales funnel. Using B2B buyer intent data, the sales team can know which prospect is showing key signals of purchase intent. These B2B intent data key signals include downloading resources, reading blog posts, signing up for a free trial, booking a demo, viewing the pricing page, and revisiting your website after the first interaction. Your sales team can segment the target list based on this information. Every lead can be broken down into three segments: high intent, medium intent, and low intent. Now that your sales team has the high intent leads, they can target these leads and convert them without wasting time on low intent leads that may not be ready to buy.
Your Sales Cycles Are Shorter than Ever
Salespeople often struggle with closing deals faster. The reasons behind this could be anything from wrong contact details to chasing imprecise, low-qualified leads and cold prospecting. Reaching out to accounts that do not show any intent to buy is a waste of time your sales team cannot afford if it wants to meet the revenue targets. With the help of B2B buyer intent data, your sales team gets actionable data insights on the accounts that are in the market and what they are looking for so they can approach these accounts confidently. Popular intent data providers provide more than 95% accurate contact information, company structure, and buyer group details on accounts so your sales team can connect with decision-makers directly and close deals faster.
Lead Prioritization is No Longer a Struggle
Prioritized lead scoring effectively puts sales managers and salespeople in a position to see real opportunities. B2B buyer intent data allows them to see what other paths leads can take even if they do not visit your website. They can understand which leads are in the final stage of the sales cycle in real-time. Leveraging this information, sales managers can align sales representatives based on the comprehensive overview of accounts without worrying about the initial ranking of the account with the help of intent-based marketing. It helps the entire sales team take advantage of the foresight that intent data provides to create an agile method to capture demand accurately.
Improved ABM Implementation
Enriching the B2B buyer journey with hyper-personalized content to target ICP in marketing as a part of intent data marketing becomes easy for your marketing teams. They can prepare content for each stage of the buying funnel, which consists of awareness, consideration, and decision-making stages. In the awareness stage, you can help your prospects narrow down their search and lead them to your brand. In the consideration stage, your sales teams can get in touch with the decision-makers who respond the most to your marketing campaigns and are in the stage to purchase your product. In the final decision-making stage, your customer support and sales teams can provide the prospects the assistance they need through content on crucial pages via a product guidance tool or a chat service. This way, your B2B account-based marketing strategy can be implemented with added accuracy.
Final Thought
Saving costs, generating more leads, and boosting sales becomes easier with the help of buyer intent data. Rather than letting your sales team wait for prospects to stumble upon landing pages, your business can leverage B2B intent data to gain a competitive edge by finding them first and offering them solutions to their problems through your products using buyer intent data strategies.
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ABM Accounts
Article | July 23, 2021
ROI matters in B2B business. Account-based marketing has reached a significant tipping point and has become an investment that could pay off for the years to come. It is because B2B marketers are achieving substantial results with the help of ABM, and those who haven't started using it yet are planning to implement it.
And why not? This type of marketing harnesses the best marketing tactics for creating highly relevant campaigns that positively impact a B2B businesses’ bottom line. Forrester describes ABM as "a strategy by which marketing and sales cooperatively work to pursue, establish, and grow in long-term and engage in revenue-generating relationships with specific accounts." As a result, its study says that 71 percent of companies that invest in ABM report that their return on investment is fairly or significantly higher than traditional marketing programs it used before.
Now that the importance of account-based marketing has come into the picture while detailing the reasons why ABM gives a better ROI. It is decisive to know why you should get interested in ABM.
Importance of Account-Based Marketing
ABM is vital to your marketing strategy because it helps you create a more targeted and effective campaign.
In other words, it has the potential to fuel growth for years into your B2B business future and develop stronger relationships with customers who matter most in support of your business objectives.
Understand that ABM is more than social media advertising that incorporates traditional marketing methods such as direct mail and email marketing.
Similarly, marketing automation is yet another crucial part of ABM. When you automate your ABM, you get qualified leads and prospecting activities. This gives you a competitive advantage over other companies in your industry so that you can get an insight into what your competitors are up to. But, most importantly, you get a higher chance of getting the right prospect to what you offer.
In connection to this, here comes an important step to include—creating relevant content. It is because when it comes to ABM, relevance is all that matters. Your offers need to be tailored for qualified prospects, and not all noise will cut through the clutter anymore.
A recent Forrester Consulting study by LiveRamp surveyed 312 B2B marketers across six industries found that nearly all marketers said their businesses are committed to using ABM as a revenue-driving strategy in the present time. Similarly, most marketers also reported a high level of confidence by using a wide range of ABM capabilities.
Let’s deep dive into five reasons why ABM offers a better return on investment than more traditional methods.
Efficient Operations for Sales and Marketing
ABM users highlight its role in bringing sales and marketing closer to collaborate on developing and executing sales and marketing strategies. As per Bizible’s research, marketers are now 40 percent more likely to align their strategy with sales because of ABM's strategy.
By putting the teams together, sales and marketing can coordinate their outreach and ensure client engagement is conducted high-value and meaningful.
Meanwhile, marketers benefit from a streamlined approach that lets them discard a far-and-wide marketing strategy favoring carefully chosen prospects. With having a focus on selected targets rather than scattershot marketing campaigns, marketers can now focus on harmonizing and automating their digital marketing efforts, which makes them ready to work on next-generation demand-gen platforms with the help of AI and machine learning. In this way, they can orchestrate their campaigns and exponentially grow the ROI of your business. This ensures the right account prospects and results in the most significant ROI potential.
This automated marketing approach reduces the marketing team workload and saves staff precious time while preserving huge marketing dollars. Thus, more efficient spending and a higher threshold for returns will bring a significant ROI to your business.
Master in Multichannel
Amid the rush to digital marketing, which is gaining prominence in the current time, the most effective ABM strategy and programs create a balance of online and offline approaches, fully integrated across sales and marketing. In addition, account-based marketing automation saves marketers from making unnecessary costs, so they spend less on marketing while still getting results.
Forrester's survey says that the key strengths of dedicated measurement solutions by ABM are the improved ability to track engagement and optimize across online and offline channels. This is so marketers can manage the frequency of engagement as well as precisely determine attribution.
A Personalized Approach
Personalization makes ABM so appealing to clients. ABM has a way of turning attention to detail, so it immediately gets a client’s interest. To be true, the marketing and sales teams have to be competent in conducting in-depth research of potential leads. When it’s done accurately, they will target clients based on their likelihood of converting, then develop personalized offers to get good results. For this, you have to keep a separate ROI of account-based marketing at the same level.
When you have such a narrow focus, you get a chance to communicate with the specific prospect and craft a better offer for them. By providing a personalized approach, you have a high chance to see increased ROI of your business.
Manage, Monitor Data Governance and Privacy
Maintaining the privacy of prospect data is crucial for B2B organizations. In today’s time, where the lines between B2B and B2C marketing are increasingly blurred, applying strict governance policies over the use of prospect data is a must. In addition, people expect brands to respect privacy preferences and actively work to build trust.
Every dollar counts in a crisis. But almost one-third of marketing professionals are still planning to increase their investments towards ABM in the next calendar year. Moreover, decision-makers expect those investments in digital to yield substantial business benefits; the pressure to deliver is higher than ever. So, to have an actual ROI of account-based marketing is equally crucial to enjoying a significant revenue of your business.
ABM Encourages to Measure Performance
By integrating ABM strategy and account-based marketing automation, marketers can identify and reinforce the most effective strategies to measure the performance of marketing efforts that exclusively depends on ROI generation. It’s easy to measure acumens when you have highly focused accounts and well-sorted campaigns. You need to perceive what content approach gains traction and what attempts fail to succeed.
In a nutshell, when the businesses are identified, an account-based approach will offer precisely what a business needs; this will help your business gain maximum ROI.
So, plan now for an account-centric marketing future. Your team can accelerate deliver strong business ROI out of account-based marketing automation programs by considering a cross-channel B2B business solution that can help fill capability gaps and evidently prove the worth of your ABM marketing efforts.
Frequently Asked Questions
How effective is ABM for generating ROI?
When it comes to increasing the ROI of business, ABM helps drastically. It aligns sales and marketing teams to work together, which generates a positive ROI and increases revenue. In this, 60% of companies that use ABM experienced a revenue increase of at least 10% within a year, while one out of five companies experienced a 30% and more rise in revenue.
What is a good ROI percentage for ABM?
A good ROI percentage for ABM stands at 5:1, which is considered the middle of the curve. A ratio over 5:1 is considered robust for most businesses, whereas a 10:1 ratio is exceptional.
What are the top 3 reasons to choose ABM marketing?
The top three reasons are:
To reach the right prospect that matters according to business
To gain a competitive advantage
ABM shortens long sales cycles
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