Core ABM
Article | August 5, 2022
As COVID-19 became increasingly widespread in the U.S. last month, Senior Account-Based Marketing Manager Kristin Kolb had to quickly shift her department’s planned Q1 pilot. Originally, it had involved direct mail that the Matillion team was going to send to target audiences in their office. Kolb said they decided on an alternative digital approach, upping the ante with personalization efforts. “You don’t need the latest and greatest technology or idea to create a hypothesis and run a small test to see if it works,” Kolb said. Billtrust’s Director of Revenue Marketing Deirdre Mills also champions personalization. While she believes that ABM is more of an art than a science, she ties relevant prospect information into program data, keeping company initiatives in mind.
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Core ABM
Article | June 20, 2023
Introduction: Lead Nurturing
The leads in your database are there because your brand or service offers them a solution to a particular problem they are facing. Developing and reinforcing relationships with leads is critical at every stage of the sales funnel. How can you do this? By fostering leads.
To effectively nurture leads, you must first understand their wants, then address their problems, build brand recognition, and follow up until they become buyers.
Campaigns for Lead Nurturing
Lead nurturing campaigns accelerate the process of deepening your connection with a prospect. A lead nurturing campaign has elements like:
Lead Magnets
Offering relevant content, solutions to pain points, and other enticing content like whitepapers, ebooks, and newsletters in exchange for the visitor’s contact information, mostly email, can get you a lead.
Website Landing Pages
Lead magnets are hosted on landing pages to attract visitors and collect their contact information.
Personalized Content
Personalized content engages and holds the visitor's attention. Marketing software generates this tailored material.
Data Segmentation
Every marketing software allows you to segment your lead data based on differentiating metrics like geography, age, and behavior. So, you can understand and analyze your users better.
Content Development
Using case studies and whitepapers to build credibility throughout the buyer's journey shows your capacity to aid customers you can relate to. This type of content nurturing can turn a visitor into a buyer.
Emailers
Engaging and educating your leads via periodic emails can help maintain a consistent communication chain. Your marketing software will send emails through the lead nurturing workflow you choose.
Marketing Automation
Marketing automation, much like robotic process automation, leverages software to automate marketing tasks. Remember those survey and feedback emails you receive now and then? Marketing automation software sends them.
This software helps marketers align processes, technology, and people to achieve marketing goals. It automates and measures marketing tasks like email campaigns or content schedules into workflows to increase operational efficiency and revenue growth. It sends out marketing emails, grows your database, and collects data that helps with your marketing strategy.
It is used in lead generation, lead nurturing, scoring, relationship marketing, cross-selling and upselling, retention, segmentation, ROI measurement, and ABM.
Choosing a Good Marketing Automation Workflow Software
There are thousands of marketing automation software on the market. Consider the following factors to find the best fit:
Features
The more features your software has, the more you can do to entice a prospect to buy your product or service. Features like email campaigns, real-time alerts, lead management, and personalized messaging are great to have.
Budget-Friendly
The software should be affordable so you can easily implement your strategy without creating a hole in your pocket.
Customizable
Ensure the software can be customized to your needs. This may impact usability. However, customization is an important attribute if you want to track any proprietary data.
Channel Integration
It should easily integrate with other channels so it obtains relevant data to send out selected workflows.
Easy to Use
The software should be easy to use and not require any special training so that the execution process is seamless across teams in an agile environment.
Among the most widely used tools, some notable marketing automation tools are HubSpot, Pardot, Demandbase, and Marketo.
7 Result-oriented Marketing Automation Workflows Revealed
After you choose a marketing automation software that meets the above criteria, it gives you access to various marketing automation workflows that help you nurture your leads. By using specific triggers, you can create different workflows to nurture different kinds of leads. A marketing automation trigger is a unique input that activates a certain workflow when specific conditions are met.
Check out these seven effective marketing automation lead nurturing workflows that you should definitely create:
Hot Lead Workflow
This workflow is crucial for your sales team to bag a lead. Set the criteria for a hot lead workflow by considering the lead’s engagement with your content. This workflow falls into the bottom-of-the-funnel (BoFU) phase, where the lead is very close to being converted to a customer.
Lost Opportunity Workflow
If you have lost a lead due to budget restrictions, competitors, or misalignment of your product, design a workflow that gets the lead back into the sales funnel. You can send such leads special offers or discounts, information on your product’s USP, and a regular update on your products to recapture them.
Re-engagement Notification Workflow
Losing hope when engaged leads go cold on you is not an option. Remind them of your brand to wake them from their slumber. Create a trigger when the lead has spent a specific amount of time not interacting with your content. Your workflow will send this lead an email to get it back into the sales funnel. Special offers, new products or services updates, and company news can get the lead’s attention.
New Subscriber Nurture Workflow
This kind of workflow is crucial for gaining new subscribers and moving your existing subscribers through the funnel. It gets new subscribers to engage with your content. Your new subscribers should receive your newest content first, not just regular subscriber emails.
Topic-based Workflow
If you have a variety of content, create a workflow of the most relevant content that might entice your leads. Once a customer visits your website or downloads an ebook or whitepaper about a certain topic, emails with related content on that topic are sent to them regularly.
Event Workflow
Today, remotely conducted events like webinars or seminars have gained immense popularity. Engaging your target audience with the help of events is not a new trick. A pre-event and post-event workflow can help you remain in touch with event registrants. Important information like event details, agendas, and reminders can be sent to them to keep them in the loop.
Lead Nurturing Workflow
A lead nurturing workflow converts leads into marketing qualified leads (MQLs), leads that have responded to your marketing efforts. If a lead comes and fills up a form on your website, requests a demo, or subscribes to a product launch event, then sending them related content can get them closer to being a marketing-qualified lead.
How Utah-based Start-up Chatbooks Grew Their Customer Engagement by 100%
Using Blueshift’s AI-based cross-channel marketing platform, Chatbooks increased their customer engagement by 100%. They achieved higher conversion rates by engaging with customers 1:1 through personalized content and event-triggered campaigns.
“Blueshift enabled us to up-level our campaigns and provide 1-to-1 personalization using dynamic user information. We can now focus on high-intent customers that want to hear my message rather than email blasting and annoying my whole customer base. The results? A +100% increase in email engagement.”
- Stephen Cruz,Lifecycle Marketing Manager, Chatbooks
Wrapping It Up
Leveraging marketing automation in ABM by creating marketing workflows can do wonders for your ABM marketing strategy. 57% of marketers stated that lead nurturing is the most advantageous feature out of all the features of marketing automation software.
FAQ
Why are marketing automation workflows important for lead nurturing?
Marketing automation workflows make sure that your leads get appropriate engagement based on their type so that they get converted into marketing qualified leads.
How to choose a marketing automation software?
Consider factors like UI, ease of use, features, easy integration, and customization before choosing a marketing automation software.
What factors are important for the success of a marketing automation workflow?
Designing workflows for each type of lead is crucial. Other factors include creating appropriate triggers, mapping customer behavior, and maintaining CRM and technology stack.
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Core ABM
Article | August 8, 2022
Account-based marketing has been around since the early 2000s, but only recently have businesses started to implement it widely in their marketing strategies. By focusing on ideal customer profiles (ICP), businesses shortlist key accounts and target them with customized content campaigns to convert them from marketing-qualified leads to buyers. An account-based marketing strategy uses sales and marketing orchestration to transform the way key accounts are approached.
ABM marketing contributed to a 70 percent increase in the number of opportunities created. (Source: Gartner)
Nash Haywood, Global Director-Digital Conversion & Paid Media, Genesys, talked about ABM’s impact on how sales and marketing teams function.
“We wanted to have more control of the entire (marketing and sales) process, and an ABM approach allowed us to do that.”
B2B account-based marketing drives valuable engagement and leads to higher ROI as compared to other marketing strategies.
Benefits of Account-based Marketing
Account-based marketing benefits range from increased marketing efficiency and higher ROI to higher engagement and retention. Let us take a look at them in detail:
ABM Enhances Your Marketing Efforts
ABM marketing is data-driven. Account-based management becomes easy with crucial data like role, industry, and buyer journey stage. Based on this data, appealing personalized content campaigns are created to target key accounts. These campaigns optimize your marketing efforts. They also give insights on which channels and messages appeal to your targeted key accounts so that you can refine your account-based marketing strategy. According to Emarketer, 46 percent of marketers are benefitting from real-time optimization to accelerate their pipeline revenue.
Sales and Marketing Teams Synchronize
An account-based marketing campaign aligns the goals of the sales and marketing teams. It also brings other important stakeholders, like the IT team and the executive team, together to create an effective strategy for achieving goals.
Sales and marketing orchestration can lead to a massive increase in marketing revenue (up to 208 percent as stated by MarketingProfs).
ABM Improves Marketing Efficiency
Account-based marketing automation technology helps streamline marketing processes and scale ABM implementation across different marketing campaigns. Activities like ad targeting, modelling, upselling media buying, and executing lead nurturing campaigns can be done efficiently using account-based marketing software. You can cease marketing to accounts that do not respond to your campaigns and focus on the ones that do. This can help you save your money and allocate your time and resources better.
You Retain Customers Better
ABM uses hyper-personalized content to pursue higher customer engagement and retention. By showing key accounts the content they want to see, brand awareness and trust are increased. An account-based marketing campaign, especially one created to engage target accounts, contributes to an enhanced customer experience that makes B2B marketing significantly impactful. It translates to long-term associations and bigger deal sizes.
You Close Deals Faster
You can move key accounts through the sales funnel swiftly and close deals faster by identifying decision-makers of your key accounts. B2B account-based marketing saves time and resources, which can be used to generate new leads. That is why this is one of the most important account-based marketing benefits.
ABM Improves Deal Sizes
Account-based B2B marketing targets only key accounts with buyer intent. It is about quality more than quantity, and this makes a whole lot of difference in how you approach accounts and strike deals. A shorter sales cycle through account-based marketing means landing a big account that signs away more money than many small accounts would.
You Get a Higher ROI
According to a report by ITSMA, 87 percent of marketers stated that ABM delivered a higher ROI as compared to other marketing strategies. Since account-based marketing is a data-driven strategy that uses personalized content to target accounts, this approach is easier and more cost-effective as it saves time and resources because of its precision.
ABM Performance Is Measurable
Account-based reporting is a key account-based marketing benefit. Using metrics like engagement, brand awareness, target account reach, retention, ROI, and influence helps you understand how well your ABM strategy is working. You can optimize your strategy to make it perform better.
ABM Makes You the Expert
While implementing account-based B2B marketing, you gain deep insights into the conversion behaviours, preferences, challenges, and needs of your target accounts. This knowledge makes you an expert in offering solutions that your target accounts crave. It also helps with new service or product design ideas that can cater to customers in a more personal way.
Creating an ABM Strategy That Works
To create an account-based marketing program that works, follow these steps:
1. Define the key accounts you want to target.
2. Identify the decision-makers for these accounts.
3. Create hyper-personalized content for them.
4. Zero in on appropriate channels to get maximum impact.
5. Create impressive content campaigns to increase engagement.
6. Measure the success of your campaigns using the correct metrics.
Account-based Marketing Services to Scale Your ABM Strategy
To adopt ABM at scale for exponential business growth, you need to evaluate your target accounts and then expand your ABM strategy from a small scale to a full-blown ABM. Your expansion can also be across new segments or businesses based on industry or company size. Artificial intelligence and marketing automation make it easier to implement ABM at scale.
Account-based marketing services offered by companies that specialize in ABM and marketing like Marketo, Terminus, Demandbase, Optimizely, and Oracle make it easier to implement an ABM strategy at scale. These companies offer services to attract and convert prospects, scale up your marketing, and grow customer relationships through up-selling and cross-selling.
Account-based marketing automation, email marketing, lead management, account-based management, social marketing, digital advertising, mobile marketing, multi-channel marketing, account-based reporting using ABM metrics and optimization along with account-based marketing software can help you scale your ABM strategy without breaking a sweat.
How SAP Created New Pipeline Opportunities Using ABM
SAP launched an account-based marketing program to target the company's top 10% of key accounts. These accounts were responsible for a third of their revenue in America. Through their ABM program, they offered specialized marketing plans for these accounts. SAP gained new pipeline opportunities and moved $57 million down the pipeline because of the benefits of account-based marketing.
Summing It Up
The time to implement ABM in your marketing strategy is now. Adopting it into your marketing strategy can help scale your business and achieve your business goals.
FAQ
What are the benefits of account-based marketing?
Some noteworthy account-based marketing benefits are: higher ROI, sales and marketing alignment, customer retention, and a shorter sales cycle.
Which metrics measure ABM performance?
Metrics like engagement, ROI, customer churn rate, content engagement, conversion rate, and average deal size are used to measure the performance of an ABM program.
Why is ABM more efficient compared to other marketing strategies?
ABM targets accounts with buyer intent, helps with better resource allocation and is cost effective. These factors contribute to a higher ROI and bring great results.
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Account Based Data
Article | April 29, 2022
In an interview with Media 7, Assaf Eisenstein, Co-Founder & President of Lusha, talked about the importance of buyer intent data for offering great customer service.
“The most important things B2B brands can do to establish themselves are to know their customers and match their strengths to the buyers they can best serve.”
B2B buyer intent data providers help companies resonate with their target audience in a sea of competitors. They can create timely campaigns to convert a prospect into a customer. According to Statista, about 70% of technology vendors rely on buyer intent data vendors for better prospecting. This puts B2B buyer intent data providers in the spotlight more than ever to come up with innovative solutions that can streamline marketing strategies and get more leads to the sales department.
Buyer Intent Data: What It Delivers
Businesses are sourcing intent data from B2B buyer intent data providers to maintain a competitive edge and grow. Here are a few of the key areas that buyer intent data can positively influence:
Your Prospecting
With the help of buyer intent data, your sales team can engage with a prospect with added accuracy at the right time (ZMoT) because it has the contextual information on the prospect. The team can prioritize good-fit leads and accounts.
Your Messaging
Identify any messaging gaps and create ideal, personalized, and precise messaging for your lead nurturing campaigns to increase engagement. Buyer intent data reveals your prospects’ interests and pain points, which you can capitalize on through your messaging.
Your Ad Targeting
Your ad campaigns can be more accurate thanks to B2B buyer intent data. They can target both known and unknown prospects who engage with your key topics with precise messaging.
Your ABM Campaign
In ABM marketing, B2B buyer intent data can tell you which of your target accounts are actively in the market looking for your product or services. It can also help you prioritize engagement and resource allocation and tailor messaging to address specific pain points that your target accounts are struggling with.
Your Revenue
The combined result of using buyer intent data tools is a spike in your revenue through lead nurturing campaign personalization, timely engagement, enhanced sales prioritization, and customer experience.
How is B2B Buyer Intent Data Driving Revenue?
For some time now, B2B buyer intent data has been a buzzword for B2B marketers because it is streamlining the conversion of marketing qualified leads (MQLs) to sales qualified leads (SQLs) through multi-channel targeted advertising. It helps them focus more on engaging prospects with buyer interest than on their size to predict the actions of prospects. It considerably shortens sales cycles and assists in demand orchestration when integrated with the sales funnel.
Let us look at how B2B buyer intent data can benefit businesses:
Understanding the Customers’ Pain Points and Demands
Using TechTarget’s Priority Engine, a prospect-level intent data product, Zoom was able to solve three crucial challenges in their ABM marketing strategy: sorting their prospects, personalized messaging to engage these prospects, and the perfect time to get in touch with them. With the help of Priority Engine, Zoom’s sales representatives improved their efficiency and generated more qualified leads that were closer to conversion.
Optimizing Sales and Marketing Approaches
It is crucial to implement ABM marketing to build an enterprise pipeline. Tracking deal progression, account engagement, and sales and marketing alignment are important for any company to succeed. Dialpad, a cloud communications platform, leveraged Demandbase to optimize its sales and marketing approaches. The platform provided Dialpad with insights whenever a lead moved from marketing qualified to sales qualified, so its sales reps never missed an opportunity. In less than six months, Dialpad sales reps got 80% more MQLs for conversions, a 20% increase in target account penetration, and 15% more deals in the pipeline in a shorter timeline.
Creating a Targeted Content Strategy and Web Personalization
Companies can no longer rely only on search engine optimization while designing their content strategy. They need to focus on offering a solid customer experience through web personalization and targeted content that addresses the pain points of the customers through effective solutions. Dodge Data, a data analytics company, used buyer intent data from Triblio to create a content strategy, personalize their website, and execute targeted display advertising campaigns. Dodge Data re-engaged 30-40 visitors per day, approaching them right when they were warm, leading to more conversions than when they relied only on demand generation campaigns.
Customer Retention Through Insights
Post-sales experience is just as important for business growth as gaining new customers. With the help of Demandbase One, Equilar, a software and technology company, was able to retain their customers and serve them on time with the help of insights on product activity and engagement. The company received regular alerts on the accounts it was catering to so it could reach out to them and keep the existing clients happy.
Efficient Lead Scoring & Pipeline Growth
Pipeline growth is a criterion for success and synchronization between the sales and marketing departments, an important attribute of ABM. Buyer intent data helps business development representatives qualify prospects that show buyer intent so they can book meetings. Leoforce, an AI-based recruiting company, used buyer intent data from Slintel and saw a pipeline growth of 10%-20%.
Enhancing ABM Strategy
B2B buyer intent data enhances the ABM strategy by identifying key accounts ready to go in-market. If B2B companies do not have this data today, they will be far behind in the competition and won’t be able to monetize their ABM strategy. A great example of how a company can enhance its ABM strategy using B2B buyer intent data would be Arizent, a book and periodical publishing company that became a part of B2B buyer intent data provider Bombora’s Data Co-op. The company monetized its ABM strategy using the buyer intent data from Bombora by capitalizing on the accounts that showed purchase intent.
Wrapping It Up
By leveraging B2B buyer intent data, businesses can drive revenue through enhanced ABM strategy implementation, outstanding customer experience, and insights that can help them enhance their sales strategy and pipeline.
FAQ
How can buyer intent data providers help you increase your sales?
Intent-based marketing can help you streamline your prospecting pipeline, focus your marketing effort on accounts that show buyer intent, and understand the pain points of customers. This can help you increase your sales pipeline.
How can you enhance your ad campaigns using buyer intent data?
Intent data can help you make your ad campaigns more granular because it allows you to capitalize on leads that show buyer intent signals. As a result, the ads will target buyers who are close to making a purchase decision.
Who are some of the popular B2B buyer intent data providers?
Some of the popular B2B buyer intent data providers are Bombora, Slintel, Demandbase, and ZoomInfo.
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