Account Based Analytics
Article | August 3, 2022
B2B marketers meticulously craft content plans to include an attractive landing page, a remarkable eBook, and paid ads for maximum engagement. They write the slickest nurture emails, supporting blogs, and over-the-top articles. Nearly tens of thousands of dollars and a couple of months go into the campaign creation, but it stops abruptly.
Why?
How can this be? The data collected for the eBook was filled with insights that made them shudder. The strategy was executed to perfection but didn't make any sense!
Does this situation sound familiar to you as well? You must have faced the same! It often happens in B2B companies when sales and marketing are not fully aligned on their goals, messaging, and targeting audience. When you spread a wide net for lead generation, most of the leads may not be relevant. So, what should we do?
Here comes the protagonist of the B2B marketing story:
Account-Based Marketing (ABM)
ABM curtails the time spent on irrelevant accounts while decreasing overall money spending. In addition, as businesses, after the pandemic, are starting to realize the potential of personalized campaigns, ABM is rapidly becoming the go-to strategy for B2B tech companies. As a result, they are aiming to improve their marketing and sales alignment.
Importantly, ABM demands sales and marketing alignment. It ends those hair-tearing, soul-destroying arguments on which leads to focus on. Now both teams have to keep the hyper-targeted focus on specific accounts, which will result in time-saving, the flow of quality leads, and, thus, your ROI will be up.
But before going about creating effective ABM campaigns, let's quickly read the factors to consider while implementing ABM.
Factors to Consider to Implement ABM
Get your Sales & Marketing teams to work together
To create an effective ABM campaign, marketing and sales teams must converge and act following a shared strategy. Furthermore, to expect excellent results, teams involved in the campaign should use the same data from diverse sources. Thus, it creates a data-inspired ideal customer profile (ICP).
To Identify Accounts
For defining target accounts, consider these factors:
Revenue potential: Your target audience should fall into your product or service's price line.
Best fit accounts: Find accounts and individual buyers who are aligned with your marketing personas.
Importance of Strategy: Aim for accounts that match your company's business strategy. Identify if they are your ideal customer or not.
Product requirements: Start with the low-hanging fruit, which means identifying accounts that can make precise use of the solution you're offering.
To Establish KPIs
To know whether you are rocking with your ABM campaigns, it's crucial to decide your KPIs. You can consider the following to confirm it:
How many companies match your customer personas?
Account and role-specific conversion KPIs such as booked meetings created deals, and purchases completed.
The accounts that visit your website or engage with the content types.
Thus, you'll have to track KPIs at every stage of your ABM funnel to determine the success of your campaign.
Prepare Multi-Channel Content
Relevant and engaging content is the root of every marketing campaign. Still, marketers should personalize ABM content so that they can timely reach each target. So, it's essential to keep the process of messaging focused on the account's pain points, budget restraints, and additional demands.
It is because your campaigns are hyper-targeted, where you'll need to spread them across multiple content channels to offer numerous opportunities. Doing so will help to gain engagement, and then you can calculate budgets for clicks and channels. In addition, blend touchpoints such as paid ads, blogs, personalized email, text messaging, and multi-touch SDR strategies will help create effective ABM campaigns.
Here are effective steps to execute an effective ABM campaign.
5 Steps to Create Effective ABM Campaigns
Build your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
As Account-based marketing is more like spearfishing, you need to be conscientious about who you target. It is because this type of marketing revolves entirely around who you reach out to. So, it is imperative that you pick companies that would benefit the most from your product or services and be your top-tier customers if they get converted to purchase your service. Hence, the first and most foundational thing for an effective ABM campaign is knowing who you need to target.
Many companies enjoy massive audiences. Therefore, they can increase revenue if they successfully reach them. However, with B2B SaaS companies in marketing, when they try to please everyone, they usually end up pleasing no one. It is because they produce standard messaging that doesn't speak to any group of people. So here, it becomes vital to build your IPC before creating an ABM campaign strategy.
Invest in the Right Account-Based Marketing Tools
To create successful account-based marketing (ABM) campaign, you need to have the right tools to help your team effortlessly execute your ABM strategy and monitor its progress simultaneously. Here are some of the best tools that you can use effectively:
ZoomInfo
Using a platform like ZoomInfo helps you quickly search companies based on their industry, number of employees, and current services. Then, you can easily set ABM campaigns based on information collected through ZoomInfo and proceed further to target.
SalesIntel
SalesIntel is a sales intelligence platform. It provides your sales team with verified numbers of the target account. Using this platform, your team can evade gatekeepers and increase the chances of securing a targeting process.
Everstring
Everstring's platform enables your ABM team to develop a predictive behavior model where target accounts can be identified and be more likely to convert into sales.
Create Relevant Content
Now, you have your ICP and personas penned down; it's time to communicate. But how do you make sure that you are effectively communicating with each account? And how to properly showcase the value that your solution provides to drive for their companies?
The secret lies in applying information gathered in each stage in the customer journey: Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion.
For an effective account-based marketing campaign, create content for each of these stages—general product & company information for Awareness, technical details for Consideration, and urgency for Conversion. Every piece of content in each step should be designed to appropriately educate prospects on their buying journey and push them to the next phase.
Here are some content types for the most successful ABM campaigns:
Emails to each persona (includes initial outreach, follow-ups, responses, and more)
Landing pages that provide information and facilitate actions
Thought leadership blog and articles for the Awareness stage
Product-specific pages for consideration
Testimonials for the Conversion stage
Organizing your content in such a framework enables you to find and fill content gaps while creating a comprehensive plan to address each persona in the customer journey.
Include Messaging Channels
You can use many avenues to engross prospects in an ABM campaign. Any medium that you use to communicate directly can be effectively utilized.
So, it's essential to focus on the most popular ABM channels like LinkedIn, Email, and telecommunication. Each method has its benefits and effectiveness to get your message to the right people in the right way. Here, you will understand how to go with it these channels:
LinkedIn
LinkedIn is the most utilized channel for ABM campaigns because of its messaging capability and enrichment abilities. It consents you to send messages for free. Additionally, you promptly gain all of their professional information when you connect with a contact, including roles and email ids.
However, the best part of LinkedIn outreach is you are considered as a person, not a bot, when you reach out to contacts. In addition, you have a profile and a resume, which humanizes you. Due to these factors, LinkedIn is one of the most accurate and up-to-date B2B outreach platforms available, as everyone constantly updates their LinkedIn profile with professional milestone information.
Having being beneficial, keep in mind that there are some limitations with LinkedIn—you can send approximately a hundred connections per week. This being said, you can use this channel for the most important contacts on your list.
Email
Email's largest advantage is that it doesn't have a character limit on initial outreach messages. Thus, you can write as much as you want. However, some trade-offs go along with that freedom.
As email being cheap, automatable, easy to use, and can reach thousands of contacts at a time, it's utilized by almost every B2B marketer. But, at the same time, this results in the clogged inbox situation, creating spam filters due to high levels of outreach competition. In addition, this makes consumers suspicious of emails received from unrecognized senders.
But the good news is that you can purchase email tools to help manage your email outreach campaigns. These can automate email message sending to ensure that you're constantly optimizing your outreach to prospects. Emails are a must-have for an effective email outreach campaign, which will exponentially surge your reach, make you smarter with analytics, and create an effective ABM campaign.
Telecommunication
Phone outreach is the most effective channel to outreach. It also gives you a chance to really get to know your prospective customer and their fears and dreams so that you can:
Figure out if your product would be a good fit for the customer.
Know how to quickly and effectively communicate the value of your product to that customer.
Retarget
Once you set up accounts with the proper channels that you plan to push people to with your ABM outreach, you can create simple retargeting ads that guide them further through the customer journey. These ads will result in Calls to Action that offer case studies or white paper resources on your solution or industry to give your prospects market insights and real-world examples of how your solution can benefit companies.
On top of it, when getting your logo and message in front of prospects again, retargeting ads perform splendidly compared to traditional methods. For example, a recent MarketLand article explained that retargeting ads often have Click-Through-Rates of "0.30%-0.95%, which is 3-10x costlier than the industry average."
Resultantly, you must pay close attention to who your audience is that you're serving these ads to, as well as where and how often you're delivering them. It may seem overwhelming at first, but it'll get easier over time. A properly executed account-based campaign will provide the results you want. Doing this will allow you to reap the enormous rewards that retargeting can bestow upon your ABM campaign.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is an ABM marketing campaign?
Account-based marketing (ABM) strategy concentrates resources on a set of target accounts within a market. The campaigns designed are to engage each account, basing the marketing message on the specific attributes and needs of the account.
How do I make an ABM campaign?
Follow these steps to make an effective ABM campaign:
Create a team that is dedicated to ABM only
Clear your goals and then make a strategy
Find your technology
Identify the right accounts
Pick the right channels
Execute your campaigns
Measure everything
Choose messaging platform
Spread relevant content (messages)
Why is ABM important?
ABM supports structure marketing efforts and resources on your key accounts to drive the most revenue. Doing ABM will maximize the efficiency of your B2B marketing resources. It will also help build the communication channel with sales to have an aligned sales and marketing organization.
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Programmatic ABM
Article | June 9, 2022
Targeted advertising has become the norm on popular ABM platforms. As a result, many marketers have forgotten ABM's principles. Leadership, marketing, revenue, sales enablement, customer success, and product teams should work together to hit ABM numbers instead of completely relying on platforms and demand generation strategies.
Here are three reasons why ABM platforms and demand generation campaigns shouldn’t drive your ABM strategy:
GTM Teams Cannot Advance
Companies focusing on targeted demand gen through technology make their ABM strategy campaign-based instead of focusing on the interactions the sales and marketing teams need to have with target accounts to deliver revenue growth. They struggle with winning multi-year contracts.
Ideally, the teams should focus on filling the gaps left by competitors with different content and messaging in order to turn accounts into sales.
Buying Journey Support is Limited
ABM is about getting key accounts to generate revenue. When teams rely on technology to put out content and messaging for target accounts but don’t change their sales motions, processes, and conversations, their win rates drop. They should change their prospects’ experiences at every stage of the buying journey to deliver an optimal customer experience.
Sales Cycles Continue to be Lengthy
An ABM strategy should be used to influence both selling conversations and internal conversations that the sales teams are not privy to. Creating demand and building a pipeline through ABM platforms won’t bring revenue growth if there is no follow-through to convert accounts. Teams should engage in account-based enablement and come up with a plan to engage accounts that go dark or get stuck in the buyer journey.
Use Technology and Demand Generation in Moderation
Remember that ABM platforms and demand gen strategies can enhance your ABM efforts, but they shouldn’t be the driving force behind your ABM strategy. Marketers need to start using ABM to fix the revenue issues in their organizations instead of treating it like a targeted demand-generation function.
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Buyer Intent Data
Article | October 7, 2022
Boost your sales in 2023 with these top 10 rich buyer intent data programs. Gain insights into customer behavior and purchasing patterns to drive conversions using the top buyer intent data platforms.
Contents
1. Market Dynamics of B2B Buyer Intent Data Software
2. KPI for Good Purchase Intent Data and How Does a Buyer Intent Data Software Determine the Purchase Intent?
3. Optimizing Your B2B Buyer Intent Data Using Software to Drive Sales
4. Top 10 B2B Buyer Intent Data Tools to Accelerate Sales with B2B Account-based Marketing
5. Summing up
Driving conversions has become more precise and predictable with the use of high-quality buyer intent data. As buyer intent marketing has emerged as one of the most promising tools to get the most out of your account based marketing campaigns, companies can quickly reach out to their highest potential prospects. This way companies can better plan the sales numbers and keep up with the rising demand for their products and services in the market while maintaining consistent customer experiences.
Buyer intent data software are capable to -
Provide granular insights into customer behavior and purchasing patterns.
Identify potential customers who are actively in the market for a product or service.
Improve target marketing efforts by enabling companies to reach the right people with the right message.
Enhance sales team's ability to close deals by providing them with valuable information about their prospects.
Improve overall marketing ROI by focusing resources on high-value prospects.
Facilitate data-driven decision making by providing actionable insights.
Monitor and analyze market trends and competition.
By using buyer intent data software, companies can gain a deeper understanding of their customers, making it easier to deliver a personalized and relevant experience, and ultimately increase conversions and sales.
1. Market Dynamics of B2B Buyer Intent Data Software
“The buyer intent data software market is projected to reach USD 15 billion at 20% CAGR by 2025.”
This growth is attributed to data-driven decision making, digital transformation, and e-commerce initiatives among businesses that has increased the adoption rate for buyer intent data software among large progressive enterprises. The demand for personalized shopping experiences and refined customer engagement drives rapid market growth in the buyer intent data industry.
2. KPI for Good Purchase Intent Data and How Does a Buyer Intent Data Software Determine the Purchase Intent?
Key Point Indicators (KPIs) for Good Buyer Intent Data:
1. Relevance: The data should be directly related to a buyer's intention to purchase a product or service.
2. Timeliness: The data should be collected and analyzed in real-time to accurately reflect a buyer's current purchasing intentions.
3. Accuracy: The data should be accurate and verified to ensure its reliability and usefulness.
4. Completeness: The data should include all relevant information about a buyer, such as demographics, previous purchases, and search history.
5. Consistency: The data should be collected and analyzed using consistent methodologies to ensure comparability over time.
6. Privacy: The data should be collected and stored in a way that protects the privacy and confidentiality of the buyer.
How Does Buyer Intent Data Software Determine the True Intent of a Customer Behavior?
Buyer intent data software determines the true intent of a customer behavior through various methods such as:
Natural language processing (NLP)
Machine learning algorithms
Data analysis of customer interactions and behaviors
Integration with other data sources (e.g. search history, demographics, etc.)
Predictive analytics
The software analyzes a wide range of data points to understand the motivations behind a customer's behavior, such as their search queries, content they engage with, and the actions they take on a website. It refers to information about a potential customer's interest or intention to purchase a product or service, usually gathered through online behavior such as web searches, social media activity, email interactions, and previous purchase history.
This data can provide insights into what a customer is looking for, their buying journey, and the likelihood of them making a purchase. It can help businesses to tailor their marketing and sales efforts, better understand their target audience, and increase the chances of successful sales. This information is then used to create a comprehensive profile of the customer's intent and provide insights into how they are likely to behave in the future.
3. Optimizing Your B2B Buyer Intent Data Using Software to Drive Sales
Monitoring the impact of your account-based marketing efforts is important to drive sales. Checking what has worked in the past using the historical data helps understand the patterns in your data which in turn helps you learn and narrow your focus when it comes to purchase intent data. These trends will change as per your industry however, they all help large enterprises to bring in more sales and data intelligence.
As far as the buyer intent data goes, gathering and analyzing the data from all the sources using technology and algorithms refine your intent data and helps you find higher potential accounts and take data-driven decisions.
4. Top 10 B2B Buyer Intent Data Tools to Accelerate Sales with B2B Account-based Marketing
Depending upon your specific needs and budget as well as your B2B industry, you can select an account-based marketing software with buyer intent data tools. We have listed some of the top B2B intent data providers to accelerate your B2B account based marketing down below.
6 sense:6Sense is a leading ABM software that provides buyer intent data to help B2B marketers personalize their outreach and drive pipeline growth. The platform uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to gather insights on your target accounts' digital behavior and buying signals, enabling you to prioritize your outreach and tailor your messaging to their specific needs and interests. Additionally, 6Sense offers a range of ABM solutions, including account identification, account engagement, and account orchestration, to help B2B marketers effectively plan, execute, and measure the impact of their ABM programs.
Albacross: Albacross is an ABM software that provides buyer intent data to help B2B marketers personalize their outreach and improve their pipeline. The platform uses lead generation and account-based marketing technology to gather insights on your target accounts' digital behavior, enabling you to prioritize your outreach and tailor your messaging to their specific needs and interests. Albacross helps B2B marketers identify their ideal customer profile and generate high-quality leads by tracking website visits and providing information about the companies visiting your website. The platform also offers a range of features, such as lead scoring, account-based retargeting, and email tracking, to help you optimize your ABM strategy and improve the impact of your campaigns.
Bombora: Bombora is a B2B data solutions company that provides account-based marketing (ABM) software for buyer intent data. The platform aggregates business intent data from various sources, including content consumption, social media activity, and job postings, to help B2B marketers gain insights into the buying signals of their target accounts. Bombora's technology provides actionable data on the topics that your target accounts are researching, enabling you to personalize your outreach and tailor your messaging to their specific needs and interests. The platform works with ABM and marketing automation tools like Marketo, Pardot, and Eloqua to help you streamline your ABM processes and make your campaigns more effective.
MadisonLogic: Madison Logic is a B2B marketing technology company that provides account-based marketing (ABM) software for buyer intent data. The platform offers a range of solutions for B2B marketers, including lead generation, content syndication, and programmatic advertising. Madison Logic's technology helps B2B marketers personalize their outreach by providing insights into the buying signals of their target accounts. The platform tracks the online behavior of your target accounts, such as website visits, content downloads, and email opens, to help you identify opportunities to engage with your prospects and improve the impact of your campaigns. Also, Madison Logic's ABM platform works with marketing automation tools like Marketo, Eloqua, and Pardot to help you streamline your ABM processes and improve your campaigns.
Qualified.com: Qualified.com is an ABM software that provides buyer intent data to help B2B marketers personalize their outreach and improve their pipeline. The platform uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to gather insights on your target accounts' digital behavior and buying signals, enabling you to prioritize your outreach and tailor your messaging to their specific needs and interests. Qualified.com offers a range of ABM solutions, including account identification, account engagement, and account orchestration, to help B2B marketers effectively plan, execute, and measure the impact of their ABM programs. The platform works with marketing automation tools like Marketo, Eloqua, and Pardot to help you streamline your ABM processes and improve your campaigns.
Demandbase: Demandbase is a leading account-based marketing (ABM) software that provides buyer intent data to help B2B marketers personalize their outreach and drive pipeline growth. The platform uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to gather insights on your target accounts' digital behavior and buying signals, enabling you to prioritize your outreach and tailor your messaging to their specific needs and interests. Demandbase offers a range of ABM solutions, including account identification, account engagement, and account orchestration, to help B2B marketers effectively plan, execute, and measure the impact of their ABM programs. Also, the platform works with a number of marketing automation tools like Marketo, Eloqua, and Pardot to help you streamline your ABM processes and improve your campaigns.
Demandscience: DemandScience is a company that provides buyer intent data software. This software helps businesses understand the buying behaviors and interests of their target audience. By analyzing a large amount of data, such as search queries, social media activity, and other online interactions, the software provides insights into what potential customers are looking for, what challenges they are facing, and what solutions they are considering. This information can be used by sales and marketing teams to better target their efforts and increase conversions.
Salesintel.io: Salesintel.io is a company that provides a B2B contact and company data platform that includes a buyer intent software component. This software uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyze large amounts of data from various sources, such as social media, search engines, and business news, to identify patterns and signals that indicate a company's buying intent. This information can be used by sales and marketing teams to prioritize their efforts and engage with potential customers at the right time, in the right way. By understanding a company's buying intent, businesses can increase their chances of closing deals and growing their revenue.
Terminus Account-based Marketing: Terminus is a company that provides an account-based marketing (ABM) platform that incorporates buyer intent data. ABM is a B2B marketing strategy that focuses on targeted and personalized outreach to specific companies rather than large groups of leads. The Terminus platform integrates buyer intent data to help sales and marketing teams better understand the buying behaviors and interests of their target accounts. By analyzing data such as website activity, social media engagement, and other online interactions, the software provides insights into the challenges and solutions that target accounts are interested in, allowing teams to personalize their messaging and outreach for maximum impact. The use of buyer intent data in the Terminus ABM platform can help businesses increase their conversion rates and drive revenue growth.
Zoominfo: ZoomInfo is a company that provides a B2B contact and company data platform, including a buyer intent data software component. The platform uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyze large amounts of data from various sources, such as social media, search engines, and business news, to identify patterns and signals that indicate a company's buying intent. This information can be used by sales and marketing teams to prioritize their efforts and engage with potential customers at the right time. With a deep understanding of a company's buying intent, businesses can increase their chances of closing deals and growing their revenue. Additionally, the platform includes features for data enrichment, lead generation, and account-based marketing, allowing sales and marketing teams to have a comprehensive view of their target accounts and personalize their outreach for maximum impact.
5. Summing up
Utilizing advanced technology and machine learning algorithms to gather and analyze data about potential customers, providing valuable insights into their buying behaviors and intent helps businesses gain an edge over competition. By utilizing this information, businesses can tailor their marketing and sales strategies to better target and convert leads into paying customers, ultimately driving more sales. Scaling your buyer intent marketing efforts has become a lot easier with the machine learning and predictive analytics.
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Core ABM
Article | July 13, 2021
ABM is Agent3’s heartland. It’s what we do best. And if you’re a regular reader of our website, you’ll be in no doubt about how strongly we feel about our commitment to ‘true’ ABM, ie, an approach that treats key accounts as markets of one.
Why? Because it works: according to ITSMA, almost 85% of marketers measuring ROI say that ABM outperforms other marketing investments and research by Alterra Group backs this statistic, revealing ABM had higher ROI than other marketing activities.
So when marketers come to us asking for pilot ABM programs on, say, 8-10 accounts it’s little wonder that the results we achieve soon means they’re asking us to ramp up that ABM activity to 50-100 accounts as interest in ABM within their organization is suddenly piqued.
And therein lies the challenge for many.
To scale a ‘true’ ABM program effectively without compromising on the key fundamentals it encompasses involves the alignment of many moveable parts: technology and resourcing are fundamental considerations, but then there’s also the decision about which accounts to include and why, and establishing clear objectives for the program.
It’s not straightforward, but if this is a challenge you’re grappling with currently, be reassured by the multiple survey results available online that you’re certainly not alone.
And it’s for this reason we chose to discuss the topic at last week’s B2B Marketing Ignite USA event with a panel of esteemed marketers: Carrie Feord – Global Head of ABM Industry Clusters, Servicenow, Giovanni Di Natale, senior manager, enterprise and ABM Marketing, Pure Storage and Vera Tatro, strategic account-based marketing, AMER, Splunk. It was great to sit down with these ABM leaders to explore some of these challenges and provide some perspective on how best to successfully navigate them.
In the session, we covered:
1) How people define ABM at scale and where the line is drawn in terms of defining the difference between 1:few/1:many ‘ABM’ and good account-centric demand generation from Product, Solutions and Industry Marketing teams. We also discussed whether certain compromises need to be made as you pursue scale.
2) How to enable teams in the field to scale with ABM: the panel shared successes they have had as well as highlighting ‘banana skins’ teams need to avoid in terms of developing ABM resources/playbooks/templates/toolkits which can then be activated by a growing team of ABMers and Field Marketers. We also discussed ways to embed a ‘build once, use again’ mindset while still being true to the ideals of ABM.
3) Clarification of roles within ABM organisations across marketing when it comes to scaling and succeeding within ABM – the panel discussed what skillsets and roles they see as being important as organizations shift from being small-scale ABM pilots to broader programs.
As you can probably imagine, it was a lively session and audience feedback would suggest we hit upon some very real challenges, so it was great to hear first-hand from the panel about their own experiences, successes and learnings.
If you missed it, I highly recommend carving 30 minutes out of your day to watch, and if you have any feedback or comments, we’d love to hear!
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