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5 Reasons Why Account-Based Marketing Gives Better ROI

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

Spotlight

Mortimer Harvey

Based in Gauteng, South Africa and Cairo, Egypt, Mortimer Harvey is one of the largest independent marketing, sales and integrated communications agencies in Africa and the Middle East, offering a full go-to-market service from strategy to sales with a strong emphasis on execution and on-the-ground delivery.

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ABM Accounts

3 Best Buyer Intent Data Tools You Should Know About

Article | June 10, 2022

Account-based marketing strategies prioritize intent data to maximize the effectiveness of their sales and marketing workflows. With the help of intent data, businesses can tailor their interactions with target accounts based on their needs and build valuable relationships with them. In an interview with Media 7, Gil Allouche, the Founder and CEO of Metadata.io, talked about the use of intent data for lead generation. “Without the right tools, companies don’t realize what campaigns have zero traction and what campaigns are attracting the most potential buyers, therefore, money is wasted on leads that won’t lead to revenue.” Intent data aids in the prioritization of a list of target accounts to be pursued for conversion. Additionally, some businesses create specialized groups and targeted lists to hyper-personalize their content offerings and influence purchase decisions. Importance of Buyer Intent Data To make the most of intent data, companies engage B2B buyer intent data tools provided by exclusive intent data providers or account-based marketing software providers. They use these tools for effective lead generation. According to Insights on Professionals, almost 40% of businesses spend more than half of their marketing budget on intent data, and 70% plan to increase spending on intent data. Intent data plays a big role in enhancing an ABM strategy. Below are some ways: It helps with target account selection With the help of intent data, you can define your ICP, understand the ICP’s intent, and gather relevant data from multiple intent data tools or platforms and collate it to amplify your target list. As a bonus, you can also divide your target list based on their intent. Finally, you can target the accounts with the help of all the insights that you gained from the B2B intent data. You can zero-in on the best messaging High-quality B2B buyer intent data includes insights like a prospect’s research history. You can uncover actionable prospect trends that you would have otherwise missed. Using this crucial information, you can optimize your messaging because it plays an important role in content marketing. Buyer intent data can enhance sales pitches by shedding light on the buyer’s interests and needs. It improves your sales outreach Prospects are now focused on doing their own research based on the suggestions their friends or acquaintances provide. With the help of intent signals that the buyer intent tools record, the movement of the prospect is revealed. Once your sales team knows the position of a prospect in the sales funnel, they can decide when to get in touch and work towards a conversion. It helps you retain customers If your customers are looking at your competitor’s products or services, intent data signals will alert you. This kind of information indicates that you need to evaluate your offerings. You can set up triggers to gather such instances and seek feedback from customers to understand their expectations. You can reach out to these customers and provide them with support and attention so you do not lose them. You can amplify your content Content personalization is a crucial component of an effective ABM strategy. Using first and third-party data, you can create impactful blog content, email marketing campaigns, and other relevant content pieces to appeal to your leads. Buyer intent data can help you target your ideal customer profile (ICP). Your marketing team can create content on topics your prospects are looking at and revamp old content to make it more effective. Why Are B2B Marketers Intent on Using Buyer Intent Data? ABM marketing is B2B marketing on steroids. For B2B marketers who want to run intent-based marketing campaigns, buyer intent data has become a go-to tool because it helps them understand their target accounts better. Their approach is focused, tailored, and relevant. Such an approach leads to more conversions, shorter sales cycles, and clearer ROI. Let us look at why B2B marketers are making it a point to use account-based marketing software with buyer intent data tools. Increases brand exposure through customized websites, landing pages, and social media pages to cater to a specific audience Aligns sales and marketing teams by bridging the communication gap between them and establishing shared business goals Facilitates hyper-targeted advertising by providing information on search intent, online behaviour, main interests through keyword searches, and propensity to make purchase Accurately predicts buyer behavior with the help of comprehensive datasets to forecast the buying patterns of prospects Enhances customer experience by providing insights into the prospects’ needs and expectations so the curated content resonates with them 3 Best Buyer Intent Data Tools You Should Know About Here is a list of the three best buyer intent data tools that can help you improve your account-based marketing strategy: Demandbase Demandbase’s ABX Cloud uses account intelligence to help its customers orchestrate sales and marketing moves. With the help of reliable and high-quality insights, you can create relevant content for every stage of the B2B buyer’s journey. ABX Cloud has an engagement platform that shows all of the information your marketing and sales teams have gathered in one place. This way, your teams can find opportunities faster, engage with them smartly, and close deals quickly, which will help your business grow. ABX Cloud also uses predictive analysis so your sales team knows when to approach a lead. It conveniently aligns the efforts of both your sales and marketing teams to create an actionable, measurable, and focused ABM approach. It uses artificial intelligence (AI) for account selection. As a result, your target list is based on intent signals, CRM data, and others, which will help you know your target accounts well enough to create effective messaging. ABX’s account-based analytics measure engagement across each account and track progress throughout pre-defined, unique account journeys. This is how Demandbase uses intent data for lead generation. Demandbase was named a leader in the first-ever 2022 Magic Quadrant for Account-based Marketing Platforms. It is the only company to get the best scores for all three use cases in the accompanying 2022 Gartner Critical Capabilities for Account-based Marketing Platforms report. Demandbase Success Story: SilkRoad Technology, Inc. is a human resource capital management software company. It used Demandbase's ABM platform, which was equipped with intent data, and saw activity and engagement from their top accounts go from 20%–30% to 80%+ in just six months. Bombora Bombora proudly markets itself as a market leader in B2B intent data. It is one of the most popular intent-based marketing facilitators. It has the most comprehensive and privacy-compliant data cooperative on the web. In short, it provides clean, risk-free intent data. It collects data consensually from its proprietary data source that comprises of 4000+ top B2B sites on the internet. It provides the most accurate data on a buyer’s digital journey so you can understand their intent. It has named its intent data solution ‘Company Surge.’ Bombora’s data can be integrated with all major platforms across the ad, sales, and martech ecosystems. This added convenience means you do not have to onboard a new system to access Bombora’s data. You can set it up in your current workflow. Privacy compliance and ethically sourced intent data make Bombora a great choice amongst the tools. It gathers data from websites that are exclusive to Bombora. It has implemented industry-standard consent mechanisms so that all the data is compliant. Company Surge uses BERT-based machine learning to understand the intent behind the words on a webpage and gives you an accurate picture of your buyer’s interest, pain points, requirements, and intent. It also helps with resolving pre-purchase signals of buyers to 2.8 million businesses by using its patented method that fuses behavioral and IP2C (Internet Protocol to Company) data. This data is then amplified by firmographic and demographic data. Bombora detects how many users from a specific organization are researching particular topics, how frequently they visit certain webpages, and how deep their research goes as compared to their usual web activity. Based on this information, it can tell when an organization wants to make a purchase. Bombora Success Story: Hornbill, a global leader of cloud-based workflow application software for IT, HR, security, and customer service teams, integrated Bombora with its HubSpot database. It got net-new in-market accounts every week, which Hornbill prioritized for sales and marketing. In six months, Hornbill found 900+ new accounts that were already in the market, which led to new active sales opportunities. ZoomInfo ZoomInfo Intent helps identify and engage buyers in real-time when they research solutions that your company offers. You can discover ready-to-buy prospects, connect with ideal buyers, and integrate the data with the tools that are already a part of your platform. It is simple to map an ideal customer profile using the buying signals collected by ZoomInfo's database. You can uncover sales-ready leads that are looking at the products or solutions that your company offers. The intent engine triggers signals that are tracked by a network of 300,000 publisher domains. One trillion new keyword-to-device pairs are added to ZoomInfo every month from more than 90% of all the devices in the United States, which is a lot of devices. ZoomInfo can help you identify and understand entire buying teams based on what they research. You can reach decision makers over the phone, through digital marketing channels, and by email to start a meaningful conversation. You can create automated workflows to close more deals by incorporating contact and intent data into your CRM, marketing, and sales software. ZoomInfo Success Story: Speakap, an internal communications app, used ZoomInfo Intent and DiscoverOrg’s combined platform. Their bounce rates fell below 1%, their engagement rate increased by 25%, and their pipeline growth increased by more than 50%. Summing It Up Buyer intent data tools can enhance the way you do business, how efficiently your sales and marketing teams function, and how effectively you can run your ABM marketing campaigns. Choose your buyer intent data tools from trusted intent data providers based on their offerings, their privacy compliance, integration capabilities, transparent metrics, and overall functionality so that you can make the most of your account-based marketing strategy. This way, you can make the most of your marketing efforts. FAQ How can you get buyer intent data? Buyer intent data is collected by buyer intent data tools, which may be a part of your ABM platform or which you can integrate with your platform. They collect the data from website visits, CRM, social media data, content consumption and off-site activity. What are the benefits of buyer intent data tools? Buyer intent data tools provide insights on a customer’s intent to purchase. They do this by mapping the customer journey, performing predictive analysis, behavioral analysis, and tracking competitor data. How can you use buyer intent data to scale your business? By using buyer intent data, you can personalize your website, prioritize your inbound leads, nurture your leads, personalize your emails and identify potential customers who haven’t engaged with you yet. So, you can convert the leads into customers by offering them just what they want.

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ABM Accounts

Intent Marketing: Removing Guesswork Out of Marketing

Article | June 2, 2021

In 2018, Demand Gen Report’s ABM Benchmark Survey found that 25% of participating B2B companies used buyer intent data and monitoring tools. 35% of them planned on using intent data within a year. Cut to 2022, and about 99% of B2B marketers are using some form of B2B intent data in their marketing campaigns to target accounts (Source: InboxInsight). In his exclusive interview with Media 7, Gil Allouche, CEO of Metadata.io, talked about how data helps convert leads. “With access to valuable data, marketers are focused on leads that are more likely to become buyers. They can also work on targeting their messaging towards these potential buyers.” Buyer intent data helps in creating a robust foundation for your marketing efforts. Let us look at how intent marketing can help you get the sales and ROI you desire. Intent Marketing: The New Normal in B2B Intent-based marketing uses consumer data that signals purchasing intent through consumption of relevant content like blogs and infographics; product comparisons; product reviews; message boards; case studies; and news. Through this data, you can find out what your prospects are looking for, which stage of the customer journey they are in, if they are researching solutions or ready to make a purchase, and what kind of steps you can take to get in front of them. One of the most important benefits of intent marketing is that it removes the guesswork out of your marketing campaigns and ensures that you are targeting the correct prospects. This targeting can be done through either intent-based branding or intent-based marketing. Intent-based branding decodes the behavior of your target audience online while intent-based marketing harnesses data on the prospect’s buying behavior so you can tailor your marketing offerings accordingly. Consequently, your sales cycle is shortened. Power-up Your Content Strategy The biggest challenge B2B marketers like you face today is to cut through all the noise and create an impact on their prospects. Consumers have a host of content options. However, they do not want to consume unnecessary information. When the content is personalized to match their needs and goals, they are more likely to engage with it. Intent data helps you plan your content as it provides you with information on the theme, buyer personas and their behavior, buyer journey maps, content formats, copy, call to action (CTA), and keyword strategy that will best suit your prospect targeting efforts. An intent-based content strategy can deliver leads while increasing conversion rates and sales. It can give you the competitive edge you need to influence your prospects at the right time. Drive Sales and ROI Intent marketing brings in more conversions on landing pages and overall higher traffic and qualified leads to your website. It uses intent information to recruit engaged prospects for sales demos and events. It helps sales teams to effectively rank their leads and accounts so that they can focus on the right leads at the right time and not miss out on any sales opportunities. Your sales teams can execute effective nurture campaigns and create sales pitches with messaging that appeals to a target account’s buying committee. This messaging addresses the account’s pain points and requirements and accelerates the buying decision. Additionally, intent marketing helps improve customer retention rates and makes it easy for teams to identify cross-sell and upsell opportunities. It takes into consideration the existing customers’ signals to find any at-risk accounts to prevent churn and increase renewal. Data-driven Marketing Personalization Intent data makes it easy to personalize your marketing efforts and provides an accurate report of prospective signals, their needs, and interests so that you can segment and categorize them. Once this segmentation is done, you can determine what kind of content needs to be created and displayed for these accounts depending on their position in the buying cycle. With this kind of personalization, your target audience gets to know that you care about them and you can connect with them on a deeper level. Increase ABM Efficiency B2B buyer intent data helps your marketing, sales, and customer success teams align their goals so that they can agree on target accounts, establish lead hand-off processes, and diversify investments to target newer, relevant accounts while maintaining the current customer list. Intent data provides marketing intelligence for creating ICP in marketing, messaging, and brand positions for B2B account-based marketing. Additionally, it provides account intelligence for target account list creation, ways to increase engagement, improve lead scoring in ABM and lead nurturing tracks, thus increasing the efficiency of your account-based marketing. Summing It Up Intent-based marketing helps B2B marketers like you to understand potential customers so you can find high-value accounts and nurture them through customized content and targeted campaigns.

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ABM Accounts

HOW UGC IS CHANGING THE GAME FOR YOUR BUSINESS’? MARKETING (EXAMPLES OF BRANDS WHO GET IT)

Article | July 19, 2022

You’re overcomplicating it. You don’t need the studio lighting, you don’t need a $2000+ camera, you don’t need a full production crew. Actually, it can actually be more effective for your content to not use any of this. Keep reading to learn how. By now, I’m sure you’ve noticed the rise of user-generated content (UGC). UGC is photos and videos created for your brand by customers, viewers, or followers. There’s so much beauty in this and throughout 2020, with everyone stuck inside their house, lots of companies had no choice but to make do with what they could. Sometimes this meant FaceTime photoshoots or videos that customers shot on regular iPhones. I am a huge fan of user-generated content and most consumers are, too. Let’s unpack the beauty of why this is such a beautiful and effective form of content on both the customer side as well as the business’ side.

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Core ABM

Optimizing ABM with Personalized Landing Pages

Article | August 8, 2022

Personalization is an essential component of an ABM strategy. Without content personalization, it is difficult to target decision makers and influence their purchase decisions. Within this content personalization, ABM landing pages play an important role in offering your target account just what they are looking for. However, without proper personalization, your ABM landing pages will not perform as expected and remain industry-specific pages that are too generic to create any impact. With the help of technology, it is easy to create hyper-personalized ABM landing pages. Here is how you can build your landing page strategy: Categorize Your Accounts Break your accounts into clusters, map patterns and choose relevant, effective content for each landing page. Use industry or firmographic details in the beginning and then switch to using account-specific pain points that each segment might face. Based on this data, you can build account personas. If you can, make a separate persona profile for each job role for certain accounts. This will make things run more smoothly. Create Value-added and Relevant Content for Each Cluster Your deep research into your target accounts will help you understand what kind of content will be valuable for each account. With your buyers in mind, create content that empowers them and facilitates their purchasing journey. Avoid creating fluffy content that raves about your brand. Instead, give the visitor something that can help them solve their business problems. Offer Personalized Offers for Each ABM Landing Page In a 2019 study conducted by Hanover Research for PROS, 69% of buyers said that personalized offers helped them purchase a product and that they were willing to pay more if a specially tailored price was quoted. Having relevant promotions and offers for a landing page that targets an account can get you the conversions you desire. Every visitor that arrives on the page should know that you have created specific content for them that can add value to their business. Delegate a Dedicated Sales Representative Your visitors may be used to chatbot automation, but they might still want to interact with a sales representative to get their queries cleared or to make special demands. Assign one sales representative to handle an account. This representative’s information should be available on the landing page so the visitors know who to get in touch with. Design a Personalized ABM Landing Page Layout Your landing page should follow a layout that aligns with the customized content. It should have a nice flow and should guide the visitor towards the call to action. It should influence the visitor through content they might find resourceful. Elements like a custom logo and the company’s banner will enrich the page with branding. The most important part of the page will be relevant content pieces like the visitors’ pain points, their industry highlights, product comparisons, and case studies. These are lucrative resources that the visitors might find useful. Using a landing page builder tool that is up-to-date, you can easily make campaigns for different campaigns. Focus on Your Call to Action Don’t hesitate to offer your visitors multiple calls to action. Offer them lead magnet downloads, specially tailored resources, tools, app downloads, upsells/cross-sells, etc. to entice them. Think about all the possible ways that could help your target accounts throughout the buying process and post-conversion. Multiple CTAs can be your way of showing how much you care about the visitors’ needs and experience. What’s the Bottomline? The pressure to bring in new customers is higher than ever before. Marketers need to get creative, revamp their acquisition strategy, and start talking to their target prospects directly through relevant content. Only then can ABM deliver the results you are looking for.

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ABM Accounts

Hard Truths and Helpful Tips About Account-Based Marketing (Part 1)

Article | June 10, 2022

Account-based marketing strategies prioritize intent data to maximize the effectiveness of their sales and marketing workflows. With the help of intent data, businesses can tailor their interactions with target accounts based on their needs and build valuable relationships with them. In an interview with Media 7, Gil Allouche, the Founder and CEO of Metadata.io, talked about the use of intent data for lead generation. “Without the right tools, companies don’t realize what campaigns have zero traction and what campaigns are attracting the most potential buyers, therefore, money is wasted on leads that won’t lead to revenue.” Intent data aids in the prioritization of a list of target accounts to be pursued for conversion. Additionally, some businesses create specialized groups and targeted lists to hyper-personalize their content offerings and influence purchase decisions. Importance of Buyer Intent Data To make the most of intent data, companies engage B2B buyer intent data tools provided by exclusive intent data providers or account-based marketing software providers. They use these tools for effective lead generation. According to Insights on Professionals, almost 40% of businesses spend more than half of their marketing budget on intent data, and 70% plan to increase spending on intent data. Intent data plays a big role in enhancing an ABM strategy. Below are some ways: It helps with target account selection With the help of intent data, you can define your ICP, understand the ICP’s intent, and gather relevant data from multiple intent data tools or platforms and collate it to amplify your target list. As a bonus, you can also divide your target list based on their intent. Finally, you can target the accounts with the help of all the insights that you gained from the B2B intent data. You can zero-in on the best messaging High-quality B2B buyer intent data includes insights like a prospect’s research history. You can uncover actionable prospect trends that you would have otherwise missed. Using this crucial information, you can optimize your messaging because it plays an important role in content marketing. Buyer intent data can enhance sales pitches by shedding light on the buyer’s interests and needs. It improves your sales outreach Prospects are now focused on doing their own research based on the suggestions their friends or acquaintances provide. With the help of intent signals that the buyer intent tools record, the movement of the prospect is revealed. Once your sales team knows the position of a prospect in the sales funnel, they can decide when to get in touch and work towards a conversion. It helps you retain customers If your customers are looking at your competitor’s products or services, intent data signals will alert you. This kind of information indicates that you need to evaluate your offerings. You can set up triggers to gather such instances and seek feedback from customers to understand their expectations. You can reach out to these customers and provide them with support and attention so you do not lose them. You can amplify your content Content personalization is a crucial component of an effective ABM strategy. Using first and third-party data, you can create impactful blog content, email marketing campaigns, and other relevant content pieces to appeal to your leads. Buyer intent data can help you target your ideal customer profile (ICP). Your marketing team can create content on topics your prospects are looking at and revamp old content to make it more effective. Why Are B2B Marketers Intent on Using Buyer Intent Data? ABM marketing is B2B marketing on steroids. For B2B marketers who want to run intent-based marketing campaigns, buyer intent data has become a go-to tool because it helps them understand their target accounts better. Their approach is focused, tailored, and relevant. Such an approach leads to more conversions, shorter sales cycles, and clearer ROI. Let us look at why B2B marketers are making it a point to use account-based marketing software with buyer intent data tools. Increases brand exposure through customized websites, landing pages, and social media pages to cater to a specific audience Aligns sales and marketing teams by bridging the communication gap between them and establishing shared business goals Facilitates hyper-targeted advertising by providing information on search intent, online behaviour, main interests through keyword searches, and propensity to make purchase Accurately predicts buyer behavior with the help of comprehensive datasets to forecast the buying patterns of prospects Enhances customer experience by providing insights into the prospects’ needs and expectations so the curated content resonates with them 3 Best Buyer Intent Data Tools You Should Know About Here is a list of the three best buyer intent data tools that can help you improve your account-based marketing strategy: Demandbase Demandbase’s ABX Cloud uses account intelligence to help its customers orchestrate sales and marketing moves. With the help of reliable and high-quality insights, you can create relevant content for every stage of the B2B buyer’s journey. ABX Cloud has an engagement platform that shows all of the information your marketing and sales teams have gathered in one place. This way, your teams can find opportunities faster, engage with them smartly, and close deals quickly, which will help your business grow. ABX Cloud also uses predictive analysis so your sales team knows when to approach a lead. It conveniently aligns the efforts of both your sales and marketing teams to create an actionable, measurable, and focused ABM approach. It uses artificial intelligence (AI) for account selection. As a result, your target list is based on intent signals, CRM data, and others, which will help you know your target accounts well enough to create effective messaging. ABX’s account-based analytics measure engagement across each account and track progress throughout pre-defined, unique account journeys. This is how Demandbase uses intent data for lead generation. Demandbase was named a leader in the first-ever 2022 Magic Quadrant for Account-based Marketing Platforms. It is the only company to get the best scores for all three use cases in the accompanying 2022 Gartner Critical Capabilities for Account-based Marketing Platforms report. Demandbase Success Story: SilkRoad Technology, Inc. is a human resource capital management software company. It used Demandbase's ABM platform, which was equipped with intent data, and saw activity and engagement from their top accounts go from 20%–30% to 80%+ in just six months. Bombora Bombora proudly markets itself as a market leader in B2B intent data. It is one of the most popular intent-based marketing facilitators. It has the most comprehensive and privacy-compliant data cooperative on the web. In short, it provides clean, risk-free intent data. It collects data consensually from its proprietary data source that comprises of 4000+ top B2B sites on the internet. It provides the most accurate data on a buyer’s digital journey so you can understand their intent. It has named its intent data solution ‘Company Surge.’ Bombora’s data can be integrated with all major platforms across the ad, sales, and martech ecosystems. This added convenience means you do not have to onboard a new system to access Bombora’s data. You can set it up in your current workflow. Privacy compliance and ethically sourced intent data make Bombora a great choice amongst the tools. It gathers data from websites that are exclusive to Bombora. It has implemented industry-standard consent mechanisms so that all the data is compliant. Company Surge uses BERT-based machine learning to understand the intent behind the words on a webpage and gives you an accurate picture of your buyer’s interest, pain points, requirements, and intent. It also helps with resolving pre-purchase signals of buyers to 2.8 million businesses by using its patented method that fuses behavioral and IP2C (Internet Protocol to Company) data. This data is then amplified by firmographic and demographic data. Bombora detects how many users from a specific organization are researching particular topics, how frequently they visit certain webpages, and how deep their research goes as compared to their usual web activity. Based on this information, it can tell when an organization wants to make a purchase. Bombora Success Story: Hornbill, a global leader of cloud-based workflow application software for IT, HR, security, and customer service teams, integrated Bombora with its HubSpot database. It got net-new in-market accounts every week, which Hornbill prioritized for sales and marketing. In six months, Hornbill found 900+ new accounts that were already in the market, which led to new active sales opportunities. ZoomInfo ZoomInfo Intent helps identify and engage buyers in real-time when they research solutions that your company offers. You can discover ready-to-buy prospects, connect with ideal buyers, and integrate the data with the tools that are already a part of your platform. It is simple to map an ideal customer profile using the buying signals collected by ZoomInfo's database. You can uncover sales-ready leads that are looking at the products or solutions that your company offers. The intent engine triggers signals that are tracked by a network of 300,000 publisher domains. One trillion new keyword-to-device pairs are added to ZoomInfo every month from more than 90% of all the devices in the United States, which is a lot of devices. ZoomInfo can help you identify and understand entire buying teams based on what they research. You can reach decision makers over the phone, through digital marketing channels, and by email to start a meaningful conversation. You can create automated workflows to close more deals by incorporating contact and intent data into your CRM, marketing, and sales software. ZoomInfo Success Story: Speakap, an internal communications app, used ZoomInfo Intent and DiscoverOrg’s combined platform. Their bounce rates fell below 1%, their engagement rate increased by 25%, and their pipeline growth increased by more than 50%. Summing It Up Buyer intent data tools can enhance the way you do business, how efficiently your sales and marketing teams function, and how effectively you can run your ABM marketing campaigns. Choose your buyer intent data tools from trusted intent data providers based on their offerings, their privacy compliance, integration capabilities, transparent metrics, and overall functionality so that you can make the most of your account-based marketing strategy. This way, you can make the most of your marketing efforts. FAQ How can you get buyer intent data? Buyer intent data is collected by buyer intent data tools, which may be a part of your ABM platform or which you can integrate with your platform. They collect the data from website visits, CRM, social media data, content consumption and off-site activity. What are the benefits of buyer intent data tools? Buyer intent data tools provide insights on a customer’s intent to purchase. They do this by mapping the customer journey, performing predictive analysis, behavioral analysis, and tracking competitor data. How can you use buyer intent data to scale your business? By using buyer intent data, you can personalize your website, prioritize your inbound leads, nurture your leads, personalize your emails and identify potential customers who haven’t engaged with you yet. So, you can convert the leads into customers by offering them just what they want.

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ABM Accounts

ABM and AI: Friends or Foe?

Article | June 2, 2021

In 2018, Demand Gen Report’s ABM Benchmark Survey found that 25% of participating B2B companies used buyer intent data and monitoring tools. 35% of them planned on using intent data within a year. Cut to 2022, and about 99% of B2B marketers are using some form of B2B intent data in their marketing campaigns to target accounts (Source: InboxInsight). In his exclusive interview with Media 7, Gil Allouche, CEO of Metadata.io, talked about how data helps convert leads. “With access to valuable data, marketers are focused on leads that are more likely to become buyers. They can also work on targeting their messaging towards these potential buyers.” Buyer intent data helps in creating a robust foundation for your marketing efforts. Let us look at how intent marketing can help you get the sales and ROI you desire. Intent Marketing: The New Normal in B2B Intent-based marketing uses consumer data that signals purchasing intent through consumption of relevant content like blogs and infographics; product comparisons; product reviews; message boards; case studies; and news. Through this data, you can find out what your prospects are looking for, which stage of the customer journey they are in, if they are researching solutions or ready to make a purchase, and what kind of steps you can take to get in front of them. One of the most important benefits of intent marketing is that it removes the guesswork out of your marketing campaigns and ensures that you are targeting the correct prospects. This targeting can be done through either intent-based branding or intent-based marketing. Intent-based branding decodes the behavior of your target audience online while intent-based marketing harnesses data on the prospect’s buying behavior so you can tailor your marketing offerings accordingly. Consequently, your sales cycle is shortened. Power-up Your Content Strategy The biggest challenge B2B marketers like you face today is to cut through all the noise and create an impact on their prospects. Consumers have a host of content options. However, they do not want to consume unnecessary information. When the content is personalized to match their needs and goals, they are more likely to engage with it. Intent data helps you plan your content as it provides you with information on the theme, buyer personas and their behavior, buyer journey maps, content formats, copy, call to action (CTA), and keyword strategy that will best suit your prospect targeting efforts. An intent-based content strategy can deliver leads while increasing conversion rates and sales. It can give you the competitive edge you need to influence your prospects at the right time. Drive Sales and ROI Intent marketing brings in more conversions on landing pages and overall higher traffic and qualified leads to your website. It uses intent information to recruit engaged prospects for sales demos and events. It helps sales teams to effectively rank their leads and accounts so that they can focus on the right leads at the right time and not miss out on any sales opportunities. Your sales teams can execute effective nurture campaigns and create sales pitches with messaging that appeals to a target account’s buying committee. This messaging addresses the account’s pain points and requirements and accelerates the buying decision. Additionally, intent marketing helps improve customer retention rates and makes it easy for teams to identify cross-sell and upsell opportunities. It takes into consideration the existing customers’ signals to find any at-risk accounts to prevent churn and increase renewal. Data-driven Marketing Personalization Intent data makes it easy to personalize your marketing efforts and provides an accurate report of prospective signals, their needs, and interests so that you can segment and categorize them. Once this segmentation is done, you can determine what kind of content needs to be created and displayed for these accounts depending on their position in the buying cycle. With this kind of personalization, your target audience gets to know that you care about them and you can connect with them on a deeper level. Increase ABM Efficiency B2B buyer intent data helps your marketing, sales, and customer success teams align their goals so that they can agree on target accounts, establish lead hand-off processes, and diversify investments to target newer, relevant accounts while maintaining the current customer list. Intent data provides marketing intelligence for creating ICP in marketing, messaging, and brand positions for B2B account-based marketing. Additionally, it provides account intelligence for target account list creation, ways to increase engagement, improve lead scoring in ABM and lead nurturing tracks, thus increasing the efficiency of your account-based marketing. Summing It Up Intent-based marketing helps B2B marketers like you to understand potential customers so you can find high-value accounts and nurture them through customized content and targeted campaigns.

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ABM Accounts

Optimize Your ABM Strategy with Content Marketing

Article | July 19, 2022

You’re overcomplicating it. You don’t need the studio lighting, you don’t need a $2000+ camera, you don’t need a full production crew. Actually, it can actually be more effective for your content to not use any of this. Keep reading to learn how. By now, I’m sure you’ve noticed the rise of user-generated content (UGC). UGC is photos and videos created for your brand by customers, viewers, or followers. There’s so much beauty in this and throughout 2020, with everyone stuck inside their house, lots of companies had no choice but to make do with what they could. Sometimes this meant FaceTime photoshoots or videos that customers shot on regular iPhones. I am a huge fan of user-generated content and most consumers are, too. Let’s unpack the beauty of why this is such a beautiful and effective form of content on both the customer side as well as the business’ side.

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Core ABM

Optimizing ABM with Personalized Landing Pages

Article | August 8, 2022

Personalization is an essential component of an ABM strategy. Without content personalization, it is difficult to target decision makers and influence their purchase decisions. Within this content personalization, ABM landing pages play an important role in offering your target account just what they are looking for. However, without proper personalization, your ABM landing pages will not perform as expected and remain industry-specific pages that are too generic to create any impact. With the help of technology, it is easy to create hyper-personalized ABM landing pages. Here is how you can build your landing page strategy: Categorize Your Accounts Break your accounts into clusters, map patterns and choose relevant, effective content for each landing page. Use industry or firmographic details in the beginning and then switch to using account-specific pain points that each segment might face. Based on this data, you can build account personas. If you can, make a separate persona profile for each job role for certain accounts. This will make things run more smoothly. Create Value-added and Relevant Content for Each Cluster Your deep research into your target accounts will help you understand what kind of content will be valuable for each account. With your buyers in mind, create content that empowers them and facilitates their purchasing journey. Avoid creating fluffy content that raves about your brand. Instead, give the visitor something that can help them solve their business problems. Offer Personalized Offers for Each ABM Landing Page In a 2019 study conducted by Hanover Research for PROS, 69% of buyers said that personalized offers helped them purchase a product and that they were willing to pay more if a specially tailored price was quoted. Having relevant promotions and offers for a landing page that targets an account can get you the conversions you desire. Every visitor that arrives on the page should know that you have created specific content for them that can add value to their business. Delegate a Dedicated Sales Representative Your visitors may be used to chatbot automation, but they might still want to interact with a sales representative to get their queries cleared or to make special demands. Assign one sales representative to handle an account. This representative’s information should be available on the landing page so the visitors know who to get in touch with. Design a Personalized ABM Landing Page Layout Your landing page should follow a layout that aligns with the customized content. It should have a nice flow and should guide the visitor towards the call to action. It should influence the visitor through content they might find resourceful. Elements like a custom logo and the company’s banner will enrich the page with branding. The most important part of the page will be relevant content pieces like the visitors’ pain points, their industry highlights, product comparisons, and case studies. These are lucrative resources that the visitors might find useful. Using a landing page builder tool that is up-to-date, you can easily make campaigns for different campaigns. Focus on Your Call to Action Don’t hesitate to offer your visitors multiple calls to action. Offer them lead magnet downloads, specially tailored resources, tools, app downloads, upsells/cross-sells, etc. to entice them. Think about all the possible ways that could help your target accounts throughout the buying process and post-conversion. Multiple CTAs can be your way of showing how much you care about the visitors’ needs and experience. What’s the Bottomline? The pressure to bring in new customers is higher than ever before. Marketers need to get creative, revamp their acquisition strategy, and start talking to their target prospects directly through relevant content. Only then can ABM deliver the results you are looking for.

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Spotlight

Mortimer Harvey

Based in Gauteng, South Africa and Cairo, Egypt, Mortimer Harvey is one of the largest independent marketing, sales and integrated communications agencies in Africa and the Middle East, offering a full go-to-market service from strategy to sales with a strong emphasis on execution and on-the-ground delivery.

Related News

Core ABM

Marketers Given Marginal Grades for ABM-Driven Revenue Growth

GlobeNewswire | January 25, 2024

Seeding and harvesting the sales pipeline — the process of acquiring, capturing, qualifying and converting business opportunities — are essential to the growth and profitability of B2B marketers across every industry and geographic sector. Marketing is largely responsible for driving this business process, yet nearly two-thirds of lead gen and engagement strategies are underperforming. A new Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council report, produced in collaboration with WM America, entitled “Fire Up Your Revenue Generation Engine,” covers critical aspects of lead generation and engagement. This includes models and metrics for tracking and measuring performance, best practice demand-gen execution, ways to score effectiveness, and more. The latest CMO Council research finds scores of marketers falling behind in lead scoring, account-based marketing, accelerated pipeline, and intention-based marketing. Key findings from a Q4 survey of over 170 B2B marketing, sales, revenue, growth, demand gen and campaign execution leaders include: 63% say marketing must own and optimize a company’s revenue-generation engine 64% say their lead gen and engagement strategy underperforms 78% of highly evolved marketers are satisfied with their accelerated pipeline, compared to only 15% of lesser evolved marketers “In today’s competitive data-driven environment, marketers should no longer be satisfied with paltry returns on their sizable lead-gen and ABM investments,” the report notes. “It’s time to turn the tables on inefficient, ineffective, and outdated practices for anticipating, adapting, and responding to customer needs and opportunities.” “Marketers must climb the evolutionary ladder and leave behind outmoded and dated practices,” notes CMO Council executive director, Donovan Neale-May. “Using AI-derived, intention-based buyer data and advanced sales intelligence are among the ways growth marketers bring more precision, predictability, and performance to B2B account marketing investments.” The CMO Council’s research revealed the top five skill sets contributing to improved ABM-driven business outcomes: Better segmentation and precision targeting of buyers and influencers On-demand customer business intelligence and personal buyer insights Tighter integration of demand gen, channel, direct sales, and support teams Greater utilization of tools and data sources for richer prospect profiling Proactive and timely pre-sales follow up and cultivation strategies The CMO Council has uncovered widening gaps in performance between highly evolved marketers and lesser evolved marketers. Gaps are occurring in four core capabilities: lead scoring, account-based marketing, accelerated pipeline, and intention-based marketing. This report tiers factors that make up a model for better identification, engagement and conversion. The model coincides with the CMO Council and WM America’s thought leadership initiative to advance lead revenue science practices through a certified Lead Evaluation and Assurance Process, or LEAP model. “Marketers will need to take a few LEAPs of faith in the coming months, because sticking to the status quo is just not practical or possible anymore. As data becomes more critical than ever before, CMOs need to extend their visions for innovation and forward-thinking strategies,” according to Lee Salem, WM America’s Vice President of Sales. Methodology The report is based on a survey of over 170 heads of B2B marketing, sales, revenue, growth, demand gen and campaign execution in Q4 2023. It also included content from in-depth interviews with executives from Netline, Autodesk, T-Mobile, NTT, ABM Consortium, TechTarget, IBM, B2B Marketing, Reachdesk, Momentum ITSMA, and Xometry. About the CMO Council The Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council is dedicated to high-level knowledge exchange, thought leadership and personal relationship building among senior corporate marketing leaders and brand decision-makers across a wide-range of global industries. The CMO Council’s 16,000+ members control more than $1 trillion in aggregated annual marketing expenditures and run complex, distributed marketing and sales operations worldwide. In total, the CMO Council and its strategic interest communities include over 65,000 global marketing and sales executives in over 110 countries covering multiple industries, segments and markets. Regional chapters and advisory boards are active in the Americas, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa. The Council’s strategic interest groups include the Customer Experience Board, Digital Marketing Performance Center, Brand Inspiration Center, Marketing Supply Chain Institute, GeoBranding Center, and the Coalition to Leverage and Optimize Sales Effectiveness (CLOSE). To learn more, visit https://www.cmocouncil.org. About WM America WM America is a leading B2B marketing company specializing in targeted in-market demand generation. The intent database at WMA tracks the intent behavior of over 75 million business professionals globally, 24X7. The database is segmented into 3,300 categories. WMA keeps around-the-clock track of buying signals from each category in this database. Based on this extremely strong foundation of data points, the company delivers precisely targeted prospects for focused marketing. Accurate keyword search enables deriving of active content consumption and opt-in content downloads. WMA's deep search ensures accurate and targeted information delivery that helps craft successful, cutting-edge marketing strategies. For more information, visit www.wmamerica.com

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Buyer Intent Data

ON24 Recognizes 2023’s Leaders in Digital Engagement

Business Wire | January 24, 2024

A recent Forrester survey found that more than 60% of B2B buyers base their final purchase decision solely on the digital content and experiences companies provide. That’s why thousands of B2B companies choose ON24 (NYSE: ONTF), a leading digital engagement platform for B2B sales and marketing that helps enterprises generate data-driven insights and deliver cost-effective revenue growth. Today, ON24, announced the industry-leading digital experiences of 2023 that drove ROI for their organizations. “At ON24, our goal is to propel business success through digital engagement, with our customers at the core. We take pride in helping our customers drive deeper engagement with their target audiences and extract meaningful insights that result in revenue growth,” said Callan Young, CMO, ON24. “It is our honor to recognize the leading organizations that exemplify excellence in leveraging our platform to create digital experiences that not only meet but surpass their audience’s expectations.” The following organizations were recognized for delivering outstanding digital experiences on the ON24 platform in 2023: Danfossdrove product growth and customer retention by leveraging distributor, reseller and customer data to optimize its webinar and digital engagement program. FloQastinfluenced 82% of event pipeline in Q3 and created 120+ new active opportunities by routing high-quality leads from in-experience demo requests directly to sales. Global X ETFsincreased qualified, high-value leads in Australia by 22%, by integrating ON24 engagement data with their CRM and using the platform’s personalization capabilities. Informaticascaled a live event into a hybrid experience across three key regions simultaneously, driving registration and delivering a consistent customer experience on a global scale. Infopro Digitalincreased conversion rates and registrations by automating processes on the ON24 platform and making real-time adjustments based on customer feedback. Kasperskydrove product adoption and business growth by creating new relationships with prospects and fostering existing relationships with customers. KnowBe4generated over $300k in pipeline through an ON24-powered digital experience. The National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators (NASFAA)achieved 100% participant satisfaction for its unique and impactful digital experience powered by the ON24 platform. PowerSchoolachieved record-breaking registration rates, 75 CTA clicks, over 400 poll responses and 300+ content downloads during an educational experience with ON24. S&P Globaldoubled marketing qualified leads and boosted engagement by designing an ON24 digital experience personalized to different customer segments. Tata Consultancy Servicesdrove revenue growth with record-high registrations for their webinar on ON24, resulting in 70% attendee participation across 30 countries. Texthelpsourced leads during a webinar series and converted at least 70% of them into marketing-qualified leads within 30 days. TOPdeskincreased revenue and improved its customer engagement by 7% YoY and extended the shelf life of its content with an on-demand hub. TravelMediaGroupclosed three deals from a single digital experience by creating a seamless and engaging customer experience on ON24. UCBachieved a 50%+ attendee conversion rate by enhancing the HCP’s experience and integrating ON24 engagement data with its business intelligence system. UnitedHealthcareachieved an 80% cost savings, increased attendee score and engagement with a new digital engagement strategy and an always-on content hub. Wood PLCsourced leads, increased audience engagement and automated continuing professional education credits on ON24, across different time zones. ZoomInfosurpassed webinar benchmarks by generating a record number of marketing-qualified leads and 190 scheduled demos, resulting in 10 closed-won deals. To learn more about 2023’s leaders in digital engagement, watch the on-demand webinar here. About ON24 ON24 is on a mission to re-imagine how companies engage, understand and build relationships with their audience in a digital world. Through our leading sales and marketing platform for digital engagement integrated with generative AI, businesses use our portfolio of webinar, virtual event and content experiences to drive engagement and generate first-party data, delivering ​revenue growth across the enterprise – from demand generation to customer success to partner enablement. ON24 powers digital engagement for industry-leading customers worldwide, including 3 of the 5 largest global technology companies, 3 of the 6 largest US banks, 3 of the 5 largest global healthcare companies, and 3 of the 5 largest global industrial manufacturers, enabling organizations to reach millions of professionals a month for billions of engagement minutes per year with all the first-party data being captured, generated and integrated from one place. ON24 is headquartered in San Francisco with global offices in North America, EMEA, and APAC. For more information, visit www.ON24.com.

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ABM Accounts

Bloomreach and Sonepar to Power Continued Search Relevance for Customers

Business Wire | January 12, 2024

Bloomreach, the platform fueling limitless e-commerce experiences, today announced Bloomreach Discovery will continue to power product discovery for Sonepar, the global world leader in B-to-B distribution of electrical products, solutions, and related services, as the companies renew their existing partnership. With Bloomreach Discovery’s AI-driven search and merchandising capabilities, Sonepar enables customers around the world to find what they want to buy — when, where, and how they want. “Sonepar is pleased to partner with Bloomreach as we continue to pursue our next stage of digital transformation,” said Fabrice del Aguila, SVP Digital Factory, Sonepar. “We look forward to leveraging Bloomreach’s expertise in product discovery as we become the first global B2B electrical distributor in the world to offer the best omnichannel experience to all our customers.” Sonepar leverages Bloomreach Discovery to drive personalized experiences across its omnichannel platform. Using rich data to refine search results, Bloomreach Discovery helps customers easily discover the products they want. It also accounts for a range of attributes and quantitative search queries, creating a search experience that is not only personalized, but personalized to the unique needs of B-to-B buyers. “We’re thrilled to continue our partnership with Sonepar,” said Jordan Roper, General Manager and Head of Product, Bloomreach Discovery. “The B-to-B space has so much to gain from digital transformation, and Sonepar is a leader in making that transformation a reality. We’re proud to join them on this journey and look forward to continuing to support their omnichannel experience with the fast ROI and relevance of Bloomreach Discovery.” Learn more about how Bloomreach Discovery and Sonepar are working together to drive success. About Bloomreach Bloomreach personalizes the e-commerce experience. Its data engine unifies real-time customer and product data so businesses understand what customers really want. By connecting that understanding to every channel, the e-commerce experience becomes limitless — reflecting a changing customer as they shop. Amplified by the speed and scale of Loomi, Bloomreach's AI for e-commerce, this creates endless new paths to purchase, greater profitability, and fast business growth. Bloomreach products include: Engagement, a marketing automation platform; Discovery, an e-commerce search solution; Content, a headless CMS; and Clarity, AI-powered conversational shopping. The company has multiple AI patents and serves 850+ global brands including: Albertsons, Bosch, Puma, and Marks & Spencer. About Sonepar Sonepar is an independent family-owned company with global market leadership in B-to-B distribution of electrical products, solutions and related services. Through a dense network of brands spanning 40 countries, the Group has an ambitious transformation agenda to become the first global B-to-B electrical distributor to provide a fully digitalized and synchronized omnichannel experience to all customers. Drawing on the skill and passion of its 44,000 associates, Sonepar had sales of €32.4 billion in 2022. www.sonepar.com

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Core ABM

Marketers Given Marginal Grades for ABM-Driven Revenue Growth

GlobeNewswire | January 25, 2024

Seeding and harvesting the sales pipeline — the process of acquiring, capturing, qualifying and converting business opportunities — are essential to the growth and profitability of B2B marketers across every industry and geographic sector. Marketing is largely responsible for driving this business process, yet nearly two-thirds of lead gen and engagement strategies are underperforming. A new Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council report, produced in collaboration with WM America, entitled “Fire Up Your Revenue Generation Engine,” covers critical aspects of lead generation and engagement. This includes models and metrics for tracking and measuring performance, best practice demand-gen execution, ways to score effectiveness, and more. The latest CMO Council research finds scores of marketers falling behind in lead scoring, account-based marketing, accelerated pipeline, and intention-based marketing. Key findings from a Q4 survey of over 170 B2B marketing, sales, revenue, growth, demand gen and campaign execution leaders include: 63% say marketing must own and optimize a company’s revenue-generation engine 64% say their lead gen and engagement strategy underperforms 78% of highly evolved marketers are satisfied with their accelerated pipeline, compared to only 15% of lesser evolved marketers “In today’s competitive data-driven environment, marketers should no longer be satisfied with paltry returns on their sizable lead-gen and ABM investments,” the report notes. “It’s time to turn the tables on inefficient, ineffective, and outdated practices for anticipating, adapting, and responding to customer needs and opportunities.” “Marketers must climb the evolutionary ladder and leave behind outmoded and dated practices,” notes CMO Council executive director, Donovan Neale-May. “Using AI-derived, intention-based buyer data and advanced sales intelligence are among the ways growth marketers bring more precision, predictability, and performance to B2B account marketing investments.” The CMO Council’s research revealed the top five skill sets contributing to improved ABM-driven business outcomes: Better segmentation and precision targeting of buyers and influencers On-demand customer business intelligence and personal buyer insights Tighter integration of demand gen, channel, direct sales, and support teams Greater utilization of tools and data sources for richer prospect profiling Proactive and timely pre-sales follow up and cultivation strategies The CMO Council has uncovered widening gaps in performance between highly evolved marketers and lesser evolved marketers. Gaps are occurring in four core capabilities: lead scoring, account-based marketing, accelerated pipeline, and intention-based marketing. This report tiers factors that make up a model for better identification, engagement and conversion. The model coincides with the CMO Council and WM America’s thought leadership initiative to advance lead revenue science practices through a certified Lead Evaluation and Assurance Process, or LEAP model. “Marketers will need to take a few LEAPs of faith in the coming months, because sticking to the status quo is just not practical or possible anymore. As data becomes more critical than ever before, CMOs need to extend their visions for innovation and forward-thinking strategies,” according to Lee Salem, WM America’s Vice President of Sales. Methodology The report is based on a survey of over 170 heads of B2B marketing, sales, revenue, growth, demand gen and campaign execution in Q4 2023. It also included content from in-depth interviews with executives from Netline, Autodesk, T-Mobile, NTT, ABM Consortium, TechTarget, IBM, B2B Marketing, Reachdesk, Momentum ITSMA, and Xometry. About the CMO Council The Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council is dedicated to high-level knowledge exchange, thought leadership and personal relationship building among senior corporate marketing leaders and brand decision-makers across a wide-range of global industries. The CMO Council’s 16,000+ members control more than $1 trillion in aggregated annual marketing expenditures and run complex, distributed marketing and sales operations worldwide. In total, the CMO Council and its strategic interest communities include over 65,000 global marketing and sales executives in over 110 countries covering multiple industries, segments and markets. Regional chapters and advisory boards are active in the Americas, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa. The Council’s strategic interest groups include the Customer Experience Board, Digital Marketing Performance Center, Brand Inspiration Center, Marketing Supply Chain Institute, GeoBranding Center, and the Coalition to Leverage and Optimize Sales Effectiveness (CLOSE). To learn more, visit https://www.cmocouncil.org. About WM America WM America is a leading B2B marketing company specializing in targeted in-market demand generation. The intent database at WMA tracks the intent behavior of over 75 million business professionals globally, 24X7. The database is segmented into 3,300 categories. WMA keeps around-the-clock track of buying signals from each category in this database. Based on this extremely strong foundation of data points, the company delivers precisely targeted prospects for focused marketing. Accurate keyword search enables deriving of active content consumption and opt-in content downloads. WMA's deep search ensures accurate and targeted information delivery that helps craft successful, cutting-edge marketing strategies. For more information, visit www.wmamerica.com

Read More

Buyer Intent Data

ON24 Recognizes 2023’s Leaders in Digital Engagement

Business Wire | January 24, 2024

A recent Forrester survey found that more than 60% of B2B buyers base their final purchase decision solely on the digital content and experiences companies provide. That’s why thousands of B2B companies choose ON24 (NYSE: ONTF), a leading digital engagement platform for B2B sales and marketing that helps enterprises generate data-driven insights and deliver cost-effective revenue growth. Today, ON24, announced the industry-leading digital experiences of 2023 that drove ROI for their organizations. “At ON24, our goal is to propel business success through digital engagement, with our customers at the core. We take pride in helping our customers drive deeper engagement with their target audiences and extract meaningful insights that result in revenue growth,” said Callan Young, CMO, ON24. “It is our honor to recognize the leading organizations that exemplify excellence in leveraging our platform to create digital experiences that not only meet but surpass their audience’s expectations.” The following organizations were recognized for delivering outstanding digital experiences on the ON24 platform in 2023: Danfossdrove product growth and customer retention by leveraging distributor, reseller and customer data to optimize its webinar and digital engagement program. FloQastinfluenced 82% of event pipeline in Q3 and created 120+ new active opportunities by routing high-quality leads from in-experience demo requests directly to sales. Global X ETFsincreased qualified, high-value leads in Australia by 22%, by integrating ON24 engagement data with their CRM and using the platform’s personalization capabilities. Informaticascaled a live event into a hybrid experience across three key regions simultaneously, driving registration and delivering a consistent customer experience on a global scale. Infopro Digitalincreased conversion rates and registrations by automating processes on the ON24 platform and making real-time adjustments based on customer feedback. Kasperskydrove product adoption and business growth by creating new relationships with prospects and fostering existing relationships with customers. KnowBe4generated over $300k in pipeline through an ON24-powered digital experience. The National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators (NASFAA)achieved 100% participant satisfaction for its unique and impactful digital experience powered by the ON24 platform. PowerSchoolachieved record-breaking registration rates, 75 CTA clicks, over 400 poll responses and 300+ content downloads during an educational experience with ON24. S&P Globaldoubled marketing qualified leads and boosted engagement by designing an ON24 digital experience personalized to different customer segments. Tata Consultancy Servicesdrove revenue growth with record-high registrations for their webinar on ON24, resulting in 70% attendee participation across 30 countries. Texthelpsourced leads during a webinar series and converted at least 70% of them into marketing-qualified leads within 30 days. TOPdeskincreased revenue and improved its customer engagement by 7% YoY and extended the shelf life of its content with an on-demand hub. TravelMediaGroupclosed three deals from a single digital experience by creating a seamless and engaging customer experience on ON24. UCBachieved a 50%+ attendee conversion rate by enhancing the HCP’s experience and integrating ON24 engagement data with its business intelligence system. UnitedHealthcareachieved an 80% cost savings, increased attendee score and engagement with a new digital engagement strategy and an always-on content hub. Wood PLCsourced leads, increased audience engagement and automated continuing professional education credits on ON24, across different time zones. ZoomInfosurpassed webinar benchmarks by generating a record number of marketing-qualified leads and 190 scheduled demos, resulting in 10 closed-won deals. To learn more about 2023’s leaders in digital engagement, watch the on-demand webinar here. About ON24 ON24 is on a mission to re-imagine how companies engage, understand and build relationships with their audience in a digital world. Through our leading sales and marketing platform for digital engagement integrated with generative AI, businesses use our portfolio of webinar, virtual event and content experiences to drive engagement and generate first-party data, delivering ​revenue growth across the enterprise – from demand generation to customer success to partner enablement. ON24 powers digital engagement for industry-leading customers worldwide, including 3 of the 5 largest global technology companies, 3 of the 6 largest US banks, 3 of the 5 largest global healthcare companies, and 3 of the 5 largest global industrial manufacturers, enabling organizations to reach millions of professionals a month for billions of engagement minutes per year with all the first-party data being captured, generated and integrated from one place. ON24 is headquartered in San Francisco with global offices in North America, EMEA, and APAC. For more information, visit www.ON24.com.

Read More

ABM Accounts

Bloomreach and Sonepar to Power Continued Search Relevance for Customers

Business Wire | January 12, 2024

Bloomreach, the platform fueling limitless e-commerce experiences, today announced Bloomreach Discovery will continue to power product discovery for Sonepar, the global world leader in B-to-B distribution of electrical products, solutions, and related services, as the companies renew their existing partnership. With Bloomreach Discovery’s AI-driven search and merchandising capabilities, Sonepar enables customers around the world to find what they want to buy — when, where, and how they want. “Sonepar is pleased to partner with Bloomreach as we continue to pursue our next stage of digital transformation,” said Fabrice del Aguila, SVP Digital Factory, Sonepar. “We look forward to leveraging Bloomreach’s expertise in product discovery as we become the first global B2B electrical distributor in the world to offer the best omnichannel experience to all our customers.” Sonepar leverages Bloomreach Discovery to drive personalized experiences across its omnichannel platform. Using rich data to refine search results, Bloomreach Discovery helps customers easily discover the products they want. It also accounts for a range of attributes and quantitative search queries, creating a search experience that is not only personalized, but personalized to the unique needs of B-to-B buyers. “We’re thrilled to continue our partnership with Sonepar,” said Jordan Roper, General Manager and Head of Product, Bloomreach Discovery. “The B-to-B space has so much to gain from digital transformation, and Sonepar is a leader in making that transformation a reality. We’re proud to join them on this journey and look forward to continuing to support their omnichannel experience with the fast ROI and relevance of Bloomreach Discovery.” Learn more about how Bloomreach Discovery and Sonepar are working together to drive success. About Bloomreach Bloomreach personalizes the e-commerce experience. Its data engine unifies real-time customer and product data so businesses understand what customers really want. By connecting that understanding to every channel, the e-commerce experience becomes limitless — reflecting a changing customer as they shop. Amplified by the speed and scale of Loomi, Bloomreach's AI for e-commerce, this creates endless new paths to purchase, greater profitability, and fast business growth. Bloomreach products include: Engagement, a marketing automation platform; Discovery, an e-commerce search solution; Content, a headless CMS; and Clarity, AI-powered conversational shopping. The company has multiple AI patents and serves 850+ global brands including: Albertsons, Bosch, Puma, and Marks & Spencer. About Sonepar Sonepar is an independent family-owned company with global market leadership in B-to-B distribution of electrical products, solutions and related services. Through a dense network of brands spanning 40 countries, the Group has an ambitious transformation agenda to become the first global B-to-B electrical distributor to provide a fully digitalized and synchronized omnichannel experience to all customers. Drawing on the skill and passion of its 44,000 associates, Sonepar had sales of €32.4 billion in 2022. www.sonepar.com

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