Core ABM
Article | June 20, 2023
Inbound Marketing
Businesses put effort into designing their inbound marketing strategies to seek growth opportunities. In inbound marketing strategies, target audiences are attracted, engaged, and delighted by businesses by using valuable content. They also communicate with the customers regularly through inbound sales calls and keep the customers happy through timely and prompt assistance.
Businesses use an inbound marketing strategy that they have trusted for years, while some still struggle to grasp the power of inbound marketing. In both cases, if the strategy doesn’t show the expected results, it becomes a matter of immediate concern.
Why Should You Conduct an Inbound Marketing Audit?
In an interview with Media 7, Daniel Englebretson, Founder of Khronos, talked about rise of AI in ABM and the success of marketing programs.
“The best programs, and the best marketers, have built their success on the back of rapid iteration and a long history of testing, learning, and continuously improving.”
Continuous improvement in marketing can happen only when you carry out regular assessments or audits of your marketing strategy, inbound, and outbound.
A marketing audit looks at the business environment, strategy implementation, systems, organization, productivity, and function of the strategy. It is undertaken when there is a change in leadership, the business is lagging compared to competitors, has rapid growth or is terribly stuck, or when a design overhaul is planned.
Here is why you should conduct an inbound marketing audit:
Identifying Weaknesses
If an inbound marketing strategy suddenly stops working, you need to find its weaknesses and remedy them in time to get the best results. This is called “strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats” (SWOT) analysis.
An audit will help you analyze the effectiveness of the channels and the tactics you use as compared to industry standards and find out the reasons behind ineffective lead generation. An effective audit also rigorously checks the marketing tools your team uses.
You can make adjustments and improvements to the strategy based on the audit. You can look into channels like websites, paid search, email marketing, social media, and organic search to assess the performance of your strategy.
Spotting Growth Opportunities
When expanding the business, introducing a new product or service, conducting an audit can add great value to your plan. You can evaluate your business position, rate your customer satisfaction and engagement, know how well you are exploiting your existing opportunities, and if you are using the right channels and messaging to get in touch with your target audience.
If you find anything amiss, you can promptly deploy resources to course-correct your team and work towards a better ROI through the inbound marketing strategy.
Reaffirming Goals
Reaffirm your marketing and business goals by assessing important data-driven perspective metrics like keyword ranking, post engagement, customer acquisition cost (CAC), email click-through rate, and lead quality. For example, if your website is not optimized for SERP and doesn’t grab the attention of your users, it could be the reason behind ineffective lead generation. In such a case, you can re-evaluate your content strategy.
Things like text-to-image ratio on web pages, irrelevant images, and weirdly placed call-to-action (CTA) buttons can affect the user’s journey. If some pages are unresponsive on mobiles or tablets, then the audit will help you find those and implement appropriate solutions.
Knowing what is working and what isn’t helps you know what you need to do next to get optimum results from your inbound marketing strategy.
Keeping Your Team Motivated
Every team is a defined stakeholder in the company's success. Right from the sales team, customer experience, IT architects, c-suite, product developers, to your marketing team, everyone will know their strengths and weaknesses through the audit. A regularly conducted marketing audit will keep your teams motivated to perform their duties well.
Boosts ROI
Boost your ROI by ditching things that do not work. Allocating resources to your business strengths instead of your marketing weaknesses will help you get the ROI you expect. You can also focus on introducing new plans to revive the part of the strategy that is no longer working. It can be anything from redesigning a few website pages to hiring a new SEO expert.
What Does a Strong Inbound Marketing Audit Look Like?
A strong marketing audit yields results that enhance your strategy, improve your ROI, and help you step up your game so you don’t fall behind in the race with your competitors. These are the characteristics a strong inbound marketing audit will have:
Autonomy
An effective audit should be autonomously conducted by a third-party auditor so you do not skip the hard parts and the management completely cooperates in the process. The more stringent the audit, the better the understanding of potential growth opportunities, managerial snags, and resource allotments.
Perfect Structure
The audit has to be systematically structured to cover all bases, like contact channels, business environment, customer experience, design, engagement, SEO, SMM, and sales management, so no crucial elements are missed.
Conducted Regularly
Conduct the audit at regular intervals of time, at least once a year. It should be a part of your marketing calendar or your strategic marketing plan.
Business-specific
The audit should factor in the technology, expertise, and experience of your business. It should consider factors like political, legal, and socio-cultural issues that arise from the location of your business. Competitors, best practices, and conditions should also be considered.
How Eclipse Software Saw a 370% Increase in Organic Traffic in a Year
Manchester-based software company Eclipse Software hit a snag when their online presence wasn’t translating into revenue, leads, or ROI. They hired Noisy Little Monkey, a service-based digital marketing agency in the UK, to help them boost their online presence. Noisy Little Monkey ran a marketing audit for them and found issues like page speeds and content offerings, and they ran campaigns using gated content. As a result of such campaigns and website improvements, Eclipse Software saw a 370% rise in their organic traffic in a year, with a conversion rate of 3.7%.
Key Takeaways
An inbound marketing audit is crucial for identifying the strengths and weaknesses of your marketing strategy. It can tell you which areas need improvement, how to allocate your resources better, and how to increase your growth opportunities and ROI through data-driven perspectives and more to achieve better results.
FAQ
At what time interval should you conduct an inbound marketing audit?
Every business should conduct an audit once every six to twelve months.
What are the characteristics of an inbound marketing audit?
An inbound marketing audit should be autonomous, periodically carried out, systematic and business-specific.
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Account Based Analytics
Article | August 3, 2022
Account-based marketing, also known as ABM, is an effective yet efficient way to seek out high-value leads and close sales. A B2B marketer can align his sales and marketing strategies to break into the industry. However, there’s one thing that needs all the attention from the marketing team- the content.
The B2B marketers from around the world are shuffling their budgets to focus more on account-based marketing. As of now, 28% of the budgets were allocated to support account-based marketing.
When considering ABM, marketers often jump to the execution part instead of planning, identifying, and targeting the target accounts. Therefore, they fail to understand the critical needs of the clientele. The whole process of connecting with the customers with their accounts goes into vain.
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Buyer Intent Data
Article | September 11, 2023
Account-based marketing has gained momentum incredibly in the B2B industry. ABM promises a higher conversion rate than any other marketing strategy. It is the best personal approach to B2B marketing.
If you are new to ABM, here is a little introduction to the strategy. ABM is creating a funnel of your clients and filtering the ones who have higher chances of conversion. Once you have the required data, your sales and marketing team can collaborate to create marketing campaigns for these exclusive clients. This strategy can overcome many challenges faced by the marketing and sales team.
Generally, the challenges faced by your businesses can be to
Drive retention with the key accounts
Deliver relevant content to exclusive customers
Boost conversion percentage with the clients most likely to convert
Build a strategy for a personalized marketing approach
Once you know what ABM is and implement it correctly, your business can easily overcome these challenges. Thus, we have provided some insights on how to overcome hurdles and excel in your ABM campaign.
How to Excel in Your ABM Campaign
According to B2B data-driven companies, personalization is the biggest challenge to succeed in ABM. Nowadays, B2B clients demand personalization like B2C clients. Now, this is a difficult task as business clients have access to business profiles. Thus, the sales and marketing teams have to develop unique ideas and make extra efforts to personalize campaigns.
So basically, this means utilizing the available data in the best way possible. But sometimes, that takes up a massive investment in terms of time and resources.
Abhi Yadav, Founder & CTO of Zylotech, says,
“Drawing intelligence from data is like pushing a boulder uphill. In most cases, it takes a team of data engineers & scientists an enormous amount of time that comes with a hefty price tag.”
So how do you minimize efforts and still excel in your ABM campaign strategy?
Well, we have six lessons that organizations have learned while implementing ABM in their marketing strategy. Some of these lessons are answers to why a particular strategy failed.
Put Yourself in Your Customer’s Shoes
If you have limited access to personal data but have plenty of professional data, put it to the correct use. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and look at the challenges they are facing at present. You can also think about their future problems and provide solutions to avoid them. Once you think like your customers, strategies and solutions become a simple task.
For example, if your targeted client is the MD or CFO of a healthcare sector. Determine how the pandemic has impacted their revenues or how they need to manage personal and government financing in these challenging times. Also, you can provide visionary solutions about future implementations for the healthcare sector.
Flip the Funnel
The traditional funnel of awareness, interest, consideration, and purchase needs to change. The implementation may work even today, but the conversion process takes time. Thus, it’s time to flip the funnel.
Flipping the funnel is the new strategy that is uprooting the traditional funnel. This method implies putting targeted organizations on the top of the funnel and then broadening it. First, it means to target the people of the organizations, then ways to connect them, and then the broadest part is to provide them with appropriate solutions.
This funnel strategy has proved to work wonders in the ABM strategy.
Personify is the leading constituent management and engagement (CME) platform. Their challenge was to create a funnel for better insights into their target market.
Their solution was to partner with product marketing and sales for an ideal customer profile (ICP). Thus the top of the funnel was sorted. Then they researched and set up personalized digital ad campaigns and sales strategies. Thus, these creative campaigns increased their brand awareness, engagement, and conversions.
They increased their on-site visitors by 39 times by implementing this strategy.
Make the Best Use of Technology
There are a plethora of tools available to strategize and implement ABM. But organizations do not make full use of these tools, leading to wastage of time, resources, and resources.
Survey the market and know there are tools developed to optimize ABM strategy and keep track of account-based metrics. Implement these tools, and you will notice that your work gets executed faster and in an intelligent way.
P.S. Human-assisted AI technologies help organizations to build compelling campaigns and optimize revenue operations.
Streamline Your Processes
Sometimes organizations do not realize that ABM requires streamlining processes with the regular ones. ABM strategies require experimentation. You have to select the strategy that suits you and your organization in the best way. Thus, ensure that your teams do not get overwhelmed by the process.
Thus, define roles, responsibilities, and the entire execution plan when the target accounts are shortlisted.
VersionOne, a cloud-based agile application life-cycle management (ALM) software provider, simplified the process by implementing data-driven approaches. Thus, VersionOne gave both teams access to monitor the ABM strategy and the success of the targeted accounts. Thus both the teams worked in collaboration and focused on segmentation. This helped in building a proper pipeline between the sales and marketing teams.
This doubled VersionOne’s sales by streamlining the processes between the sales and marketing teams.
Focus On Retention
ABM is not only targeting exclusive clients and converting them. But you have to track and retain them. Many a time clients convert and the organization forgets to follow up. Thus, it creates a void for current and future clients, as the success rate is incredibly defined by retention.
For example, small gestures like regular surveys, emails regarding workflow, and more can play an essential role for the clients to know that you care.
Do Not Refrain from Outsourcing
Outsourcing is a great way to ease out tasks and get a filtered list of high-value clients. Also, companies that specialize in data-driven technologies can provide you with more relevant information about the clients than your in-house team.
So, avail services from experienced companies and industry leaders in providing you with the best list of relevant clients. These professional organizations know the pain-point of the clients, which helps you in planning your ABM strategy.
That’s All Folks
We hope we have provided you with solutions to the hurdles that you face while strategizing ABM. Remember, ABM strategy cannot be mastered overnight. So set goals, implement ABM, learn from the results and repeat- it is that simple!
Frequently Asked Questions
Which is the best way to succeed in ABM?
The key idea is to focus on the personalization and retention of the clients. Your ABM strategy is likely to succeed if you provide personalized solutions to your exclusive clients. Success in your ABM strategy depends on your team, your account-based marketing campaigns, and the level of experimentation you do.
Is it okay to outsource for account-based marketing?
If your organization does not want to invest the time, resources, and technology required for ABM, it is good to outsource it. These third-party organizations can help you provide you with a list of the best clients and their information.
How important is ABM strategy?
ABM is an essential strategy as it helps to shorten the sales process and increases the conversion rate. In addition, it helps an organization concentrate on the most exclusive clients and retain them, thus generating better revenue and ROI.
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ABM Accounts
Article | June 10, 2022
Are you thinking about ditching your revenue team’s creaky, ineffective sales approach and embracing ABM … but aren’t sure of what you need to know? You’ve found the right blog post.
Today, we’re providing some mind-blowing highlights from a recent webinar hosted by Kerry Cunningham, our Senior Principal of Product Marketing.
The webinar unpacked what matters most for launching an effective ABM program and offers actionable tips for sales and marketing teams. It’s well worth a watch. But if you’re short on time, here are some insights. Kerry started the webinar by sharing some hard truths about the state of selling:
Hard Truth #1: If They’re a Lead, You May Be Too Late
B2B sales used to be all about leads. Even now, many revenue teams lean heavily into the lead-based mindset. But the emergence of Account-Based Marketing brought many revelations to revenue teams, including that account opportunities are far more important than individual leads.
When you turn your (obsessive) attention from solo buyers and instead examine the full spectrum of interest or intent that an entire organization is expressing in your solution, you’re able to dramatically increase the quantity and quality of your sales intelligence.
Without this analysis, your team won’t be aware that buyers are conducting so much research on their own that by the time your team determines that they’re an early-stage “lead,” they may in fact be much farther down the buyer’s journey than expected.
Your team plays catchup after that, putting them at a competitive advantage.
Hard Truth #2: B2B Buyers Aren’t Even ‘Buyers’ Anymore
These days, buyers are no longer individuals, but rather teams of people. On average, buying teams often include 10 people, Kerry explained.
“Not everybody involved in the buying process is going to be sitting at the table at the end of that last meeting when they sign the deal,” Kerry said, “but all of those folks are doing some research.”
How big are these teams? From the webinar’s transcript:
Kerry: “For bigger deals, there may be as many as 20 or more people involved. And again, all of those folks are having interactions. In fact, Forrester Research did a study recently that showed that on average, post-pandemic, buyers are having 27 interactions each. So when you have 10 people or 20 people, and they’re having 20-something interactions each, that adds up.”
But there’s an upside to all this activity, Kerry said. As buyers conduct research, they leave behind digital “breadcrumb trails” or “footprints in the snow” across the internet.
Sellers armed with leading account engagement technologies can track, aggregate and de-anonymize these intent signals. ABM tools help them better understand the buyers’ research and buying processes.
Hard Truth #3: You Might Deal with Multiple Buying Teams
Depending on the scope of your solution’s capabilities, your sellers may contend with more than one buying team.
Here’s an example: Let’s say a company is looking for a solution to handle the needs of many departments or divisions. Each division may task its own buyer or buying team to conduct its own research to find solutions that effectively solves its own business problems.
If your solution can serve the needs of multiple divisions, your revenue team is in a good position, especially if your team can proactively identify the divisions’ unique needs. (Account engagement platforms do a great job of this.)
However, don’t assume that your solution can be everything to every division, Kerry warned.
Kerry: “If you sell multiple solutions — say you’re a big tech company and you have three, four, five solutions — you may be selling to multiple buying centers. But those buying centers may not all be great prospects for your solution. So take into account the fact that some of the buying centers inside those specific accounts may or may not be good prospects for you.”
Hard Truth #4: Buyers Think They Know Everything About Your Solution (But Actually Don’t)
Many buyers believe they can get all the information they need about your solution (and your competitors) exclusively through online research, Kerry said. This is super-convenient for buyers, but sellers can’t fully control the narrative. That leads to big problems.
Kerry: “Not all the information that they get is going to be accurate. It certainly may not be how you’d like to present yourself. So one of the things that’s really important is you have to understand how your buyers are finding out about you.”
This requires identifying other likely sources of information — such as content from competitors or unreliable analysts — and proactively engaging buyers with data and talking points that counter this misinformation.
Conclusion
Pivoting to an account-based approach isn’t always easy, especially for revenue teams that are entrenched in a older sales approaches. But making the change to ABM can revolutionize your business, Kerry said.
“Within the first year, 6sense clients who take all of these new techniques on board are able to produce substantially better results, bigger deal sizes, better win rates, and even shorter sales cycles,” Kerry said. “This is really the way B2B ought to be done.”
We’ve covered a few hard truths in this post, but come back tomorrow for Part 2 of this series. We’ll provide some helpful and actionable ABM tips then.
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