Core ABM
Article | June 20, 2023
ABM is Agent3’s heartland. It’s what we do best. And if you’re a regular reader of our website, you’ll be in no doubt about how strongly we feel about our commitment to ‘true’ ABM, ie, an approach that treats key accounts as markets of one.
Why? Because it works: according to ITSMA, almost 85% of marketers measuring ROI say that ABM outperforms other marketing investments and research by Alterra Group backs this statistic, revealing ABM had higher ROI than other marketing activities.
So when marketers come to us asking for pilot ABM programs on, say, 8-10 accounts it’s little wonder that the results we achieve soon means they’re asking us to ramp up that ABM activity to 50-100 accounts as interest in ABM within their organization is suddenly piqued.
And therein lies the challenge for many.
To scale a ‘true’ ABM program effectively without compromising on the key fundamentals it encompasses involves the alignment of many moveable parts: technology and resourcing are fundamental considerations, but then there’s also the decision about which accounts to include and why, and establishing clear objectives for the program.
It’s not straightforward, but if this is a challenge you’re grappling with currently, be reassured by the multiple survey results available online that you’re certainly not alone.
And it’s for this reason we chose to discuss the topic at last week’s B2B Marketing Ignite USA event with a panel of esteemed marketers: Carrie Feord – Global Head of ABM Industry Clusters, Servicenow, Giovanni Di Natale, senior manager, enterprise and ABM Marketing, Pure Storage and Vera Tatro, strategic account-based marketing, AMER, Splunk. It was great to sit down with these ABM leaders to explore some of these challenges and provide some perspective on how best to successfully navigate them.
In the session, we covered:
1) How people define ABM at scale and where the line is drawn in terms of defining the difference between 1:few/1:many ‘ABM’ and good account-centric demand generation from Product, Solutions and Industry Marketing teams. We also discussed whether certain compromises need to be made as you pursue scale.
2) How to enable teams in the field to scale with ABM: the panel shared successes they have had as well as highlighting ‘banana skins’ teams need to avoid in terms of developing ABM resources/playbooks/templates/toolkits which can then be activated by a growing team of ABMers and Field Marketers. We also discussed ways to embed a ‘build once, use again’ mindset while still being true to the ideals of ABM.
3) Clarification of roles within ABM organisations across marketing when it comes to scaling and succeeding within ABM – the panel discussed what skillsets and roles they see as being important as organizations shift from being small-scale ABM pilots to broader programs.
As you can probably imagine, it was a lively session and audience feedback would suggest we hit upon some very real challenges, so it was great to hear first-hand from the panel about their own experiences, successes and learnings.
If you missed it, I highly recommend carving 30 minutes out of your day to watch, and if you have any feedback or comments, we’d love to hear!
Read More
Account Based Data
Article | June 29, 2023
Boost your sales in 2023 with these top 10 rich buyer intent data programs. Gain insights into customer behavior and purchasing patterns to drive conversions using the top buyer intent data platforms.
Contents
1. Market Dynamics of B2B Buyer Intent Data Software
2. KPI for Good Purchase Intent Data and How Does a Buyer Intent Data Software Determine the Purchase Intent?
3. Optimizing Your B2B Buyer Intent Data Using Software to Drive Sales
4. Top 10 B2B Buyer Intent Data Tools to Accelerate Sales with B2B Account-based Marketing
5. Summing up
Driving conversions has become more precise and predictable with the use of high-quality buyer intent data. As buyer intent marketing has emerged as one of the most promising tools to get the most out of your account based marketing campaigns, companies can quickly reach out to their highest potential prospects. This way companies can better plan the sales numbers and keep up with the rising demand for their products and services in the market while maintaining consistent customer experiences.
Buyer intent data software are capable to -
Provide granular insights into customer behavior and purchasing patterns.
Identify potential customers who are actively in the market for a product or service.
Improve target marketing efforts by enabling companies to reach the right people with the right message.
Enhance sales team's ability to close deals by providing them with valuable information about their prospects.
Improve overall marketing ROI by focusing resources on high-value prospects.
Facilitate data-driven decision making by providing actionable insights.
Monitor and analyze market trends and competition.
By using buyer intent data software, companies can gain a deeper understanding of their customers, making it easier to deliver a personalized and relevant experience, and ultimately increase conversions and sales.
1. Market Dynamics of B2B Buyer Intent Data Software
“The buyer intent data software market is projected to reach USD 15 billion at 20% CAGR by 2025.”
This growth is attributed to data-driven decision making, digital transformation, and e-commerce initiatives among businesses that has increased the adoption rate for buyer intent data software among large progressive enterprises. The demand for personalized shopping experiences and refined customer engagement drives rapid market growth in the buyer intent data industry.
2. KPI for Good Purchase Intent Data and How Does a Buyer Intent Data Software Determine the Purchase Intent?
Key Point Indicators (KPIs) for Good Buyer Intent Data:
1. Relevance: The data should be directly related to a buyer's intention to purchase a product or service.
2. Timeliness: The data should be collected and analyzed in real-time to accurately reflect a buyer's current purchasing intentions.
3. Accuracy: The data should be accurate and verified to ensure its reliability and usefulness.
4. Completeness: The data should include all relevant information about a buyer, such as demographics, previous purchases, and search history.
5. Consistency: The data should be collected and analyzed using consistent methodologies to ensure comparability over time.
6. Privacy: The data should be collected and stored in a way that protects the privacy and confidentiality of the buyer.
How Does Buyer Intent Data Software Determine the True Intent of a Customer Behavior?
Buyer intent data software determines the true intent of a customer behavior through various methods such as:
Natural language processing (NLP)
Machine learning algorithms
Data analysis of customer interactions and behaviors
Integration with other data sources (e.g. search history, demographics, etc.)
Predictive analytics
The software analyzes a wide range of data points to understand the motivations behind a customer's behavior, such as their search queries, content they engage with, and the actions they take on a website. It refers to information about a potential customer's interest or intention to purchase a product or service, usually gathered through online behavior such as web searches, social media activity, email interactions, and previous purchase history.
This data can provide insights into what a customer is looking for, their buying journey, and the likelihood of them making a purchase. It can help businesses to tailor their marketing and sales efforts, better understand their target audience, and increase the chances of successful sales. This information is then used to create a comprehensive profile of the customer's intent and provide insights into how they are likely to behave in the future.
3. Optimizing Your B2B Buyer Intent Data Using Software to Drive Sales
Monitoring the impact of your account-based marketing efforts is important to drive sales. Checking what has worked in the past using the historical data helps understand the patterns in your data which in turn helps you learn and narrow your focus when it comes to purchase intent data. These trends will change as per your industry however, they all help large enterprises to bring in more sales and data intelligence.
As far as the buyer intent data goes, gathering and analyzing the data from all the sources using technology and algorithms refine your intent data and helps you find higher potential accounts and take data-driven decisions.
4. Top 10 B2B Buyer Intent Data Tools to Accelerate Sales with B2B Account-based Marketing
Depending upon your specific needs and budget as well as your B2B industry, you can select an account-based marketing software with buyer intent data tools. We have listed some of the top B2B intent data providers to accelerate your B2B account based marketing down below.
6 sense:6Sense is a leading ABM software that provides buyer intent data to help B2B marketers personalize their outreach and drive pipeline growth. The platform uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to gather insights on your target accounts' digital behavior and buying signals, enabling you to prioritize your outreach and tailor your messaging to their specific needs and interests. Additionally, 6Sense offers a range of ABM solutions, including account identification, account engagement, and account orchestration, to help B2B marketers effectively plan, execute, and measure the impact of their ABM programs.
Albacross: Albacross is an ABM software that provides buyer intent data to help B2B marketers personalize their outreach and improve their pipeline. The platform uses lead generation and account-based marketing technology to gather insights on your target accounts' digital behavior, enabling you to prioritize your outreach and tailor your messaging to their specific needs and interests. Albacross helps B2B marketers identify their ideal customer profile and generate high-quality leads by tracking website visits and providing information about the companies visiting your website. The platform also offers a range of features, such as lead scoring, account-based retargeting, and email tracking, to help you optimize your ABM strategy and improve the impact of your campaigns.
Bombora: Bombora is a B2B data solutions company that provides account-based marketing (ABM) software for buyer intent data. The platform aggregates business intent data from various sources, including content consumption, social media activity, and job postings, to help B2B marketers gain insights into the buying signals of their target accounts. Bombora's technology provides actionable data on the topics that your target accounts are researching, enabling you to personalize your outreach and tailor your messaging to their specific needs and interests. The platform works with ABM and marketing automation tools like Marketo, Pardot, and Eloqua to help you streamline your ABM processes and make your campaigns more effective.
MadisonLogic: Madison Logic is a B2B marketing technology company that provides account-based marketing (ABM) software for buyer intent data. The platform offers a range of solutions for B2B marketers, including lead generation, content syndication, and programmatic advertising. Madison Logic's technology helps B2B marketers personalize their outreach by providing insights into the buying signals of their target accounts. The platform tracks the online behavior of your target accounts, such as website visits, content downloads, and email opens, to help you identify opportunities to engage with your prospects and improve the impact of your campaigns. Also, Madison Logic's ABM platform works with marketing automation tools like Marketo, Eloqua, and Pardot to help you streamline your ABM processes and improve your campaigns.
Qualified.com: Qualified.com is an ABM software that provides buyer intent data to help B2B marketers personalize their outreach and improve their pipeline. The platform uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to gather insights on your target accounts' digital behavior and buying signals, enabling you to prioritize your outreach and tailor your messaging to their specific needs and interests. Qualified.com offers a range of ABM solutions, including account identification, account engagement, and account orchestration, to help B2B marketers effectively plan, execute, and measure the impact of their ABM programs. The platform works with marketing automation tools like Marketo, Eloqua, and Pardot to help you streamline your ABM processes and improve your campaigns.
Demandbase: Demandbase is a leading account-based marketing (ABM) software that provides buyer intent data to help B2B marketers personalize their outreach and drive pipeline growth. The platform uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to gather insights on your target accounts' digital behavior and buying signals, enabling you to prioritize your outreach and tailor your messaging to their specific needs and interests. Demandbase offers a range of ABM solutions, including account identification, account engagement, and account orchestration, to help B2B marketers effectively plan, execute, and measure the impact of their ABM programs. Also, the platform works with a number of marketing automation tools like Marketo, Eloqua, and Pardot to help you streamline your ABM processes and improve your campaigns.
Demandscience: DemandScience is a company that provides buyer intent data software. This software helps businesses understand the buying behaviors and interests of their target audience. By analyzing a large amount of data, such as search queries, social media activity, and other online interactions, the software provides insights into what potential customers are looking for, what challenges they are facing, and what solutions they are considering. This information can be used by sales and marketing teams to better target their efforts and increase conversions.
Salesintel.io: Salesintel.io is a company that provides a B2B contact and company data platform that includes a buyer intent software component. This software uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyze large amounts of data from various sources, such as social media, search engines, and business news, to identify patterns and signals that indicate a company's buying intent. This information can be used by sales and marketing teams to prioritize their efforts and engage with potential customers at the right time, in the right way. By understanding a company's buying intent, businesses can increase their chances of closing deals and growing their revenue.
Terminus Account-based Marketing: Terminus is a company that provides an account-based marketing (ABM) platform that incorporates buyer intent data. ABM is a B2B marketing strategy that focuses on targeted and personalized outreach to specific companies rather than large groups of leads. The Terminus platform integrates buyer intent data to help sales and marketing teams better understand the buying behaviors and interests of their target accounts. By analyzing data such as website activity, social media engagement, and other online interactions, the software provides insights into the challenges and solutions that target accounts are interested in, allowing teams to personalize their messaging and outreach for maximum impact. The use of buyer intent data in the Terminus ABM platform can help businesses increase their conversion rates and drive revenue growth.
Zoominfo: ZoomInfo is a company that provides a B2B contact and company data platform, including a buyer intent data software component. The platform uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyze large amounts of data from various sources, such as social media, search engines, and business news, to identify patterns and signals that indicate a company's buying intent. This information can be used by sales and marketing teams to prioritize their efforts and engage with potential customers at the right time. With a deep understanding of a company's buying intent, businesses can increase their chances of closing deals and growing their revenue. Additionally, the platform includes features for data enrichment, lead generation, and account-based marketing, allowing sales and marketing teams to have a comprehensive view of their target accounts and personalize their outreach for maximum impact.
5. Summing up
Utilizing advanced technology and machine learning algorithms to gather and analyze data about potential customers, providing valuable insights into their buying behaviors and intent helps businesses gain an edge over competition. By utilizing this information, businesses can tailor their marketing and sales strategies to better target and convert leads into paying customers, ultimately driving more sales. Scaling your buyer intent marketing efforts has become a lot easier with the machine learning and predictive analytics.
Read More
Buyer Intent Data
Article | March 6, 2023
Account-based marketing (ABM) has been around for long enough now that most companies have either rolled out strategies or are actively exploring their options. Looking at the ABM adoption model produced by the ITSMA, an industry association for technology-based marketing and services, many companies are in the experimentation stage and looking to further refine their initial pilot programs. As you begin to experiment and expand your ABM programs, there are many complexities that you can introduce like content personalization, website personalization, scaling accounts and channels, and additional technology and automation, to name a few.
Read More
Account Based Analytics
Article | December 28, 2021
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.
Read More