ABM Tactics to Optimize Your Marketing Strategy

Apurva Pathak | February 10, 2022 | 659 views

Optimize Your Marketing Strategy

Introduction: Account-based Marketing and ABM Tactics

B2B account-based marketing is a strategic approach that focuses on targeted campaigns for high-value accounts. An account-based marketing strategy involves identifying target accounts, reaching out to them using hyper-personalized content, and engaging them in the right way and at the right time, irrespective of their position in the sales funnel. Closing the deal through an alignment between sales and marketing is the ultimate goal of an effective account-based marketing campaign. By using certain ABM tactics, you can enhance your campaign. Let us first understand what account-based marketing is, what challenges it can help you scale, and how it can help you get a higher ROI compared to any other marketing strategy that exists today.

Why Should You Implement Account-based Marketing?

According to ITSMA, 87 percent of marketers say that ABM marketing outperforms other marketing investments. B2B account-based marketing gets better results year-over-year after its implementation. With changing times, B2B customer expectations have changed. A more humane marketing strategy, customized content, the right channels, and a smooth customer experience are some of them. Not only does ABM targeting offer solutions to customers’ specific challenges, but it also converts leads with buyer intent into customers. Here are some of the challenges that an effective account-based marketing strategy will help you overcome:

Aligning Your Sales and Marketing Teams

The account-based marketing process involves streamlining the goals, objectives, and metrics of your sales and marketing teams. This eliminates the possibility of poor communication. Instead, there is a group effort to go after the right people to get a better return on investment.

These teams centrally view the targeted accounts through your CRM. This breaks the silos and boosts the impact of your ABM tactics. It allows unobstructed data sharing between marketing and sales. The account-based marketing process solely functions using centralized data and empowers both teams to make the most of the intent data and predict when and how to engage with the stakeholders of the target accounts.

Effective Content Personalization

As a central metric, customer experience is of paramount importance to creating lasting associations with target accounts. Most customers know what they want and need, are aware of the market conditions, and seek solutions that work best for them. They want these solutions to be offered to them on a platter through predictive customer experience. ABM scores a homerun in this aspect. It connects customers with content personalization characterized by distinct messaging speaking about challenges and solutions. Content is important to the success of an account-based marketing campaign right from the start.

Achieving Complete Data Utilization

B2B account-based marketing is a data-driven marketing technology that drives success for your business. Data is used to predict the needs of target accounts, understand their pain points, and preferred channels of communication. Clean intent data helps in increasing brand awareness among target accounts, streamlines the buying cycle, and assists marketing in creating content and messaging that best represents your brand and sharing it with sales teams so that they can use it to convert leads. Feedback data can also help marketing to access the success of the account-based marketing campaign and improve it to get better results in the future.

Maintaining Long-term Relationships with Customers

No matter the kind of B2B marketing strategy (ABM Lite, Strategic ABM, or Programmatic ABM) you choose to apply, its personalized approach boosts confidence and trust in buyers because they experience a stellar customer experience. Through customized content and focused service offerings, lasting long-term relationships with target accounts can become a reality. It also creates new opportunities for businesses.

Marketing Budgeting

An account-based marketing program enhances marketing budgets by improving customer retention and makes it easier to track ROI. It also improves your brand awareness, engagement, and lead quality metrics, so you can allocate your resources better.

Now that the benefits of account-based marketing are evident, let us now look at ABM tactics to further enhance your B2B account-based marketing strategy.

ABM Tactics to Optimize Your Marketing Strategy

Before you start using any tips and tricks to optimize your account-based marketing program, you should set your expectations and finalize the KPIs you intend to use to measure the success of your B2B ABM marketing tactics.

Let us explore some ABM tactics that can optimize your account-based marketing program:

Optimize Your ABM Funnel

Optimizing your ABM funnel may be one of the most effective account-based marketing tactics that can help you achieve growth.

Target Accounts

Optimize your target accounts using the following ways:
  • Content Auditing
Audit your content and verify if it caters effectively to your target accounts’ personas and the industry they belong to. Stringently review every content piece you have to ensure it is hyper-personalized and addresses the target accounts’ needs and pain points. Sometimes, your content may help you tighten your target account list.

  • Use Intent Data Wisely
ABM targeting should be dynamic. Update your target account list based on the intent data you receive from CRM and other platforms. You must know what your target accounts are searching for. Is it something about your business, your product, or the solutions you offer? You should always use this data to enhance your list.

  • Approach Different Segments
Simultaneously run multiple account-based marketing campaigns with different levels of personalization and investment. Choose from ABM Lite (one-to-few accounts), Programmatic ABM (one-to-many accounts), or Strategic ABM (one-to-one) based on your ABM targeting goals.

Engaged Accounts

Optimizing engaged accounts can be difficult because no two engaged accounts can be in the same stage of the sales funnel. Checking on how your ads are performing through click rates, organic visits on your website, email click through rates, or any other digital interaction with your brand can be a good start. Your ads should be informative yet beautiful. Improve on your copy and tighten your target account list so you reach out only to the accounts that are engaging with your content. Go all out through social media, emails, and all other channels available on the internet to reach out to engaged accounts. These account-based marketing tactics ensure that you take advantage of target account engagement enthusiastically through all channels.

New Opportunities

Help your sales team to enhance the rate of new opportunities through lead generation strategies created by ad retargeting so they can tap into the accounts that have interacted with your ads previously with renewed vigour. Creating an account engagement model to define an ‘engaged account’ in collaboration with your sales team can smoothen out the process of controlling the number of accounts it has to work on.

Outreach

Focus on creating or warming up existing relationships with the employees of your target account stakeholders. Use direct mail or personal meetings to get in touch with your target accounts. This opens the doors to new pipeline opportunities. One-to-one C-level campaigns, phone calls, and demos can be used to reach more people, warm up leads, and create brand awareness.

Improve Sales Velocity

Sales velocity is the average time taken from when an opportunity is created to when it is converted into a customer. Treat every opportunity that comes your way with the same dedication that you show to your target accounts. This approach is applicable to all the lead generation strategies you execute. Opportunities may make their way through your ABM platform or through inbound channels. Once they make their way through the funnel, make it a point to shift from awareness to ROI campaigns by exhibiting customer success stories and testimonials. These efforts can lead to a shortened sales cycle.

Harness Social Media

For the success of your B2B marketing strategy, using social media can be an effective way to capture important target accounts’ behavioral data. Follow their company accounts, stakeholder accounts, and employee accounts to remain updated. Understanding stakeholders’ and employees’ social media behaviour, likes, and engagement can help you narrow down your target account list. Strategically calling out the target accounts on social media through mentions can work in your favour.

Use Paid Advertising & Content Marketing

LinkedIn targeting, paid Google ads, industry-specific blogging along with problem and solution-oriented content can create target account engagement. Consider using account-based marketing services to market your content better and more accurately.

Marketing Automation

Artificial intelligence (AI) based marketing can optimize your account-based program by providing you with predictive insights and enhancing your communication efforts. Email campaigns can be executed using marketing automation to offer measurable account engagement. AI and big data rely on CRM data to gather user information from different platforms. This information can help you personalize your content better. Account-based marketing services offer these options to execute targeted marketing campaigns at scale.

According to a MarketingProfs survey, companies that used this ABM tactic saw 59 percent increase in closing rates.

Implement Influencer Marketing

Harness the influence of industry experts, thought leaders, and recognized contributors that your target accounts consider authentic. It can improve your conversion rate. By humanizing the buyer experience through an influencer, you can win over the trust of your accounts, encourage brand advocacy, attract new audiences, and increase the authority of the content you share. This tactic adds value to your B2B marketing strategy.

Test, Measure, Improve

Periodically testing your ad copy, content, design, and channel elements to see what works and what doesn’t is crucial to improving B2B account-based marketing. Tracking important KPIs that measure the success of your strategy can help you make it more effective. Avoid being constrained and try new things boldly. If something doesn’t work, find other ways to achieve your goals instead of scrapping the strategy. Account-based marketing tactics will only work if you analyze how they affect your strategy and accordingly keep improving its execution.

In an interview with Media 7, Daniel Englebretson, the founder of Khronos, talked about how to improve an account-based marketing strategy.

“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.”

Northrop Grumman Won a $2 Billion Contract by Leveraging Account-based Marketing

Northrop Grumman, an aerospace and defense company headquartered in Virginia, clinched a ten-year, $2 billion contract with VITA. Their B2B ABM marketing tactics included using marketing and business development teams that worked closely to understand VITA’s issues, needs, and priorities. They used all this information to create a focused branding campaign to target the key decision makers at VITA. They ensured that every interaction they had with VITA reinforced their IT expertise.

The Takeaway

These ABM tactics are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to optimizing your account-based marketing program. Confidence, attentiveness, and patience are key to achieving expected conversions from an ABM strategy.

FAQ

What are the types of ABM marketing?

Programmatic ABM (one-to-many approach), ABM Lite (one-to-few approach) and Strategic ABM (one-to-one approach) are the three types of ABM marketing.

Why is account-based marketing more effective than traditional B2B marketing?

Account-based marketing targets accounts with buyer intent. It increases the conversion rate and customer experience through content personalization and a close understanding of key accounts’ needs and challenges. This focused approach leads to a higher ROI.

What are the benefits of using account-based marketing software?

An account-based marketing software powered by AI can help you reach, engage, and convert target accounts and provide you with actionable data through your websites, CRM, and marketing automation platforms. It helps you grow your business quickly and efficiently.

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Social Media Delivered

Social Media Delivered offers consulting, training and marketing services specializing in social media campaigns for organizations across all industries whether B2B or B2C since 2008.

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"The ability to automatically identify and engage with accurate buying groups, understanding their personas and roles, will revolutionize our sales and marketing efforts. This tool truly understands the complex dynamics of B2B decision-making processes, cutting through the noise to reach the right people at the right time. We can't wait to get our hands on it." "B2B GTM teams have known for a long time that the traditional lead-based approach really misses the mark, because individuals don't buy solutions in the enterprise — that focus is too narrow," says Brewster Stanislaw, chief product officer, at Demandbase. "That's why account-based marketing came into existence… but the reality is an account-based approach has its drawbacks as well. It's too broad because it's not every person at an account that participates in a buying decision. The sweet spot is in between; it's the buying committee, made of influencers, champions, blockers, etc., that actually determines where and when an enterprise will invest in a given solution." Stanislaw continues, "Until now, it's been too hard to implement buying groups because companies had to rely on manual guesswork and faulty data. Our AI-powered buying groups solve this once and for all by delivering on the audience that is 'just right.' We're using artificial intelligence to analyze massive behavioral data sets to generate accurate buying groups and automatically assign roles and personas to each of their constituent members. This empowers our customers to be optimally efficient across their entire GTM motion. By focusing on the buying group as their core GTM object, they can generate more demand with greater velocity through the customer journey, while minimizing waste by investing resources where they are most impactful. This is a revolution for B2B GTM teams that will unlock efficient growth, and those that adopt will be the CMOs and CROs of the future." The industry has recognized the need to target and reach buying groups, with Forrester Research saying that the goal of this approach is to "better align with the true buyer in virtually all B2B buying decisions — a group of people (the buying group) all working together to solve a business issue." "Identifying and engaging with the buying committee is the key to winning deals but it's really hard," commented Craig Rosenberg, chief platform officer at Scale Venture Partners. "That's why the introduction of AI-powered buying groups is so powerful for GTM teams. It eliminates the manual guesswork for B2B GTM teams thus allowing these teams to focus on driving increased demand." Historically, teams have relied on guesswork, manual processes, and missing and inaccurate data, resulting in systematic under-estimation of all personas that make up the full committee. With Demandbase Buying Group AI, this will all change. For the first time, companies will be able to use AI to automatically generate their ideal buying groups, create different buying groups for different products and journey stages, find the right contacts for each persona — adding them to their CRM, if not already there — and engage them with accurate contact information. The result will be fewer missed, lost, or delayed deals and vastly superior go-to-market execution. Demandbase pioneered the ABM movement and is now leading the way in this latest evolution of B2B go-to-market. The company is uniquely positioned to deliver on AI-generated buying groups with its massive data set that combines the customer's engagement data with Demandbase's B2B data — including AI-validated contact data on more than 150M buyers plus expansive advertising and behavioral data — to see how individuals interact across products and with each other. Demandbase Buying Group AI will launch out of beta in Q3 of 2023. See how it works to learn more and discover why buying groups are the foundation of a modern, Smarter GTM™ platform. About Demandbase Demandbase helps B2B companies hit their revenue goals using fewer resources. How? By using the power of AI to identify and engage the accounts and buying groups most likely to purchase, powered by combining your sales and marketing data with our validated B2B data — what we call Account Intelligence. Better data makes better AI, that's Smarter GTM™.

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Gartner Says Sales Leaders Who Position Technology As a Teammate Rather Than a Tool will Unlock Seller Productivity and High-Quality Deals

Business Wire | May 22, 2023

Sales organizations that actively position technology as sellers’ “teammate” rather than just another tool will unlock seller productivity and enable high-quality deals, according to Gartner, Inc. During the opening keynote at the Gartner CSO & Sales Leader Conference, which is taking place here through Wednesday, Gartner experts explored how technology – particularly artificial intelligence – is key in augmenting the unique value that human sellers provide to buyers in a continuously disruptive environment. “A new approach that marries technology advances with the distinctive abilities that human sellers bring to a deal is required to adapt to customers’ changing needs and drive real commercial outcomes,” said Robert Blaisdell, Senior Director Analyst in the Gartner Sales Practice. “The tech revolution isn’t about giving sellers more technology, it’s about giving technology more responsibility. “New technologies, such as generative AI and digital humans, have the potential to transform the role of the seller. Sales leaders will need to rethink how to meet buyers’ inflated digital expectations. Those who don’t risk distancing themselves from buyers and leaving real money on the table.” Sales is at a turning point While sellers are often the CSO’s most obvious option to help buyers through dysfunction to reach their goals, they’re also the most expensive. The tight labor market, administrative burden of overinvesting in the wrong technologies, and the persistent skills gap renders this approach ineffective. Organizations can finally move beyond simple automation and assisted selling to true augmented selling, where technology plays an active role in the design and execution of the sales process. As technology becomes fully embedded over time, sellers can lean on technology as their teammate to delegate tasks associated with lead generation or basic customer interactions. Generative AI, in particular, has the power to automatically generate and personalize sales content based on the customer and their current needs, with sellers only needing to view the output. Accentuate human superpowers to win deals and do what tech can’t While a high percentage of buyers report preferring a rep-free experience, this preference is at odds with what makes for a high-quality deal. Buyers who receive validation that a purchase feels right for them are 30% more likely to complete an ambitious or premium purchase that lived up to expectations. Gartner calls this Value Affirmation, and buyers that engage with a human during the purchase process are 2.3x more likely to experience it. "Value affirmation's importance in enabling high-quality deals highlights how feelings matter just as much as facts for today's B2B buyers,” said Alice Walmesley, Director, Advisory in the Gartner Sales Practice. The best sellers intuitively have the ability to infer buyers’ unspoken beliefs, feelings and intentions to predict and influence buyer behavior. Technology comes in to free up sellers’ time, so they can better catch these innately human feelings. “CSOs can coach core performers accordingly and ensure technology unlocks their sellers’ potential to be more human than ever. Progressive sales organizations are shifting their mindsets from a technology versus human approach, to a technology and human approach, where each entity brings out the best in one another to complete high-quality deals,” concluded Walmesley. About the Gartner CSO & Sales Leaders Conference The Gartner CSO & Sales Leader Conference is taking place May 16-17, 2023 in Las Vegas, providing sales leaders with the latest research on sales talent, customer buying behavior, account-based marketing strategies and leveraging digital channels. Follow news and updates coming out of the conference on the Gartner Newsroom and on Twitter and LinkedIn using #GartnerSales. About Gartner for Sales Leaders Gartner for Sales Leaders provides heads of sales and their teams with the insights, advice and tools they need to address mission-critical priorities amid mounting pressures to drive growth through new and existing customers. With extensive qualitative and quantitative research, Gartner for Sales Leaders helps sales teams combat commoditization and price-based purchasing, develop critical manager and seller skills, elevate the value of sales interactions, unlock existing growth potential, and optimize sales force enablement. Follow news and update from the Gartner Sales practice on Twitter and LinkedIn using #GartnerSales. Members of the media can find additional information and insights in the Gartner Sales Newsroom. About Gartner Gartner, Inc. (NYSE: IT) delivers actionable, objective insight to executives and their teams. Our expert guidance and tools enable faster, smarter decisions and stronger performance on an organization’s mission-critical priorities. To learn more, visit gartner.com.

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ZoomInfo Announces First Quarter 2023 Financial Results

Business Wire | May 02, 2023

ZoomInfo, (NASDAQ: ZI) the go-to-market platform to find, acquire, and grow customers, today announced its financial results for the first quarter ended March 31, 2023. “ZoomInfo again delivered a quarter of growth, profitability, and free cash flow generation,” said Henry Schuck, ZoomInfo Founder and CEO. “Businesses are unlocking our insights, engaging with customers more effectively, and winning faster through our platform. We’re still early in the digital revolution of B2B sales and marketing, but we’re in a position to empower every business worldwide to modernize their go-to-market motion.” First Quarter 2023 Financial and Other Recent Highlights - Financial Highlights: Revenue of $300.7 million, an increase of 24% year-over-year. Operating income of $66.3 million and Adjusted Operating Income of $120.3 million. GAAP operating income margin of 22% and Adjusted Operating Income Margin of 40%. Cash flow from operations of $108.6 million and Unlevered Free Cash Flow of $121.1 million. Business and Operating Highlights: Incorporated Engage natively within SalesOS to seamlessly integrate multiple go-to-market channels into a highly personalized and engaging customer experience. Announced that the company has integrated generative AI into its go-to-market (GTM) plays and within Chorus to create actionable meeting summaries. ZoomInfo’s team of data scientists and engineers is now incorporating Generative AI into the platform to make sophisticated GTM more automated and accessible. Published the Company’s 2022 sustainability report, highlighting notable achievements in Environmental, Social, and Governance matters. The full 2022 sustainability report is available here: https://ir.zoominfo.com/sustainability/. Completed a repricing of our First Lien Credit Agreement at par, which resulted in a four-year maturity extension to 2030 and a 25 basis point reduction in interest rate. During the three months ended March 31, 2023, the Company repurchased 1,058,291 shares of Common Stock at an average price of $22.99, for an aggregate $24.3 million, under the $100 million share repurchase authorization announced on March 14, 2023. Closed the quarter with 1,905 customers with $100,000 or greater in annual contract value. The Company uses a variety of operational and financial metrics, including non-GAAP financial measures, to evaluate its performance and financial condition. The accompanying financial data includes additional information regarding these metrics and a reconciliation of non-GAAP financial information for historical periods to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measure. The presentation of non-GAAP financial information should not be considered in isolation or as a substitute for, or superior to, the financial information prepared and presented in accordance with GAAP. Conference Call and Webcast Information: ZoomInfo will host a conference call today, May 1, 2023, to review its results at 4:30 p.m. Eastern Time, 1:30 p.m. Pacific Time. To participate in the live conference call via telephone, please register here. Upon registering, a dial-in number and unique PIN will be provided to join the conference call. The call will also be webcast live on the Company’s investor relations website at https://ir.zoominfo.com/, where related presentation materials will be posted prior to the conference call. Following the conference call, an archived webcast of the call will be available for one year on ZoomInfo’s Investor Relations website. Non-GAAP Financial Measures and Other Metrics: To supplement our consolidated financial statements presented in accordance with GAAP, this press release contains non-GAAP financial measures, including Adjusted Operating Income, Adjusted Operating Income Margin, Adjusted Net Income, Adjusted Net Income Per Share, and Unlevered Free Cash Flow. We believe these non-GAAP measures are useful to investors in evaluating our operating performance because they eliminate certain items that affect period-over-period comparability and provide consistency with past financial performance and additional information about our underlying results and trends by excluding certain items that may not be indicative of our business, results of operations, or outlook.​​ Non-GAAP financial measures are not meant to be considered in isolation or as a substitute for the comparable GAAP measures, but rather as supplemental information to our business results. This information should be read only in conjunction with our consolidated financial statements prepared in accordance with GAAP. There are limitations to these non-GAAP financial measures because they are not prepared in accordance with GAAP and may not be comparable to similarly titled measures of other companies due to potential differences in methods of calculation and items or events being adjusted. In addition, other companies may use different measures to evaluate their performance, all of which could reduce the usefulness of our non-GAAP financial measures as tools for comparison. A reconciliation is provided at the end of this press release for each historical non-GAAP financial measure to the most directly comparable financial measure stated in accordance with GAAP. We do not provide a quantitative reconciliation of the forward-looking non-GAAP financial measures included in this press release to the most directly comparable GAAP measures due to the high variability and difficulty to predict certain items excluded from these non-GAAP financial measures; in particular, the effects of stock-based compensation expense, taxes and amounts under the exchange tax receivable agreement, deferred tax assets and deferred tax liabilities, and restructuring and transaction expenses. We expect the variability of these excluded items may have a significant, and potentially unpredictable, impact on our future GAAP financial results. We define Adjusted Operating Income as income from operations plus (i) impact of fair value adjustments to acquired unearned revenue, (ii) amortization of acquired technology and other acquired intangibles, (iii) equity-based compensation expense, (iv) restructuring and transaction-related expenses, and (v) integration costs and acquisition-related compensation. We define Adjusted Operating Income Margin as Adjusted Operating Income divided by the sum of revenue and the impact of fair value adjustments to acquired unearned revenue. We define Adjusted Net Income as Adjusted Operating Income less (i) interest expense, net (ii) other (income) expense, net, excluding TRA liability remeasurement expense (benefit) and (iii) income tax expense (benefit) including incremental tax effects of adjustments to arrive at Adjusted Operating Income and current tax benefits related to the TRA. We define Adjusted Net Income Per Share as Adjusted Net Income divided by diluted weighted average shares outstanding. We define Unlevered Free Cash Flow as net cash provided from operating activities less (i) purchases of property and equipment and other assets, plus (ii) cash interest expense, (iii) cash payments related to restructuring and transaction-related expenses, and (iv) cash payments related to integration costs and acquisition-related compensation. Unlevered Free Cash Flow does not represent residual cash flow available for discretionary expenditures since, among other things, we have mandatory debt service requirements. Net revenue retention is an annual metric that we calculate based on customers of ZoomInfo at the beginning of the year, and is calculated as: (a) the total ACV for those customers at the end of the year, divided by (b) the total ACV for those customers at the beginning of the year. About ZoomInfo ZoomInfo (NASDAQ: ZI) is a leader in modern go-to-market software, data, and intelligence for more than 30,000 companies worldwide. ZoomInfo’s revenue operating system, RevOS, empowers business-to-business sales, marketing, operations, and recruiting professionals to hit their number by pairing best-in-class technology with unrivaled data coverage, accuracy, and depth of company and contact information. With integrations embedded into workflows and technology stacks, including the leading CRM, Sales Engagement, Marketing Automation, and Talent Management applications, ZoomInfo drives more predictable, accelerated, and sustainable growth for its customers. ZoomInfo emphasizes GDPR and CCPA compliance. In addition to creating the industry’s first proactive notice program, the company is a registered data broker with the states of California and Vermont. Read about ZoomInfo’s commitment to compliance, privacy, and security. For more information about ZoomInfo’s leading go-to-market software, data, and intelligence, and how they help sales, marketing, operations, and recruiting professionals, please visit www.zoominfo.com.

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