Account Based Data
Article | August 19, 2022
ABM influences key accounts that show buyer intent. This influence is internal (B2B through personalized content) and aims to sway decision-makers who green-light a purchase.
In an interview with Media 7, Mark Emond, Founder & President of Demand Spring, talked about the importance of content in marketing.
“Content is at the heart of great marketing today. It needs to educate, inspire, and convert. It must be tied to the unique rational and emotional needs of each target persona.”
ABM’s focused approach leads to faster lead conversions and a higher ROI. However, B2B marketers still face the following challenges in their marketing strategy:
Maximizing Marketing Efficiency
B2B marketers must consistently drive higher ROI on their efforts while working within a limited budget.
Improving Customer Experience
Cutting through the noise of thousands of competitors and delivering an enhanced customer experience is challenging.
Generating Trust in Customers
Marketers need to humanize their approach and reach a level of undeniable authenticity to generate trust in the minds of customers.
Why Should You Use Influencer Marketing in ABM?
According to a CSO Insights report from Marketing Charts, brands fail to incite enough trust in their target audience. Interestingly, it is what the subject matter experts and third-party influencers from the industry say that counts. So, external influence is driving purchase decisions. Internal influence, though crucial, cannot sideline external influence and how it impacts sales and key decisions.
When you integrate ABM with influencer marketing, you co-create relatable, impactful content with relevant influencers to encourage your target accounts to move ahead in the sales funnel. An influencer becomes a credible touch point, powerful enough to convert a lead. The influencer’s performance-oriented content resonates with the target audience, engages, educates, and informs them of the strong points of your business, creating a strong foundation for lead conversion.
Here is how it can help strengthen ABM strategy:
Increases Content Authenticity
The words of a trusted subject matter expert or third-party niche content creator hold more weight than static website content or brand ads. Their followers trust them and consider their views authentic. If such relevant influencers create content with you, your target audience is bound to be positively influenced. This leads to higher conversions and ROI, qualitative reach, and better engagement.
Attracts New Audiences
Influencers attract new audiences that are similar to your ideal customer profile (ICP). Interactions, content promotions, and publicity can create brand awareness generate more interest in your brand.
Encourages Brand Advocacy
Positive reviews, customer success stories (voice of customer), testimonials, and word-of-mouth publicity that comes from influencers and their followers promote brand advocacy. Influencers also create incentives for referrals, thus bringing in better engagement.
Humanizes the Buyer Experiences
B2B storytelling is the key to conversions. It has more impact than any other form of advertising. Influencers humanize the buyer experience by sharing their opinions, reviews from other businesses, and highlighting success stories through their content. This content is impressive as compared to any other content the brand hosts and promotes.
B2B Influencer Content is Priceless
B2B influencer content has high value because it has third-party credibility that attracts trust across all brand channels. Another advantage is that you can easily access the creativity of the influencer without having to hire someone. All the content that influencers publish on their platforms is brand content, highlighted with the voice of the customer. Influencer marketing generates traction and engagement for businesses.
Integrated Influence
Influence can be integrated through social media marketing, content marketing, PR, SEO, branding, and ABM.
How to Create a Powerful, Influencer-based ABM Marketing Strategy?
Brainstorm a Strategy
To make the most of influencer-based ABM marketing, you need to streamline a process and strategy. Find the answers to these two crucial questions:
1. Who influences your target audience?
2. Which topics interest your target audience?
Once you find the answers to these questions, you can zero in on a relevant influencer and approach them to participate in creating/co-creating high-quality marketing content (text, podcast, video, interactive). Integrate the content and publish it on brand channels, and influencer channels. Promote the content via blogs, ads, other influencers, and brand sites to target your key accounts. Monitor the promotions (URLs, engagement) and adjust the campaign for maximum output. Most importantly, create and nurture relationships with industry influencers for future campaigns.
Understand the Demand
Understanding the demand of the target audience through keyword research and data analysis can boost the results of an influencer marketing campaign. Offering audiences solutions to their problems or information that will help them scale their business assist in lead nurturing and conversions.
Identify Ideal Influencers
Choosing a suitable influencer can help kick start your influencer campaign powerfully. An ideal influencer should be proficient in their domain, passionate about content creation, capable of publishing content across platforms, popular in the industry with keen followers, and knowledgeable and eager to promote content across different channels in different formats.
You can employ software to identify and qualify relevant influencers who create credible, high-quality content on the topic you want to promote. Filter influencers based on how much they charge and how well they align with your company values and brand voice. Focus on creating a long term association.
Shuffle the Content Formats
By shuffling between marketing content formats like blog articles, live video, third party analyst reports, videos, case studies, webinars, podcasts, industry presentations, infographics, and interactive content, the target audience can be engaged on multiple channels, and data can be collected to analyze which formats work best.
Remain Connected with Influencers
As a B2B marketer, you should connect one-on-one through email, phone, or in-person meetings with influencers frequently. You should monitor and engage with influencers on social media when they mention your brand.
By interacting with and sharing relevant influencer content on social channels, you can build a community and promote advocacy through continued partnership and engagement. Additionally, you can recycle content made by influencers to show you value the association.
Sixty-three percent of marketers believe they would have better marketing results with an influencer marketing program, while seventy-four percent of marketers agree that it improves customer and prospect experience with the brand.
How Cherwell Software Witnessed a 437% Year-over-year Increase in Content Shares?
Colorado-based Cherwell Software is an IT Service Management (ITSM) company. It engaged TopRankMarketing to create an influencer marketing campaign with the aim of increasing brand awareness, targeting CIOs, CTOs, and IT Directors of companies for business, and increasing sales and revenue.
With the help of the content 15 ITSM thought leaders created and amplified across five channels, Cherwell Software saw a 170% growth in their audience views and a 437% year-over-year increase in their content shares.
Key Takeaways
In B2B marketing and ABM, influencer marketing can help reach customers you would have otherwise missed. Engaging in an influencer marketing platform to maximize ABM strategy outputs is crucial to remaining ahead in the race.
FAQ
What characteristics should a good B2B influencer have?
A good B2B influencer should be proficient, passionate, popular, a dedicated content promoter and creator.
How does influencer marketing help B2B marketers?
Influencer marketing can help B2B marketers target key accounts by leveraging content created by industry experts.
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Buyer Intent Data
Article | September 11, 2023
Introduction
The application of AI marketing technology is picking up pace because of its many advantages. According to a 2020 Deloitte survey, 74% of AI adopters agree that AI will be a part of all their enterprise applications by 2023.
What does an AI-based marketing strategy look like, and how do you make the most of it? This article gets into the nitty-gritty of AI marketing technology and how to implement it in ABM so you can maximize your business performance and outputs.
AI’s Role in Marketing
Thanks to its accuracy, B2C businesses use AI marketing technology to target their customers with product or service recommendations. The following are some use cases of AI-based B2C marketing:
Personalization
AI helps businesses with their 1-to-1 marketing strategies by personalizing their content to cater to every segment.
Event Communication
Emails informing customers of upcoming sales, special access, or exciting offers are sent out via AI technology. Weekend offer emailers, special discount codes, and new product updates are a result of event communication automation so that customers can be informed before time about upcoming events.
Real-time Content
Trending topics, investments, event promotions, webinars, customer feedback, product availability, bestselling combo, weather reports, and new blog post updates are provided in real-time to maintain an active connection with customers.
Businesses do this by using the ‘open time content’ AI technology. Manually executing 1-to-1 marketing strategies is nearly impossible, impractical, and does not see much success. AI helps streamline these strategies and executes them effortlessly.
What Goes into Creating an Effective ABM Strategy?
For an ABM strategy to work, businesses need to follow these steps:
Preparing for the ABM Strategy
Organizational readiness is crucial for implementing ABM. Make sure you have a budget and an achievable timeline to execute the strategy, team members who can anchor it, and an understanding of ABM metrics so you can make the most of it.
Synergy Between Marketing and Sales Teams
Your sales and marketing teams should be in sync and not at loggerheads due to account-level communication issues. Discussing the benefits of ABM with both the teams beforehand and coming to a strategic agreement to implement ABM can help them align their goals while executing the ABM strategy.
Identifying Target Segments
Your ABM strategy can do wonders for your business only if you have a precise segmentation of data. Use dimensions like business size, annual revenue, current spending, projected spending, targeted products, geography, open opportunities, closed opportunities, etc., to identify your target segments.
Zeroing-in on a Priority
Having a clear priority helps you streamline your ABM strategy. It should either be acquisition (acquiring new accounts), retention (retaining existing accounts), or expansion (expanding the scope of accounts). Without a clear priority, any ABM strategy may not yield expected results because the efforts won’t be concentrated towards a single goal.
Leveraging AI in ABM Strategy
In an interview with Media 7, Daniel Englebretson, founder of Khronos, spoke about AI’s impact on the future of ABM.
“From my perspective, B2B marketers have faced countless challenges that have formed the basis of new technology – problem brings a solution. I expect AI will solve identity resolution, resolve data challenges, and enhance targeting. I expect AI will address 1:1 content at scale, unlocking the rapid deployment of 1:1 brand experiences.”
Introducing AI into your ABM strategy can help you in the following way:
Content Personalization
Once you know your customer’s pain points and interests, you can focus on providing them personalized solutions, products, or services they desire. Of course, personalizing content is complex, but AI makes it easier by offering the technological capacity to deliver what your customer wants.
Efficient Resource Management
Without customer profiling, an ABM strategy cannot achieve the expected output. AI can assist with data crawling the internet to find out important customer information. Also, it segments data acquired from CRM, which gives you more information about a customer than any other generic data. This data is helpful for lead qualification and creating heavily personalized content for a customer.
Since AI does all the heavy lifting, you can allocate your resources to building and nurturing a relationship with the customer.
Automation
AI-based marketing in ABM generates automated insights for lead generation. It also highlights campaign performance related to specific, high-value accounts and suggests steps to engage a prospect.
Digital marketing and automation are a dynamic duo where AI brings about intelligent marketing automation. Efficient email campaigns are run when executed by automation. Email marketing companies like MailChimp target customers based on insights to achieve more conversions. When AI and big data use CRM data, large chunks of user information can be collected from different platforms. This information can help with formulating a successful ABM strategy.
ABM Optimization and Predictive Insights
To analyze intent, AI processes data in real-time and gives predictive insights to help with ABM optimization. As a result, it is easier to merge data from different sources with AI-enabled tools, achieve predictive analysis, manage recommendations in real-time, and understand competitor strategies through social media. AI can also interpret images correctly.
Enhancing Communications
Use AI for building a strong relationship with your customer. Personalizing communication by using customer data can be easily achieved with AI.
What Is the Future of AI-enabled ABM Strategy?
ABM, with an AI marketing strategy, has a bright future ahead of it. Demandbase recently conducted a survey in which they found that 80% of marketers had plans to integrate AI into their ABM marketing strategy. Another survey conducted by MarketingProfs concluded that businesses that used AI in their ABM strategies had 59% higher closing rates as compared to others. They saw a 58% increase in their revenue and a 52% increase in their conversions.
Ways Salesforce's AI Einstein Aided U.S. Bank in Growing Revenue
The U.S. bank used Salesforce’s sales cloud AI, Einstein, to boost their revenue. Their lead conversion rate increased 2.35 times after implementing Einstein. They were able to create a model to predict lead conversion. They did this by using Einstein to search through customized historical lead data.
“We work to build high-quality, personalized relationships between our customers and their financial advisors or commercial bankers. There is nothing that replaces that person-to-person interaction. What AI allows us to do is augment that relationship. We can provide our teams with better data and smarter insights, which helps them establish stronger relationships.”
– Srini Nallasivan, Chief Analytics Officer, U.S. Bank
Summing It Up
AI-based marketing can enhance your ABM strategy only if qualitative data is available. Therefore, businesses will need to have clear marketing goals and turn data into an asset.
FAQs
What are the challenges in the AI-based ABM strategy?
Managing, protecting, and enriching data obtained from CRM and other customer support systems can be challenging.
How can AI help in strengthening your ABM strategy?
AI helps with personalizing content, automation, ABM optimization, and providing predictive insights for lead conversion.
What does a strong AI-based ABM strategy do for your business?
A strong AI-based ABM strategy helps with account profiling, analytics, reporting and hyper-individualized content, which leads to increased lead conversion.
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Account Based Data
Article | June 29, 2023
Data-driven strategies for increasing time to market, pipeline, and revenue impact.
The B2B environment is incredibly complex, so it’s no surprise that more than three-quarters of B2B buyers describe their purchasing journey as very complex or challenging. A significant majority (67%) of the B2B buyer’s journey happens digitally, but B2B buying does not play out in any predictable, linear order. Unfortunately, much of today’s ABM technology lacks the capabilities required to provide personalized experiences across multiple channels, platforms, buying centers, geographies, and lines of business. This puts the target account into an undesirable linear campaign and assumes all accounts progress through the funnel at the same speed.
Instead, customers engage in “looping” behaviors during a typical B2B purchase, revisiting multiple buying stages at least once. Buying stages do not happen sequentially but rather simultaneously. This means that ABM success depends not only on a deep understanding of its audience’s needs but also on precisely orchestrating the delivery of the right message in the right channel at the right time - and on a global scale.
In the face of these complexities, ABM is rapidly maturing as a practice. New research shows that almost half (45%) of companies consider their ABM programs to be fully adopted versus experimental – up a third compared with 2020. But even as ABM programs mature, the headwinds of change are accelerating, leaving more than two-thirds of ABM marketers thwarted in their mission to drive significant revenue impact.
B2B marketers must contend with and overcome a slew of challenges that can feel beyond their immediate control. A recent study by Demand Metric and MRP found that more than three-quarters of marketers’ report that the pace of their campaigns has intensified over the past year. That percentage is higher still, at 83%, at enterprise companies that operate with high levels of complexity on a global scale. Four in ten marketers report that changing account profiles poses a challenge, as does the emergence of new channels and demand for new content formats.
Responsive buyer experiences and relevant content across channels have always been the top criteria for mature, high-performing, omnichannel account-based orchestrations. But much of today’s conversation revolves around linear, top-down campaigns, where the target account is placed in a marketing or sales play, operating within a siloed platform throughout the buyer’s journey. The result is often antithetical to the desired buyer “experience.” Addressing this reality requires rethinking how marketers engage with accounts.
The most mature account-based orchestrations are adaptive, understanding a target’s changing needs, aligning content to those desires, and delivering personalized experiences consistently across multiple channels. This demands a new approach to data management, better use of intent and predictive insights, and fully synchronized orchestration.
To make meaningful connections with prospects and customers amidst these changes, enterprise marketers are evolving their ABM initiatives to focus on highly personalized experiences tailored to the account level and individual locations and buyer roles. Increasingly, ABM leaders employ a set of principles and processes that are consistent from company to company – giving others a blueprint for success. The most critical steps for marketers to achieve significant results with their ABM programs include:
Collaborate Closely Across the Organization
Enterprise marketers must share insights widely across interdisciplinary teams. This allows campaigns to be coordinated across shared accounts. A study of top ABM performers found that nine in ten reported close cross-functional collaborations between marketing and sales. ABM leaders need to establish a standardized measurement framework so everyone is working toward the same goals and success.
Establish a Single Source of Truth
Not only are ABM leaders’ teams highly integrated, but so is their data. A single view of data allows for a deeper understanding of audience needs and improves collaboration. Eight out of ten (80%) top performers use data from three or more systems to guide their ABM practice, and even more, 84%, say that their tech stack is mostly or completely integrated. This is more than double the number (30%) of those whose ABM impact was negative or couldn't be measured.
Deliver Messages Consistently - and Across Touchpoints
Successful ABM marketers can customize the buyer’s experience based on the specific product or solution under consideration and factor in their stage within the buying journey. Almost half of leading ABM practitioners (46%) go beyond personalizing messages by industry to adapt their messages to the recipient’s job role and stage of the customer lifecycle. Highly personalized content delivered at the right time is more critical than ever since customers often skip “steps” on the buying journey and require digital experiences to adapt accordingly.
Grasping at New Buzzwords Isn’t the Answer
Calling an initiative “ABX” instead of “ABM” doesn’t make it easier to execute successfully. In fact, in a rush to accelerate the delivery of 'account-based experiences', the platforms that support it have become a critical bottleneck, creating yet another siloed system. This not only adds to the complexity but also undermines the outcomes it is intended to improve.
Today’s B2B marketers face unprecedented challenges but the enterprise must approach ABM as a guiding strategy rather than a limited tactic. Synthesizing data across multiple sources, eliminating tech and people silos, and taking a collaborative approach to ABM can give marketers a deeper understanding of what target accounts need and where to deliver it. The right tech solutions can trigger omnichannel actions based on account insights, simplifying the complexity of ABM and executing mature, omnichannel orchestrations that have a measurable impact on revenue.
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Core ABM
Article | June 15, 2022
Recently, Contentgine, a content-based marketing agency, released its latest ‘Top 5’ research ranking for popular artificial intelligence (AI) related content consumed by B2B decision-makers. The content assets, mostly e-books, that made it to the list focus on predictive analytics, cloud-based machine learning (ML) technologies, deep data analytics, and more.
But why are B2B decision-makers so curious about AI and ML?
They want to use AI and ML-based solutions effectively to streamline their business processes and improve their marketing strategies.
Digital transformation, heightened consumer expectations, and changing buyer dynamics govern the way B2B decision-makers utilize their resources. Let us look at what is making them seek AI and ML-related content on such a high scale:
AI Simplifies Decision-Making
A survey conducted by SurveyMonkey concluded that 6 out of 10 B2B decision-makers experience decision paralysis—difficulty in choosing an option from a few viable ones—more often than expected. Furthermore, reaching a consensus becomes cumbersome if too many stakeholders are involved in the decision-making process. In such sticky situations, AI algorithms come to the rescue. They leverage heterogeneous data from social media, reports, website activity and more, to offer insights on management and resource allocation, assist in troubleshooting problems and aid strategic development. They alleviate issues that insufficient data and a lack of proper tools to measure metrics pose. They present a clear picture in front of the decision-makers to enable them to make an informed decision.
Assists in Lead Generation
Forget archaic, standard prospecting tools. You can effortlessly conduct lead generation research using various complex parameters with AI-powered tools. You can also analyze customer behavior, create dynamic, intuitive, secure and valuable lead lists. Sifting through massive lead generation data to discover the client profiles that match your ICP gets easier. On the other hand, ML helps with demand prediction, churn prediction, local optimization, and sentiment analysis, so you can offer an excellent customer experience to your leads. AI lead generation tools such as Conversica, Drift, and LeadCrunch can have conversations with your leads, collect their email addresses, and qualify them even before handing them off to the sales teams. AI-powered lead scoring can help you identify intent signals that your marketing teams might have missed.
Optimizes Content Strategy
Let’s face it. You don’t want to sell Eskimo ice. Irrelevant content sabotages your chances of creating a lasting relationship with your prospects. Your content should align with your customer’s needs and pain points. Thanks to machine learning, deep content personalization is possible. ML can analyze content assets on your website and send the relevant ones to a prospect at the right time based on their position in the buyer’s journey.
AI and ML Are Changing the Game for B2B Businesses
According to an O’Reilly survey commissioned by MemSQL, 71% of executives said that ML and AI are game-changers for their business. B2B decision-makers are investing their resources in exploring the advantages of AI and ML in-depth. They are keen to implement AI systems and ML-based solutions to eliminate human errors, continuously analyze vast amounts of raw data, and harness structured solutions to problems they face in executing their business processes.
VMWare Uses Acrolinx to Streamline Content Program
AI-enabled content solution Acrolinx offered VMWare real-time dashboards on the results of its content activity. The qualitative report helped VMWare focus its resources on making its content better so that it could get more conversions.
Closing Thoughts
“AI will increasingly determine which firms win and which firms lose.” - Phil Clement, former CMO of Aon.
“AI will increasingly determine which firms win and which firms lose.” - Phil Clement, former CMO of Aon. AI and ML can significantly impact business operations and marketing campaigns in the B2B domain. To have a competitive edge in the market, understanding their importance and figuring out where and how to use their power will no longer be a choice but a necessity.
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