Buyer Intent Data
Article | March 6, 2023
As Account-Based Marketing (ABM) continues to grow and develop into a powerful marketing strategy, the conventional question remains: How to prove and measure my results?
Diving into your account-based marketing metrics to understand your results is all about asking the right questions. The metrics focus on quality over quantity. This means that looking at engagement levels above traffic volume and opportunities over leads have a close association with sales. Thus, it summarizes activity metrics and outcome metrics together.
If you implement a new sales methodology without adopting new sales metrics, you’ll have a much harder time tracking the progress of your marketing efforts. That’s why the companies, shifting to an account-based framework, should update their KPIs, as these are the leading indicators of success.
So, the account-based marketing metrics highly focus on the activity of an individual lead and look at crucial accounts that would likely drive the most revenue for your organization.
How are Account-Based Marketing Metrics Different?
The rate at which digital marketers have moved towards the ABM model by creating successful ABM campaigns is quite surprising. While many thought, ‘Will this thing stick?’ or ‘Is this just a whim that will go away in the future?’
But it’s 2021, and ABM has become even more popular in the B2B world as marketers see value in targeting accounts and not only leads.
Recent research from SiriusDecisions states that 93% of marketers consider ABM extremely important to their overall organizational success. With any marketing strategy, you are going to be asked whether your campaign is performing well or not. It indeed takes time for the programs to run for any marketer who has built an ABM strategy. So, what should you consider more in creating an ABM strategy?
Think quality, not quantity
A team working on the ABM model understands the priority—influencing customers who matter as crucial accounts. So instead of focusing on new lead creation, ABM focuses on activating and engaging the right leads (even if it’s smaller in number).
Similarly, your ABM team needs to focus on growing revenue from every single account. This means what would your team value more: ten random marketing professionals downloading a whitepaper or having a meaningful conversation with a decision-maker?
It’s About Engagement
SiriusDecisions states that there has been a 24% increase in the average B2B sales cycle length since 2019. It means that the larger the deal size, the longer the cycle. With such a lengthy process, you need to measure what’s happening during the progressing phase.
So, how do you do that?
It is engagement on which you need to focus on. Track how deeply the right account gets engaged with your brand. This way, you’ll have a measurable way of showing development in your business.
Engagement in ABM results in immense benefits for most businesses. Here is a list of the latest ABM statistics that shows companies that utilized the strategy saw incredible results, such:
200% rise in ROI
50% of sales teams were more productive and able to optimize qualified leads
30% boost in revenue
66% augmented the number of leads generated
83% saw amplified engagement from targeted leads
Shorter sales cycles grew by 27% and more
However, such benefits of implementing an ABM strategy are only the results of a successful ABM approach, as it’s not an easy task for every organization. The only way to ensure that your business’s ABM efforts are successful is by meticulously monitoring the most important metrics.
The 4 Crucial Metrics to Track
Reading further, you will come across the six crucial types of account-based marketing metrics.
Engagement
How are your prospects get interested and engaged?
The more attention they pay to your company, the more committed they tend to be. Measure the time they spend with your brand or on your website. Monitor when they respond to your marketing programs socially or when they use your product and connect with your sales team.
As one of the account-based marketing metrics, the amount of engagement will be the closest and essential. Therefore, your focus should be to measure how contacts are involved with your content, including the type of content. The following areas will help you understand it deeply:
Email metrics: Track the activities of your audience with your email marketing campaigns. You will want to know the open and click-through rates and look at the number of responses received from each email. Also, how email recipients are sharing your messages with others.
Social metrics: You can check with contacts from your targeted accounts if they have liked, shared, or commented on your posts. Are they following your business page and social accounts?
Consumption rates: Similarly, you can look at how contacts from your targeted accounts consume your online content, specifically information provided on your website and blogs. This shows several page views, average page time, and specific content being viewed and downloaded.
Offline Activity metrics: Beyond your digital information, track your targeted accounts engaging with you offline. Are they attending events you sponsor, readily contacting, and responding to direct mail?
Therefore, these account-based marketing metrics' primary goal is to know where your contacts are in their buying journey. In fact, through these metrics, you can uncover what information (content) your website lacks to support communications in their research.
Awareness
Do your prospects are aware of your company’s name and offerings? Web traffic is an ethical reflection of keeping prospects aware, specifically, traffic coming from within your target accounts. You should also track whether your contacts are opening your emails, attending your events, and contacting through calls, or using any other medium you provided.
Target-Account Reach
Are you able to reach specific target accounts in the right way? Where do you lack in your efforts?
These account-based metrics help you to track success by channel. In case of point, in a webinar campaign, you would measure its success by analyzing event attendance. So, track the percent of target accounts that have successfully enrolled in each program as well. And, finally, track your focus. What is the percentage of all program successes coming from key accounts? This will help you understand how many target accounts reach you through your ABM campaigns, ABM strategies, and other marketing functionalities.
Influence
Your marketing strategy’s influence on a targeted account will be measured mainly by your interactions with each account. However, some of the account-based marketing metrics mentioned above will help check your ABM strategy's influence metrics. But the big question is whether your efforts are working or not. To understand this, you need to evaluate some parameters such as:
The conversion rate for contacts in your targeted accounts
Converting of your targeted accounts in the marketing funnel
Frequency and volume of meetings or calls with each account
With whom you have the discussions— account influencers or final decision-makers
Finally, the results of your meetings
These parameters will divulge what efforts are working and where you need to change your approach or the information you provide to make your business successful.
Types of Account-Based Sales Metrics
Marketing and sales often measure success differently. Account-based metrics can help bring these closer by aligning their focus on a specific list of target accounts.
With an Account-Based Sales Development (ABSD) strategy, there are two types of metrics. These would help you understand whether your sales team is performing well in an account-based sales plan or not.
Activity-based sales metrics
You need to check and understand whether your sales team is doing various marketing activities in the right way or not. This will be specific for each account to be targeted and includes activities like task completion, emails, contacts per day, account coverage, meaningful conversations, and appointments.
Outcome-based sales metrics
It is generally considered under post-sale account-based marketing metrics. Now the time is to track the result of the activities mentioned above. Also, include the rate of accounts accepted from the pipeline created and revenue generated.
In short, the goal is to measure the monetary value of each transaction and to track your performance and successes over time in business. This information is also helpful in identifying new accounts to target.
To know how read through in the next!
Value
Measuring value is more important than your total sales volume, as it is a part of ABM metrics. The goal is to understand the worth of each account to your bottom line—how they compare to other accounts and see the performance of each sales representative. In this context, your account-based marketing metrics should uncover the following:
What is your average selling point value?
What is the average account sales volume?
What is the swelling value of each account?
What is the total sales volume?
How much revenue generated?
What is the value of each deal?
Having a clear answer to these aspects reveals the most tangible insights into your results. By looking at specific accounts, you can measure where you are growing, where opportunities exist and show underperforming accounts. Thus, it will make your work accordingly.
Retention
As account-based marketing metrics measure quality over quantity, retention is one part where this comes into play. In addition, it measures the possibility of a targeted account and their satisfaction level.
Measuring retention is a decent indication of the strength of your account relationships. Accounts that stay for a long term are generally satisfied. Thus, they provide the most value to your business.
On the flip side, dissatisfied accounts won’t stay with you very long. But they are virtuous indicators of areas you need to change and improve — either with the process, products, or account types.
ROI
The most crucial account-based marketing metrics is your return on investment (ROI). Eventually, you measure your ABM campaigns and marketing strategies—if they are effective. So, ROI is the percentage of your investment to earnings.
What makes these account-based marketing metrics so challenging in reality? Several factors influence each transaction or sale. Take a step back and consider these questions:
Has your closure rate improved over the past month, quarter, or year?
On average, how long does it take to close a sale?
What was your ROI for each campaign you launched?
The purpose behind considering these aspects is to know what marketing campaigns were successful and better understand inclusive marketing and sales effectiveness.
Putting all ABM Metric to Work Together
A successful ABM strategy requires various activities, technologies, and outlooks for B2B marketing or demand generation. Here, the use of ABM metrics becomes important for measuring pre-sale success and revenue potential. For this, B2B marketing organizations should monitor post-sale metrics to track client satisfaction.
Therefore, by monitoring the entire ABM funnel, you can incessantly optimize marketing activities and improve customer relationships for your business.
Conclusively, account-based strategies present an incredible opportunity for organizations to make marketing and sales more relevant, focused, and effective. However, to apprehend the benefits, it’s important to measure what matters.
Frequently Asked Questions
How is account-based marketing success measured?
To measure account-based marketing success, here are some important ways:
Understand targeted accounts and needs
Regularly check content analytics statistics
Account engagement
Rate of interactions
Amount of in-depth conversations
Conversion metrics
Sales cycle lengths
What are excellent ABM metrics?
Awareness, engagement, conversion, and outcome are some of the excellent ABM metrics. Putting them together, a business can arrive at a complete set of elementary account-based marketing metrics and attracts more customers.
How are ABM campaigns measured?
The value of your ABM campaigns is scaled by the lifetime value of each targeted accounts. When measuring these, elements such as customer retention, awareness, reach, pipeline velocity, and influence are responsible for making an ABM program successful.
What are key metrics in marketing?
The various key metrics in marketing are:
Viewership metrics
Lead-based metrics
Engagement metrics
Pre-sales metrics
Post-sales metrics
Conversion metrics
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Account Based Data
Article | June 29, 2023
ABM is B2B marketing with a higher ROI. It involves going after fewer accounts with a more personalized approach. So, account selection is vital. No matter the budget, if you fumble the ball in the account selection process, your campaign is bound to fail. Guesswork is not an option. You need to stringently research your ideal accounts based on your ICP (ideal customer profile).
In an interview with Media 7, Maliha Aqeel, Director of Global Communications at Fix Network World, talked about the common mistakes companies make while implementing brand strategy. Not budgeting your ABM strategy correctly may be one of them.
"One of the most common mistakes companies make is implementing a brand strategy that isn’t aligned to the organization’s overall business goal."
Businesses that want to transition into ABM are often confused and have several questions about ABM implementation. One of the most important questions they have is about budgeting.
According to a 2016 report by SiriusDecisions, 33% of companies allocated at least 30% of their marketing budgets to ABM. In 2017 that number increased up to 52% — a 57% year over year increase. Their 2019 State of Account-Based Marketing Study showed that the average ABM budget is around $350,000 excluding head count costs.
Going by these statistics, how much should you invest in your ABM strategy? It is common to finalize a strategy way in advance. Allocating budgets to a certain strategy and then deciding to execute ABM can be a pain.
Before deciding on your ABM budget and streamlining your ABM funding strategy, consider the following factors:
Factors to Consider for ABM Funding
Know Your Target Accounts
Business size, decision-makers, departments, positions, interests, demographics, get all the information you can on your target accounts. Make sure you are investing your money in the right target accounts. The bigger your target account, the more stakeholders, and departments there are to manage. This may considerably increase the cost and complexity of your campaign.
Your Advertising Budget
Zero in on the platforms you want to use to engage your target audience. Once you do this, you will get an idea of how much you need to spend to reach your audience on these platforms and get maximum engagement.
Additional marketing techniques like seminars, webinars, conferences, and other events should also be considered in your ABM funding.
Brand Awareness
Gather information on how well your target accounts know your brand. If they already know your brand, then you are saving time and money on creating a new relationship from scratch. However, if your brand does not have a good reputation or reach, creating new leads requires more resources than creating new opportunities.
Your Product’s Complexity
If your product or service complexity is high, you need to work harder to explain its advantages and benefits to convince the stakeholders of your target accounts. This effort is directly proportional to the amount of money you need to spend.
Your Customer’s Needs
The customer’s need for your product or service defines how much you need to spend on advertising. If there is no urgency or if there are many similar solutions that they have used in the past, it becomes difficult to convince them to use your product or service. In short, if they don’t need your product, you need to spend a better part of your budget on impressing them.
Your Competition
The more competitors you have, the more aggressive your campaign needs to be. An aggressive campaign will need a bigger budget. It gets trickier if your competitors already have an established relationship with your target account.
However, if you have the target account’s CLV (customer lifetime value) figured out, you can easily determine how much you need to spend on pursuing a particular account.
Technology Integration
To deliver hyper personalized account-based experiences, you need to find suitable technological platforms to launch your ABM strategy. Platforms like ABM Unified Workforce are an ideal start because of their unified approach to strategy implementation. Consider allocating a part of your budget to technology integrations so you remain up-to-speed with modern implementations like marketing automation. It will also help you optimize your campaign results.
ABM Partners
You need knowledge, human resources, and technology to launch and successfully run account-based marketing campaigns. Alternatively, you can also hire new staff or train the people you already have. Partnering with an ABM agency is also a great option. It not only saves you the time and effort of finding the right marketers, but it also delivers the results and metrics you expect. There are many service providers in the market who can help you kick-start your ABM campaign.
Funding Your ABM Strategy
Now that you know the factors that should be considered for your ABM funding, let us look at some tips to enhance your budgeting.
Identify Target Account CLV
In ABM, less is more, so identify target accounts based on their CLV. It may require three or more years for your ABM campaign to show results, so make sure you periodically assess your target account’s CLV before making big investments.
Harness Technology
Tie your technology budget with sales. Support your goals and streamline your processes by using martech. Collaborating with specialized agencies that have talent and technology can uplift your ABM campaign. Not only do agencies quickly launch your campaign, but they also save you the trouble of recruiting new staff. However, make sure you engage a trustworthy agency with the best technology offerings and expertise.
Get Approval and Support from Stakeholders
Get your stakeholders on your side by justifying your budget with a list of target accounts and their projected value. If you are planning to implement ABM, then you should already have a preliminary version of your ABM funding proposal ready.
Measure Your Performance
Use relationships, reputation, and revenue, the three crucial R’s to measure your performance. These should be your benchmarks and should be assessed periodically.
Conclusion
ABM funding takes effort and time but doing it diligently can bring an increase in ROI, brand awareness, revenue, and confidence in ABM.
FAQ
What is the first step in your ABM funding strategy?
The first step in your ABM funding strategy is to know your target accounts through stringent research.
What are the three important Rs for measuring ABM performance?
The three important Rs for measuring ABM’s performance are relationship, reputation, and revenue.
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Buyer Intent Data
Article | June 20, 2023
You’re overcomplicating it. You don’t need the studio lighting, you don’t need a $2000+ camera, you don’t need a full production crew. Actually, it can actually be more effective for your content to not use any of this. Keep reading to learn how.
By now, I’m sure you’ve noticed the rise of user-generated content (UGC). UGC is photos and videos created for your brand by customers, viewers, or followers. There’s so much beauty in this and throughout 2020, with everyone stuck inside their house, lots of companies had no choice but to make do with what they could. Sometimes this meant FaceTime photoshoots or videos that customers shot on regular iPhones. I am a huge fan of user-generated content and most consumers are, too.
Let’s unpack the beauty of why this is such a beautiful and effective form of content on both the customer side as well as the business’ side.
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Targeted Account Strategy
Article | July 5, 2022
Account-based marketing in healthcare helps marketers reach institutional decision-makers based on intent and target accounts. However, ABM becomes a bit more complex in the healthcare domain where the needs, regulations, and procurement processes vary widely, and so do the ways healthcare providers communicate. For an ABM strategy to work in this domain, effort, time, tailored content, and deep customer insights are necessary.
ABM Strategy in Healthcare
Here are the co-ordinated steps you need to take to implement ABM in the healthcare domain:
Getting Buy-in
Get buy-in from sponsors at the highest level and coordinate with functional stakeholders. Create client-centric teams and decide on KPIs that matter.
Identify Key Accounts
With the help of sales representatives and relationship managers, identify key HCP accounts that can benefit from your ABM strategy.
Conduct Extensive Research
Deep-dive into research on these key accounts, their history, buyer journeys with you. Find out their current and future needs and issues, and their status within the market.
Tailor Your Content
The research will help you tailor the content for your content marketing strategy. Address the decision-makers with content that solves their pressing issues to get the conversions you want.
Analyze & Adjust the Strategy
Analyze campaign results from time to time (preferably quarterly). Based on your identified KPIs, check what is working and what isn’t bringing the expected results. Adjust your strategy accordingly.
What to Expect from ABM in Healthcare?
Salesforce recently conducted research among healthcare marketing professionals. The results showed that 70% believed connected customer journeys positively impacted client loyalty and willingness to recommend products to others. So, ABM could be a great way to increase your revenue and get a higher ROI as compared to any other marketing strategy.
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