Account Based Analytics
Article | August 3, 2022
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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Buyer Intent Data
Article | March 6, 2023
In 2021, 70% of marketers reported using an account-based marketing campaign. Since 2020, their numbers have gone up by 15%. One of the reasons ABM has become so popular is that it can greatly enhance customer loyalty and revenue by tailoring the buyer's journey for unique clients. ABM tactics can further enrich an ABM strategy.
In an interview with Media 7, Tim Kopp, CEO of Terminus, talked about the account-based marketing process.
“ABM flips the traditional approach of generating leads on its head. It doesn’t adhere to the idea that a full sales funnel will create a trickle-down effect leading to high conversion rates. Instead, ABM enables marketers to refine the criteria by which they identify buyers. While marketers might not have the same amount of leads, each lead is targeted and relevant — and thus more likely to convert.”
Account-based marketing is being implemented confidently by more and more B2B marketers. It is important to find ways to amplify its impact on your revenue through accurate targeting and conversions. Let us take a look at three effective ABM tactics that can help you enhance your account-based marketing strategy.
3 Effective ABM Tactics for B2B Marketers
Improve Your ABM Funnel's Performance
Account-based marketing funnel optimization may be one of the most effective ABM tactics to grow your business.
The following techniques can help you improve your funnel’s overall performance:
Audit Your Content Smartly
Check if your content is personalized according to your target accounts' personas and industry. Does it address the specific needs and pain points of your target accounts? Your content can help you narrow down your list of ideal customers.
Make Good Use of Intent Data
Dynamic ABM targeting is essential. Based on data from your CRM and other platforms, update your list of target accounts. Make sure you have a good idea of what your target audience is looking for. Are there issues with your company, products, or services that you provide? Always use this information to improve your list.
Approach Different Markets Confidently
Run multiple account-based marketing campaigns with varying degrees of customization and investment parallelly. Choose between ABM Lite (targeting a small number of accounts), Programmatic ABM (targeting many accounts), or Strategic ABM (targeting a single account) according to your business goals.
Optimize Engaged Accounts
No two engaged accounts can be in the same sales funnel stage. So, optimizing engaged accounts can be difficult. Start by tracking click-through rates, organic website traffic, email open rates, and any other digital interactions with your brand to see how effective your ads are. Your ads must be both informative and visually appealing. Reach engaged accounts through social media, email, and other suitable channels.
Unlock Opportunities
Lead generation strategies based on advertising retargeting allow your sales team to tap into accounts that have previously interacted with your ads with renewed vigour. By working with your sales team to develop an account engagement model that defines an "engaged account," you can streamline the lead generation strategies by limiting the number of accounts that your team is required to manage.
Increase Outreach
Your target account stakeholders' employees should be the focus of your outreach efforts. Target accounts can be contacted via direct mail or in-person meetings. As a result, new pipeline opportunities are now available. You can reach a larger audience by using one-on-one C-level campaigns like phone calls and demos.
Implement Marketing Automation
Artificial intelligence (AI) marketing can help you improve your B2B account-based marketing strategy. It gives you predictive insights and makes your communication more effective.
In your account-based marketing process, marketing automation can run email campaigns that can show you how people interact with your account.
CRM data is used by AI and big data to get information about people from different platforms. This information can help you make your content unique for more ABM targeting. Account-based marketing services give you the ability to run targeted marketing campaigns at scale. As an account-based marketing service, ABM automation aims to target firms with multi-person purchasing committees extensively by utilizing individualized content and engagement to influence their purchase decisions.
The immediate impact of using marketing automation in your B2B marketing strategy is a shorter sales cycle, a free marketing team, better sales and marketing team alignment, and stronger customer retention.
You can start off by creating your ICP. After that, you can set up your target account, integrate your account-based marketing strategy with marketing automation software and your CRM. Then you can create impressive campaigns, personalize content, and offer tailored engagement to your target accounts. You can access the performance of your ABM marketing strategy using marketing automation software’s dashboard and tweak your strategy to make the most of it.
Analyze and Improve Your Strategy
B2B account-based marketing requires regular testing of your ad wording, content, design, and channel aspects to see what works and what doesn't. You can improve the efficiency of your approach by keeping tabs on key performance indicators (KPIs). Instead of abandoning a tactic because it isn't working, improve it by tweaking it. Account-based marketing approaches can succeed only if you assess how they affect your strategy and continually improve its execution.
In an interview with Media 7, Abhi Yadav, Founder & CTO of Zylotech, talked about the importance of customer intelligence in marketing.
“Tracking every point of engagement is critical in delivering a holistic view of where buyers are actively engaged and what’s working.”
Developing an efficient B2B marketing strategy using the ABM approach requires a great deal of trial and error. Optimize your ABM approach by defining and measuring your KPIs. This B2B ABM marketing tactic is crucial to understanding how effectively you are engaging key accounts and moving them forward in the sales funnel.
Couchbase Generated $1.5 Million in Pipeline Opportunities Using ABM
Couchbase, a NoSQL database provider for enterprises, used a data-based ABM strategy to determine the interests of their target customers. They then combined real-world behavior with system-generated social personas of their customers, which helped them generate $1.5 million in pipeline opportunities.
Conclusion
These account-based marketing tactics can help you optimize your ABM marketing strategy. Concentrating on your funnel metrics and KPI and constantly improving your strategy can help you get the best results.
FAQ
What are funnel metrics?
Velocity (time spent in days by a prospect in each stage of the funnel), conversion rates (percentage of leads that move from stage to stage in the funnel), and volume (number of leads passing through any stage of the funnel) are funnel metrics. Improving them is a great B2B ABM marketing tactic.
What are the benefits of account-based marketing automation?
ABM automation is a great account-based marketing tactic. It allows you to set up a marketing process at once and then scale it across different campaigns. With the help of automation, tasks like media buying, modeling, upselling, and ad targeting are carried out efficiently.
How can you develop an effective ABM strategy?
Start by identifying key accounts. You can then map their decision-makers, create targeted campaigns to get their engagement, decide on the best channels to approach them, execute your marketing campaigns, and finally measure the results of your ABM strategy.
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Buyer Intent Data
Article | August 23, 2022
The only constant thing about account-based marketing (ABM) is its evolution. ABM goes beyond plain sales and marketing. It is a strategic and dynamic approach to marketing. It influences B2B buyers who are savvy, digitally native, and educated buying committee members who are otherwise difficult to target, let alone convert.
ABM has evolved from pure one-to-one ABM to one-to-few and one-to-many. We know how ABM is now ABX, which harnesses intent data and programmatic advertising for better results.
Consider a company that wants to implement account-based marketing on its key accounts. If every aspect of this organization revolves around the needs, demands, and requirements of its key accounts, it becomes an account-centric enterprise.
In the first part of this article, we will discuss how an account-based approach on an organizational level can enhance your ABM strategy and help you create relationships that deliver mutual value and growth.
Building an Account-Centric Organization
Transforming an entire organization into an account-centric one is overall an eight-step process. Let us look at the first four:
Two-fold Approach: Check Your Foundation
Examine your foundation before implementing an account-based strategy. Ensure that your tech stack is optimum and that the right employees handle the right responsibilities. Secure the internal buy-in needed to get your ABM program up and running.
Adaption: Make Your Changes Eventually
Make changes to your current strategy only when required and over time. It is unnecessary to completely revamp your organization to align it with your ABM efforts. Ideally, make changes based on your performance. Always focus on the target account so all your teams— demand generation, events, sales, and marketing teams— will have the mindset to target your ICP. The correct approach is to enhance your processes as you go.
Awareness: Train and Educate Your Teams
Your entire team should live and breathe ABM. Align your sales and marketing teams. Other teams should match their processes to best suit the target accounts’ needs. Train and educate your teams, so they can easily adapt to new ABM processes and don’t feel blind-sided.
Analysis: Data Matters a Great Deal
Understand your data. Constantly review, acknowledge, and adjust your processes based on the data at hand. Then, support it with the knowledge of your salespeople. Get their input and advice on which accounts to engage with for optimal results. Then, bring them into the decision-making process for outstanding results.
It’s a Process
Building an account-centric organization requires time and commitment. In the next part of this article, we will discuss important aspects that impact and govern the success of your ABM strategy.
Stay tuned to read the next part of the article.
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Account Management
Article | July 7, 2022
Targeted advertising has become the norm on popular ABM platforms. As a result, many marketers have forgotten ABM's principles. Leadership, marketing, revenue, sales enablement, customer success, and product teams should work together to hit ABM numbers instead of completely relying on platforms and demand generation strategies.
Here are three reasons why ABM platforms and demand generation campaigns shouldn’t drive your ABM strategy:
GTM Teams Cannot Advance
Companies focusing on targeted demand gen through technology make their ABM strategy campaign-based instead of focusing on the interactions the sales and marketing teams need to have with target accounts to deliver revenue growth. They struggle with winning multi-year contracts.
Ideally, the teams should focus on filling the gaps left by competitors with different content and messaging in order to turn accounts into sales.
Buying Journey Support is Limited
ABM is about getting key accounts to generate revenue. When teams rely on technology to put out content and messaging for target accounts but don’t change their sales motions, processes, and conversations, their win rates drop. They should change their prospects’ experiences at every stage of the buying journey to deliver an optimal customer experience.
Sales Cycles Continue to be Lengthy
An ABM strategy should be used to influence both selling conversations and internal conversations that the sales teams are not privy to. Creating demand and building a pipeline through ABM platforms won’t bring revenue growth if there is no follow-through to convert accounts. Teams should engage in account-based enablement and come up with a plan to engage accounts that go dark or get stuck in the buyer journey.
Use Technology and Demand Generation in Moderation
Remember that ABM platforms and demand gen strategies can enhance your ABM efforts, but they shouldn’t be the driving force behind your ABM strategy. Marketers need to start using ABM to fix the revenue issues in their organizations instead of treating it like a targeted demand-generation function.
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