Account Based Data
Article | August 19, 2022
Account-based marketing strategies prioritize intent data to maximize the effectiveness of their sales and marketing workflows. With the help of intent data, businesses can tailor their interactions with target accounts based on their needs and build valuable relationships with them.
In an interview with Media 7, Gil Allouche, the Founder and CEO of Metadata.io, talked about the use of intent data for lead generation.
“Without the right tools, companies don’t realize what campaigns have zero traction and what campaigns are attracting the most potential buyers, therefore, money is wasted on leads that won’t lead to revenue.”
Intent data aids in the prioritization of a list of target accounts to be pursued for conversion. Additionally, some businesses create specialized groups and targeted lists to hyper-personalize their content offerings and influence purchase decisions.
Importance of Buyer Intent Data
To make the most of intent data, companies engage B2B buyer intent data tools provided by exclusive intent data providers or account-based marketing software providers. They use these tools for effective lead generation.
According to Insights on Professionals, almost 40% of businesses spend more than half of their marketing budget on intent data, and 70% plan to increase spending on intent data.
Intent data plays a big role in enhancing an ABM strategy. Below are some ways:
It helps with target account selection
With the help of intent data, you can define your ICP, understand the ICP’s intent, and gather relevant data from multiple intent data tools or platforms and collate it to amplify your target list. As a bonus, you can also divide your target list based on their intent. Finally, you can target the accounts with the help of all the insights that you gained from the B2B intent data.
You can zero-in on the best messaging
High-quality B2B buyer intent data includes insights like a prospect’s research history. You can uncover actionable prospect trends that you would have otherwise missed. Using this crucial information, you can optimize your messaging because it plays an important role in content marketing. Buyer intent data can enhance sales pitches by shedding light on the buyer’s interests and needs.
It improves your sales outreach
Prospects are now focused on doing their own research based on the suggestions their friends or acquaintances provide. With the help of intent signals that the buyer intent tools record, the movement of the prospect is revealed. Once your sales team knows the position of a prospect in the sales funnel, they can decide when to get in touch and work towards a conversion.
It helps you retain customers
If your customers are looking at your competitor’s products or services, intent data signals will alert you. This kind of information indicates that you need to evaluate your offerings. You can set up triggers to gather such instances and seek feedback from customers to understand their expectations. You can reach out to these customers and provide them with support and attention so you do not lose them.
You can amplify your content
Content personalization is a crucial component of an effective ABM strategy. Using first and third-party data, you can create impactful blog content, email marketing campaigns, and other relevant content pieces to appeal to your leads. Buyer intent data can help you target your ideal customer profile (ICP). Your marketing team can create content on topics your prospects are looking at and revamp old content to make it more effective.
Why Are B2B Marketers Intent on Using Buyer Intent Data?
ABM marketing is B2B marketing on steroids. For B2B marketers who want to run intent-based marketing campaigns, buyer intent data has become a go-to tool because it helps them understand their target accounts better. Their approach is focused, tailored, and relevant. Such an approach leads to more conversions, shorter sales cycles, and clearer ROI.
Let us look at why B2B marketers are making it a point to use account-based marketing software with buyer intent data tools.
Increases brand exposure through customized websites, landing pages, and social media pages to cater to a specific audience
Aligns sales and marketing teams by bridging the communication gap between them and establishing shared business goals
Facilitates hyper-targeted advertising by providing information on search intent, online behaviour, main interests through keyword searches, and propensity to make purchase
Accurately predicts buyer behavior with the help of comprehensive datasets to forecast the buying patterns of prospects
Enhances customer experience by providing insights into the prospects’ needs and expectations so the curated content resonates with them
3 Best Buyer Intent Data Tools You Should Know About
Here is a list of the three best buyer intent data tools that can help you improve your account-based marketing strategy:
Demandbase
Demandbase’s ABX Cloud uses account intelligence to help its customers orchestrate sales and marketing moves. With the help of reliable and high-quality insights, you can create relevant content for every stage of the B2B buyer’s journey. ABX Cloud has an engagement platform that shows all of the information your marketing and sales teams have gathered in one place. This way, your teams can find opportunities faster, engage with them smartly, and close deals quickly, which will help your business grow.
ABX Cloud also uses predictive analysis so your sales team knows when to approach a lead. It conveniently aligns the efforts of both your sales and marketing teams to create an actionable, measurable, and focused ABM approach. It uses artificial intelligence (AI) for account selection. As a result, your target list is based on intent signals, CRM data, and others, which will help you know your target accounts well enough to create effective messaging. ABX’s account-based analytics measure engagement across each account and track progress throughout pre-defined, unique account journeys. This is how Demandbase uses intent data for lead generation.
Demandbase was named a leader in the first-ever 2022 Magic Quadrant for Account-based Marketing Platforms. It is the only company to get the best scores for all three use cases in the accompanying 2022 Gartner Critical Capabilities for Account-based Marketing Platforms report.
Demandbase Success Story: SilkRoad Technology, Inc. is a human resource capital management software company. It used Demandbase's ABM platform, which was equipped with intent data, and saw activity and engagement from their top accounts go from 20%–30% to 80%+ in just six months.
Bombora
Bombora proudly markets itself as a market leader in B2B intent data. It is one of the most popular intent-based marketing facilitators. It has the most comprehensive and privacy-compliant data cooperative on the web. In short, it provides clean, risk-free intent data. It collects data consensually from its proprietary data source that comprises of 4000+ top B2B sites on the internet. It provides the most accurate data on a buyer’s digital journey so you can understand their intent. It has named its intent data solution ‘Company Surge.’
Bombora’s data can be integrated with all major platforms across the ad, sales, and martech ecosystems. This added convenience means you do not have to onboard a new system to access Bombora’s data. You can set it up in your current workflow.
Privacy compliance and ethically sourced intent data make Bombora a great choice amongst the tools. It gathers data from websites that are exclusive to Bombora. It has implemented industry-standard consent mechanisms so that all the data is compliant.
Company Surge uses BERT-based machine learning to understand the intent behind the words on a webpage and gives you an accurate picture of your buyer’s interest, pain points, requirements, and intent. It also helps with resolving pre-purchase signals of buyers to 2.8 million businesses by using its patented method that fuses behavioral and IP2C (Internet Protocol to Company) data. This data is then amplified by firmographic and demographic data.
Bombora detects how many users from a specific organization are researching particular topics, how frequently they visit certain webpages, and how deep their research goes as compared to their usual web activity. Based on this information, it can tell when an organization wants to make a purchase.
Bombora Success Story: Hornbill, a global leader of cloud-based workflow application software for IT, HR, security, and customer service teams, integrated Bombora with its HubSpot database. It got net-new in-market accounts every week, which Hornbill prioritized for sales and marketing. In six months, Hornbill found 900+ new accounts that were already in the market, which led to new active sales opportunities.
ZoomInfo
ZoomInfo Intent helps identify and engage buyers in real-time when they research solutions that your company offers. You can discover ready-to-buy prospects, connect with ideal buyers, and integrate the data with the tools that are already a part of your platform. It is simple to map an ideal customer profile using the buying signals collected by ZoomInfo's database.
You can uncover sales-ready leads that are looking at the products or solutions that your company offers. The intent engine triggers signals that are tracked by a network of 300,000 publisher domains. One trillion new keyword-to-device pairs are added to ZoomInfo every month from more than 90% of all the devices in the United States, which is a lot of devices.
ZoomInfo can help you identify and understand entire buying teams based on what they research. You can reach decision makers over the phone, through digital marketing channels, and by email to start a meaningful conversation. You can create automated workflows to close more deals by incorporating contact and intent data into your CRM, marketing, and sales software.
ZoomInfo Success Story: Speakap, an internal communications app, used ZoomInfo Intent and DiscoverOrg’s combined platform. Their bounce rates fell below 1%, their engagement rate increased by 25%, and their pipeline growth increased by more than 50%.
Summing It Up
Buyer intent data tools can enhance the way you do business, how efficiently your sales and marketing teams function, and how effectively you can run your ABM marketing campaigns. Choose your buyer intent data tools from trusted intent data providers based on their offerings, their privacy compliance, integration capabilities, transparent metrics, and overall functionality so that you can make the most of your account-based marketing strategy. This way, you can make the most of your marketing efforts.
FAQ
How can you get buyer intent data?
Buyer intent data is collected by buyer intent data tools, which may be a part of your ABM platform or which you can integrate with your platform. They collect the data from website visits, CRM, social media data, content consumption and off-site activity.
What are the benefits of buyer intent data tools?
Buyer intent data tools provide insights on a customer’s intent to purchase. They do this by mapping the customer journey, performing predictive analysis, behavioral analysis, and tracking competitor data.
How can you use buyer intent data to scale your business?
By using buyer intent data, you can personalize your website, prioritize your inbound leads, nurture your leads, personalize your emails and identify potential customers who haven’t engaged with you yet. So, you can convert the leads into customers by offering them just what they want.
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Buyer Intent Data
Article | June 20, 2023
Introduction: Lead Nurturing
The leads in your database are there because your brand or service offers them a solution to a particular problem they are facing. Developing and reinforcing relationships with leads is critical at every stage of the sales funnel. How can you do this? By fostering leads.
To effectively nurture leads, you must first understand their wants, then address their problems, build brand recognition, and follow up until they become buyers.
Campaigns for Lead Nurturing
Lead nurturing campaigns accelerate the process of deepening your connection with a prospect. A lead nurturing campaign has elements like:
Lead Magnets
Offering relevant content, solutions to pain points, and other enticing content like whitepapers, ebooks, and newsletters in exchange for the visitor’s contact information, mostly email, can get you a lead.
Website Landing Pages
Lead magnets are hosted on landing pages to attract visitors and collect their contact information.
Personalized Content
Personalized content engages and holds the visitor's attention. Marketing software generates this tailored material.
Data Segmentation
Every marketing software allows you to segment your lead data based on differentiating metrics like geography, age, and behavior. So, you can understand and analyze your users better.
Content Development
Using case studies and whitepapers to build credibility throughout the buyer's journey shows your capacity to aid customers you can relate to. This type of content nurturing can turn a visitor into a buyer.
Emailers
Engaging and educating your leads via periodic emails can help maintain a consistent communication chain. Your marketing software will send emails through the lead nurturing workflow you choose.
Marketing Automation
Marketing automation, much like robotic process automation, leverages software to automate marketing tasks. Remember those survey and feedback emails you receive now and then? Marketing automation software sends them.
This software helps marketers align processes, technology, and people to achieve marketing goals. It automates and measures marketing tasks like email campaigns or content schedules into workflows to increase operational efficiency and revenue growth. It sends out marketing emails, grows your database, and collects data that helps with your marketing strategy.
It is used in lead generation, lead nurturing, scoring, relationship marketing, cross-selling and upselling, retention, segmentation, ROI measurement, and ABM.
Choosing a Good Marketing Automation Workflow Software
There are thousands of marketing automation software on the market. Consider the following factors to find the best fit:
Features
The more features your software has, the more you can do to entice a prospect to buy your product or service. Features like email campaigns, real-time alerts, lead management, and personalized messaging are great to have.
Budget-Friendly
The software should be affordable so you can easily implement your strategy without creating a hole in your pocket.
Customizable
Ensure the software can be customized to your needs. This may impact usability. However, customization is an important attribute if you want to track any proprietary data.
Channel Integration
It should easily integrate with other channels so it obtains relevant data to send out selected workflows.
Easy to Use
The software should be easy to use and not require any special training so that the execution process is seamless across teams in an agile environment.
Among the most widely used tools, some notable marketing automation tools are HubSpot, Pardot, Demandbase, and Marketo.
7 Result-oriented Marketing Automation Workflows Revealed
After you choose a marketing automation software that meets the above criteria, it gives you access to various marketing automation workflows that help you nurture your leads. By using specific triggers, you can create different workflows to nurture different kinds of leads. A marketing automation trigger is a unique input that activates a certain workflow when specific conditions are met.
Check out these seven effective marketing automation lead nurturing workflows that you should definitely create:
Hot Lead Workflow
This workflow is crucial for your sales team to bag a lead. Set the criteria for a hot lead workflow by considering the lead’s engagement with your content. This workflow falls into the bottom-of-the-funnel (BoFU) phase, where the lead is very close to being converted to a customer.
Lost Opportunity Workflow
If you have lost a lead due to budget restrictions, competitors, or misalignment of your product, design a workflow that gets the lead back into the sales funnel. You can send such leads special offers or discounts, information on your product’s USP, and a regular update on your products to recapture them.
Re-engagement Notification Workflow
Losing hope when engaged leads go cold on you is not an option. Remind them of your brand to wake them from their slumber. Create a trigger when the lead has spent a specific amount of time not interacting with your content. Your workflow will send this lead an email to get it back into the sales funnel. Special offers, new products or services updates, and company news can get the lead’s attention.
New Subscriber Nurture Workflow
This kind of workflow is crucial for gaining new subscribers and moving your existing subscribers through the funnel. It gets new subscribers to engage with your content. Your new subscribers should receive your newest content first, not just regular subscriber emails.
Topic-based Workflow
If you have a variety of content, create a workflow of the most relevant content that might entice your leads. Once a customer visits your website or downloads an ebook or whitepaper about a certain topic, emails with related content on that topic are sent to them regularly.
Event Workflow
Today, remotely conducted events like webinars or seminars have gained immense popularity. Engaging your target audience with the help of events is not a new trick. A pre-event and post-event workflow can help you remain in touch with event registrants. Important information like event details, agendas, and reminders can be sent to them to keep them in the loop.
Lead Nurturing Workflow
A lead nurturing workflow converts leads into marketing qualified leads (MQLs), leads that have responded to your marketing efforts. If a lead comes and fills up a form on your website, requests a demo, or subscribes to a product launch event, then sending them related content can get them closer to being a marketing-qualified lead.
How Utah-based Start-up Chatbooks Grew Their Customer Engagement by 100%
Using Blueshift’s AI-based cross-channel marketing platform, Chatbooks increased their customer engagement by 100%. They achieved higher conversion rates by engaging with customers 1:1 through personalized content and event-triggered campaigns.
“Blueshift enabled us to up-level our campaigns and provide 1-to-1 personalization using dynamic user information. We can now focus on high-intent customers that want to hear my message rather than email blasting and annoying my whole customer base. The results? A +100% increase in email engagement.”
- Stephen Cruz,Lifecycle Marketing Manager, Chatbooks
Wrapping It Up
Leveraging marketing automation in ABM by creating marketing workflows can do wonders for your ABM marketing strategy. 57% of marketers stated that lead nurturing is the most advantageous feature out of all the features of marketing automation software.
FAQ
Why are marketing automation workflows important for lead nurturing?
Marketing automation workflows make sure that your leads get appropriate engagement based on their type so that they get converted into marketing qualified leads.
How to choose a marketing automation software?
Consider factors like UI, ease of use, features, easy integration, and customization before choosing a marketing automation software.
What factors are important for the success of a marketing automation workflow?
Designing workflows for each type of lead is crucial. Other factors include creating appropriate triggers, mapping customer behavior, and maintaining CRM and technology stack.
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Buyer Intent Data
Article | October 7, 2022
ABM is Agent3’s heartland. It’s what we do best. And if you’re a regular reader of our website, you’ll be in no doubt about how strongly we feel about our commitment to ‘true’ ABM, ie, an approach that treats key accounts as markets of one.
Why? Because it works: according to ITSMA, almost 85% of marketers measuring ROI say that ABM outperforms other marketing investments and research by Alterra Group backs this statistic, revealing ABM had higher ROI than other marketing activities.
So when marketers come to us asking for pilot ABM programs on, say, 8-10 accounts it’s little wonder that the results we achieve soon means they’re asking us to ramp up that ABM activity to 50-100 accounts as interest in ABM within their organization is suddenly piqued.
And therein lies the challenge for many.
To scale a ‘true’ ABM program effectively without compromising on the key fundamentals it encompasses involves the alignment of many moveable parts: technology and resourcing are fundamental considerations, but then there’s also the decision about which accounts to include and why, and establishing clear objectives for the program.
It’s not straightforward, but if this is a challenge you’re grappling with currently, be reassured by the multiple survey results available online that you’re certainly not alone.
And it’s for this reason we chose to discuss the topic at last week’s B2B Marketing Ignite USA event with a panel of esteemed marketers: Carrie Feord – Global Head of ABM Industry Clusters, Servicenow, Giovanni Di Natale, senior manager, enterprise and ABM Marketing, Pure Storage and Vera Tatro, strategic account-based marketing, AMER, Splunk. It was great to sit down with these ABM leaders to explore some of these challenges and provide some perspective on how best to successfully navigate them.
In the session, we covered:
1) How people define ABM at scale and where the line is drawn in terms of defining the difference between 1:few/1:many ‘ABM’ and good account-centric demand generation from Product, Solutions and Industry Marketing teams. We also discussed whether certain compromises need to be made as you pursue scale.
2) How to enable teams in the field to scale with ABM: the panel shared successes they have had as well as highlighting ‘banana skins’ teams need to avoid in terms of developing ABM resources/playbooks/templates/toolkits which can then be activated by a growing team of ABMers and Field Marketers. We also discussed ways to embed a ‘build once, use again’ mindset while still being true to the ideals of ABM.
3) Clarification of roles within ABM organisations across marketing when it comes to scaling and succeeding within ABM – the panel discussed what skillsets and roles they see as being important as organizations shift from being small-scale ABM pilots to broader programs.
As you can probably imagine, it was a lively session and audience feedback would suggest we hit upon some very real challenges, so it was great to hear first-hand from the panel about their own experiences, successes and learnings.
If you missed it, I highly recommend carving 30 minutes out of your day to watch, and if you have any feedback or comments, we’d love to hear!
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Targeted Account Strategy
Article | January 11, 2022
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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