Buyer Intent Data
Article | September 11, 2023
Over the last couple years, there has been a paradigm shift in the way customers engage with brands. The effect of this shift has also trickled down to the B2B domain. The marketing strategies that drove sales and revenue pre-COVID no longer work. In response, brands are focusing on revolutionizing their marketing strategies by implementing ABM to optimize their processes and drive a higher ROI. Today, 67% of brands leverage account-based marketing.
Account-based marketing (ABM) is the answer to B2B marketers’ struggles as they navigate through the volatile business situation that the pandemic has created. It uses content personalization, focused targeting of high-value accounts, and aligns the marketing strategy with business goals. Through multiple platforms, brand awareness, and optimized processes, ABM gives a higher ROI than any other marketing strategy.
In an interview with Media 7, Mark Emond, Founder and President of Demand Spring, talked about B2B marketing strategies, content, and technology stacks.
“In today’s long B2B buying journey, buyers are in control and they are interacting across multiple channels. The key is to use data and technology to serve up highly targeted content across channels, tuned to the stage of the buyer’s journey a prospect is in, and what their behavior shows they are most apt to engage in.”
The following five emerging trends in account-based marketing have defined ABM in 2021 and may influence the way it evolves in 2022:
Data Integration
Manually researching target account data requires resources and time. To overcome this challenge, businesses use integrated marketing automation and CRM to collect firmographic data (company size and location), technographic data (target company’s technological choices), behavioral and intent data, predictive analytics, and more to optimize their ABM campaigns.
Marketing automation and CRM keep track of this integration so that brands can segment their prospects effectively. With the help of this integration, they can also find accounts similar to their target accounts. Breaking down internal info silos for cross-departmental collaboration promotes using the valuable customer intelligence that departments have. For example, the product management department can share the customization preferences of the clients they work with. This information can help marketers offer clients just what they want. Data integration helps steer ABM campaigns in the right direction.
New Tools
A wide array of tools to simplify and optimize account-based marketing are available on the market. These tools are used for CRM and marketing automation, intent monitoring, campaign execution, orchestration, measuring and reporting the performance of the ABM campaign, and content syndication. These tools are a part of the martech stack that brands use to find key accounts closest to their ideal customer profile (ICP). They facilitate better resource allocation so that personnel can spend more time on personalized interactions with the target accounts.
B2B businesses prefer using marketing automation platforms that they can customize to fit their needs, like sending email marketing (behavior based email), CRM and sales automation, campaign tracking, account-based digital marketing, and analyzing the performance of their ABM campaign, instead of creating a martech stack from scratch. They choose software that can have numerous integrations, products, and services to better adapt to changing circumstances.
Omnichannel Presence
Omnichannel presence is one of the most influential emerging trends in account-based marketing. Brands need to be present and relevant in the lives of their customers. They do this by using different channels for communication and engagement so that their relationship is deep and meaningful, focusing on understanding their problems and offering effective solutions.
A 2019 study by Gartner found that B2B buyers only spent 17% of their time meeting with potential suppliers. In the current pandemic situation, in-person events and meetings are replaced by AI-powered chat bots, behavior-based emails, personalized website content, and account-based digital advertising so that customers receive a steady flow of information from businesses across different channels. Marketing automation streamlines this omnichannel communication in ABM. However, it can also complicate things for buyers because of the barrage of information they receive. The Gartner study found that 77% of B2B customers found their purchase journey difficult. Striking a careful balance is necessary while integrating new channels into your strategy.
Customized Content
According to a 2020 ABM Benchmark Survey Report, 42% of respondents are personalising their content to increase account engagement and build long-term relationships. Businesses are creating tailored content for specific industries, roles, titles, challenges, and needs. Their content strategy is based on mapping content to suit a specific buyer persona. They engage the buyer at every stage. As one of the most important emerging trends in account-based marketing, customized content is making a huge difference in lead generation, conversion, and retargeting accounts.
The latest tools allow B2B marketers to personalize content based on target accounts’ interests and preferences. Selecting an appropriate content format, topics of interest, and the response to the use of respected industry influencers are mapped to create hyper-personalized content to better connect with prospects, especially decision-makers. Using marketing automation can modernize this process and deliver extraordinary results in terms of conversions and lead nurturing.
Account Metrics
Assessing the performance of an ABM campaign is of paramount importance if marketers want to meet their ROI expectations. To keep up with the emerging trends in marketing and analyze campaign performance, B2B marketers are focusing on account-centric metrics. Generated revenue and the number of accounts gained and retained are mapped using metric tools. Marketers also focus on KPIs like win rate, pipeline velocity, pipeline contribution, and account engagement score to measure the success of their ABM campaigns. As account-based marketing is evolving, it is crucial to map campaign performance so any weaknesses can be taken care of and the campaign can be optimized for better results.
Connecting siloed data sets across the entire content strategy becomes easy because of these ABM-specific metrics. These metrics gather valuable information that impacts purchase decisions as prospects move through the sales and marketing cycle.
How Snapchat’s Bitmoji Brings Traffic to Its Discover Page
Snapchat’s Bitmoji app was launched in 2016 so that users could create their own personalized cartoon avatars. Every user’s Bitmoji appears on the Discover page, where advertisements and brand content are also displayed. This way, traffic comes to the Discover page for Bitmoji but ends up being exposed to brand content and advertisements. This is a great illustration of how personalized content can drive traffic.
Conclusion
B2B marketers are keeping up with the changing and emerging trends in account-based marketing to get the most out of their campaigns. In 2022, ABM is expected to flourish and optimize the demand generation and conversion process.
FAQ
What is the future of ABM?
ABM is expected to become robust with the use of technology like marketing automation to enhance the customer experience.
Why should businesses use account-based marketing?
Account-based marketing motivates marketing and sales teams to work together, identify target accounts, craft campaigns, and align individual accounts through the pipeline.
Read More
Buyer Intent Data
Article | August 23, 2022
High-value content plays a key role in account-based marketing. Account-based marketing uses content to nurture leads and address their pain points throughout the sales process.
A perfect ABM strategy is one that provides relevant content to the right prospects at the right time. ABM content needs to be personal and highly relevant to create an impact on the stakeholders of your target account.
In an interview with Media 7, Stuart Sumner, Editorial Director at Incisive Media, talked about the importance of content in marketing strategy.
“The best way to win the content war is to have better, more valuable, and more timely content than your competitors. You need to offer audiences a regular supply of high-quality, in-depth content, which they can’t get elsewhere.”
The need for effective content is all-encompassing across industries, demographics, and niche domains. It helps businesses seek solutions to their critical business challenges. Reading through the opinions of other thought leaders from the industry influences their purchase decisions. So, good quality, reliable content can convince a business that you are the ideal choice for a B2B association.
How Should ABM Content Be Organized?
Creating effective content is the need of the hour, but it can be challenging if done without a direction or goal in mind.
Your ABM content should build brand awareness, and engage the readers while also presenting value to them. It should also be personalized enough to convey your involvement and dedication to your target account. To organize ABM content effectively, follow these steps:
Conduct Stringent Research
Stringently researching your target audience can help to create a content framework that can capture the solutions to their problems, their needs, and their interests. When you investigate the target accounts in-depth, you will know what aspects you can leverage to capture their attention and interest. Then you can organize the content to engage them.
Another interesting approach is to directly ask your audience about the kind of content they enjoy and their preferred formats. These insights can help you personalize the content better because 80% of consumers prefer shopping with brands that provide a personalized experience. You might also be able to leverage content for more than one account.
Maintain a Content Inventory
The research-based content that was created before you developed your ABM strategy can be repurposed to target the accounts in your focus. Creating a content library and mapping the intent of your content can help you with repurposing the correct content. The more detailed your content library, the easier it gets to reuse it. Consider organizing your content library with dates, extra information, highlights, and formats so you can start using the content without much ado.
The content you develop should complement your ABM strategy. As a part of your ABM strategy, it should add value to your marketing effort.
Create a Content Matrix
Create a content matrix that lists out the target accounts in your focus. It is a tool to organize your data to meet your marketing objectives. Based on your objectives, you can carry out content mapping to influence purchase decisions for these accounts. This can help you decide on the purpose of your content strategy. Do you want to create awareness or incite action from your readers? By figuring out what you want, you can use your content matrix to understand the scope to personalize the content in line with your ABM goals.
Analyze Your Performance
Experiment with different formats, visuals, and messages while creating your content. Measure the success of your content strategy like you measure the success of your ABM strategy using KPIs. Gauge how your audience reacts to different formats and visuals to know what to focus more on. Revise, retest, repurpose the content till you get the best output. It all boils down to how well you organize your ABM content.
ABM Content Best Practices
Best practices should be followed when creating content to achieve sales and marketing alignment, drive ROI, and target key accounts. Periodically engaging in website content mapping and content research to see how your content is doing is vital. Here are the ABM content best practices you should follow to organize ABM content:
1. Personalize the content to suit your target account’s needs.
2. Conduct regular SEO and content audits to find any flaws or unresponsive content.
3. Optimize your content to meet search engine optimization needs.
4. Repurpose your content regularly to make the most of it.
5. Support your content with good design.
6. Focus on creating interactive ABM content.
7. Your content should build trust in the minds of your target accounts.
How Coca-Cola’s Fanbase on Facebook Increased by 39% Because of Organized Content
Coca-Cola’s famous ‘Share a Coke’ campaign targeted Australian millennials to improve their sales numbers in the summer of 2011. Under this campaign, Coca-Cola offered name-branded coke bottles to the customers. Through stringent research, understanding their audiences’ preferred formats (TV commercials, newspapers, bus ads, and social media), and implementing strong CTAs in their ads, Coca-Cola gained a 39% increase in its Facebook fanbase.
Key Takeaway
The way you formulate and organize ABM content plays a key role in driving results from your ABM strategy. It is crucial that you dedicate time and resources to creating, personalizing, organizing, presenting, and analyzing the content you offer to your target accounts. You can drive a higher ROI from your ABM and content strategy only when your approach to content is as focused as your ABM strategy.
FAQ
What is a content matrix?
A content matrix is a tool that a marketer can use to plan and offer the right content in the right format and on the right platform to the target audience.
How can you use old content in your ABM strategy?
You can use your old content by repurposing it to better target your key accounts.
Read More
Programmatic ABM
Article | June 9, 2022
B2B markets are more competitive than ever. They’re crowded, commoditized, noisy, and everybody is trying to knock on the same doors. So how do you break through the cacophony?
The key is to not wait and reach out to your accounts with everyone else but to reach them when they are still early in the buyer’s journey. And that’s where leveraging intent data comes in.
With intent data, you can see who is showing interest in your company or your competitors before they respond to your marketing efforts through form fills for content downloads or event RSVPs. You can create orchestrated plays as soon as they are in-market when they are searching. So you can deliver fresh ideas based on knowledge and understanding of an account’s industry and unique business issues before everyone else.
Read More
Account Based Analytics
Article | December 6, 2021
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.
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "FAQPage",
"mainEntity": [{
"@type": "Question",
"name": "What Are the Challenges in the AI-based ABM Strategy?",
"acceptedAnswer": {
"@type": "Answer",
"text": "Managing, protecting, and enriching data obtained from CRM and other customer support systems can be challenging."
}
},{
"@type": "Question",
"name": "How Can AI Help in Strengthening Your ABM Strategy?",
"acceptedAnswer": {
"@type": "Answer",
"text": "AI helps with personalizing content, automation, ABM optimization, and providing predictive insights for lead conversion."
}
},{
"@type": "Question",
"name": "What Does a Strong AI-based ABM Strategy Do for Your Business?",
"acceptedAnswer": {
"@type": "Answer",
"text": "A strong AI-based ABM strategy helps with account profiling, analytics, reporting and hyper-individualized content, which leads to increased lead conversion."
}
}]
}
Read More