Buyer Intent Data
Article | March 6, 2023
Metrics, Analytics, and Insights in ABM
It is a fact that ABM gives a higher ROI as compared to other marketing strategies. If you are a marketer who has painstakingly built an ABM strategy from scratch, you would understand the amount of time it takes to execute it and for it to show measurable results. How do you measure the success of your ABM strategy? You need to understand the metrics, analytics, and insights. Marketers use these terms interchangeably, but there is a difference between them.
By using raw data points, metrics show you the incremental changes in how target accounts interact with your brand.
Analytics compares the metrics over time to show you how your ABM strategy is performing.
Metrics and analytics together help you gain insights into what is working and what isn’t.
Insights help you take action to improve your ABM strategy.
To measure the success of an ABM strategy, you need to use ABM Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) metrics. ABM KPIs track the performance of your strategy with respect to customer service, marketing, efficiency, revenue, and employment statistics.
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.
Defining ABM KPIs
Use the SMART criteria to evaluate the effectiveness of a KPI. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-Bound.
By identifying how well the KPI fits into these criteria, you can define it. Find answers to the following questions to define your KPI:
Is your goal specific?
Is your goal measurable?
Is it attainable?
Is it relevant to your business?
Is the goal time-bound?
A well-defined KPI should be a part of your marketing analytics strategy to accurately track the performance of your ABM strategy.
KPIs You Should Measure to Track ABM Success
Sales Funnel Metrics
Measuring sales funnel metrics can quickly pinpoint where your ABM strategy has fallen out of alignment with your business goals. They can be classified into three types:
Upper Funnel Metrics
Upper funnel or top-of-funnel metrics track the engagement rate of the leads within your target accounts. They assess the time taken for a lead to complete specific actions like opening your emails, receiving, or responding to direct mail, visiting your website, and more. You can pinpoint which leads are closer to buying based on the increase in engagement. These metrics also help you know which accounts don’t know anything about your company. You can improve your strategy to capture these accounts.
Is there a huge gap between the products and services your target accounts want and the ones you offer? This gap is the white space. Find your white space by identifying where you lack engagement within your accounts. Should you consider targeting different accounts? Eliminate the white space once you find the answers to these questions. Your goal should depend on the size of the company and the number of ICPs you are targeting.
Middle-of-Funnel Metrics
These metrics help measure the impact of your campaign on your top accounts. Are your target accounts having productive meetings and engagements with your sales team? Swiftly moving your leads to the sales team is an indicator of an effective ABM campaign. Also, you should measure the quality of the campaign based on how many leads move to the next stage of the funnel.
Bottom-of-Funnel Metrics
For the bottom-of-funnel metrics, measure average selling point (ASP) to gauge if you have targeted the right accounts with your campaign. If you have a higher close rate within your ABM accounts that means your campaign is performing well. As compared to other marketing strategies, ABM helps businesses increase their close rate.
Customer Churn Rate
The customer churn rate, also known as the attrition rate, is the number of accounts that have stopped doing business with you over a period. It should be as low as possible. It is a metric to measure the quality of the relationship you have with an account. ABM is a qualitative marketing strategy. If your churn rate is high, then reevaluate your products and services and confirm that you are targeting the right accounts. Understanding your target accounts better is the easiest way to decrease your churn rate.
Content Engagement
Content management is of paramount importance while running an ABM strategy. With this KPI, you can track the engagement each piece of content brings. The pieces that don’t perform well should be scrapped or improved to better suit the needs of your target accounts. Email open and click-through rates point towards ineffective subject lines, content, and CTAs.
Form Fills
Form fills are important for collecting data that helps with nurturing and engaging leads. Track your form fills to confirm if you are gathering information effectively. Adjust your campaign if you are not getting the expected results.
Conversions during the Customer Journey
A good way to show your customers that you care about them is to give them several opportunities to buy or sign up. It's important to keep track of the conversion rate for each CTA so that you can figure out where customers are losing interest in the sales process. Having this information will help you improve the customer journey.
Phone Calls and Scheduled Demos
Keeping a record of your phone calls and scheduled demonstrations is crucial to measuring your ABM success. You are creating a personal connection while interacting with the customer so they may take you closer to converting a deal.
Conversion Rate
Every ABM strategy’s aim is to drive sales and acquire new customers. As a metric, the B2B conversion rate is important because it helps you evaluate the success of your campaign and compare your performance to the previous year.
Customer Retention
Assess the health of your accounts by measuring customer satisfaction. A Net Promoter Score (NPS) can determine how satisfied your accounts are with your product or service. You can seek their feedback and use it to create better customer experiences and, in the future, design products and services to cater to their needs so you can retain your customers.
Average Deal Size
This KPI is primarily used by sales managers to understand how well they have utilized the opportunities that have come their way. It is calculated by dividing your total monetary amount of deals by the total number of deals that were converted. It can help the sales team understand what the average deal size is that they are looking at and what they can aim for.
Popular ABM Analytics Tools
The most popular and widely used ABM analytics tools are Microsoft Excel, LeanData, Salesforce, Google Analytics, Marketo, Engagio, DemandBase, and Terminus.
How ServiceMax Saw a 300% Increase in Their Conversions Using DemandBase
Using DemandBase’s Forms solution to collect user data, AI-powered DemandBase Site Optimization for data personalization, and DemandBase Analytics to understand traffic trends, bounce rates, conversion rates, and other critical website metrics, California-based Service Execution Management company ServiceMax, witnessed a 300 percent increase in their conversions, a 70 percent decrease in bounce rates, and a 100 percent increase in page views per session.
Key Takeaways
Measuring the success of your ABM strategy is crucial to understanding the strong and weak points of your strategy. A lot of trial and error goes into creating an effective ABM strategy. Define and measure your ABM KPIs to optimize your ABM strategy for better results.
FAQ
What are the most important ABM KPIs?
Some of the most important KPIs are upper funnel metrics, customer churn rate, and conversion rate.
What are some popular ABM analytics tools?
Popular ABM analytics tools include Salesforce, Google Analytics, Marketo, Engagio, DemandBase, and Terminus.
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Account Based Data
Article | June 29, 2023
B2B marketers meticulously craft content plans to include an attractive landing page, a remarkable eBook, and paid ads for maximum engagement. They write the slickest nurture emails, supporting blogs, and over-the-top articles. Nearly tens of thousands of dollars and a couple of months go into the campaign creation, but it stops abruptly.
Why?
How can this be? The data collected for the eBook was filled with insights that made them shudder. The strategy was executed to perfection but didn't make any sense!
Does this situation sound familiar to you as well? You must have faced the same! It often happens in B2B companies when sales and marketing are not fully aligned on their goals, messaging, and targeting audience. When you spread a wide net for lead generation, most of the leads may not be relevant. So, what should we do?
Here comes the protagonist of the B2B marketing story:
Account-Based Marketing (ABM)
ABM curtails the time spent on irrelevant accounts while decreasing overall money spending. In addition, as businesses, after the pandemic, are starting to realize the potential of personalized campaigns, ABM is rapidly becoming the go-to strategy for B2B tech companies. As a result, they are aiming to improve their marketing and sales alignment.
Importantly, ABM demands sales and marketing alignment. It ends those hair-tearing, soul-destroying arguments on which leads to focus on. Now both teams have to keep the hyper-targeted focus on specific accounts, which will result in time-saving, the flow of quality leads, and, thus, your ROI will be up.
But before going about creating effective ABM campaigns, let's quickly read the factors to consider while implementing ABM.
Factors to Consider to Implement ABM
Get your Sales & Marketing teams to work together
To create an effective ABM campaign, marketing and sales teams must converge and act following a shared strategy. Furthermore, to expect excellent results, teams involved in the campaign should use the same data from diverse sources. Thus, it creates a data-inspired ideal customer profile (ICP).
To Identify Accounts
For defining target accounts, consider these factors:
Revenue potential: Your target audience should fall into your product or service's price line.
Best fit accounts: Find accounts and individual buyers who are aligned with your marketing personas.
Importance of Strategy: Aim for accounts that match your company's business strategy. Identify if they are your ideal customer or not.
Product requirements: Start with the low-hanging fruit, which means identifying accounts that can make precise use of the solution you're offering.
To Establish KPIs
To know whether you are rocking with your ABM campaigns, it's crucial to decide your KPIs. You can consider the following to confirm it:
How many companies match your customer personas?
Account and role-specific conversion KPIs such as booked meetings created deals, and purchases completed.
The accounts that visit your website or engage with the content types.
Thus, you'll have to track KPIs at every stage of your ABM funnel to determine the success of your campaign.
Prepare Multi-Channel Content
Relevant and engaging content is the root of every marketing campaign. Still, marketers should personalize ABM content so that they can timely reach each target. So, it's essential to keep the process of messaging focused on the account's pain points, budget restraints, and additional demands.
It is because your campaigns are hyper-targeted, where you'll need to spread them across multiple content channels to offer numerous opportunities. Doing so will help to gain engagement, and then you can calculate budgets for clicks and channels. In addition, blend touchpoints such as paid ads, blogs, personalized email, text messaging, and multi-touch SDR strategies will help create effective ABM campaigns.
Here are effective steps to execute an effective ABM campaign.
5 Steps to Create Effective ABM Campaigns
Build your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
As Account-based marketing is more like spearfishing, you need to be conscientious about who you target. It is because this type of marketing revolves entirely around who you reach out to. So, it is imperative that you pick companies that would benefit the most from your product or services and be your top-tier customers if they get converted to purchase your service. Hence, the first and most foundational thing for an effective ABM campaign is knowing who you need to target.
Many companies enjoy massive audiences. Therefore, they can increase revenue if they successfully reach them. However, with B2B SaaS companies in marketing, when they try to please everyone, they usually end up pleasing no one. It is because they produce standard messaging that doesn't speak to any group of people. So here, it becomes vital to build your IPC before creating an ABM campaign strategy.
Invest in the Right Account-Based Marketing Tools
To create successful account-based marketing (ABM) campaign, you need to have the right tools to help your team effortlessly execute your ABM strategy and monitor its progress simultaneously. Here are some of the best tools that you can use effectively:
ZoomInfo
Using a platform like ZoomInfo helps you quickly search companies based on their industry, number of employees, and current services. Then, you can easily set ABM campaigns based on information collected through ZoomInfo and proceed further to target.
SalesIntel
SalesIntel is a sales intelligence platform. It provides your sales team with verified numbers of the target account. Using this platform, your team can evade gatekeepers and increase the chances of securing a targeting process.
Everstring
Everstring's platform enables your ABM team to develop a predictive behavior model where target accounts can be identified and be more likely to convert into sales.
Create Relevant Content
Now, you have your ICP and personas penned down; it's time to communicate. But how do you make sure that you are effectively communicating with each account? And how to properly showcase the value that your solution provides to drive for their companies?
The secret lies in applying information gathered in each stage in the customer journey: Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion.
For an effective account-based marketing campaign, create content for each of these stages—general product & company information for Awareness, technical details for Consideration, and urgency for Conversion. Every piece of content in each step should be designed to appropriately educate prospects on their buying journey and push them to the next phase.
Here are some content types for the most successful ABM campaigns:
Emails to each persona (includes initial outreach, follow-ups, responses, and more)
Landing pages that provide information and facilitate actions
Thought leadership blog and articles for the Awareness stage
Product-specific pages for consideration
Testimonials for the Conversion stage
Organizing your content in such a framework enables you to find and fill content gaps while creating a comprehensive plan to address each persona in the customer journey.
Include Messaging Channels
You can use many avenues to engross prospects in an ABM campaign. Any medium that you use to communicate directly can be effectively utilized.
So, it's essential to focus on the most popular ABM channels like LinkedIn, Email, and telecommunication. Each method has its benefits and effectiveness to get your message to the right people in the right way. Here, you will understand how to go with it these channels:
LinkedIn
LinkedIn is the most utilized channel for ABM campaigns because of its messaging capability and enrichment abilities. It consents you to send messages for free. Additionally, you promptly gain all of their professional information when you connect with a contact, including roles and email ids.
However, the best part of LinkedIn outreach is you are considered as a person, not a bot, when you reach out to contacts. In addition, you have a profile and a resume, which humanizes you. Due to these factors, LinkedIn is one of the most accurate and up-to-date B2B outreach platforms available, as everyone constantly updates their LinkedIn profile with professional milestone information.
Having being beneficial, keep in mind that there are some limitations with LinkedIn—you can send approximately a hundred connections per week. This being said, you can use this channel for the most important contacts on your list.
Email
Email's largest advantage is that it doesn't have a character limit on initial outreach messages. Thus, you can write as much as you want. However, some trade-offs go along with that freedom.
As email being cheap, automatable, easy to use, and can reach thousands of contacts at a time, it's utilized by almost every B2B marketer. But, at the same time, this results in the clogged inbox situation, creating spam filters due to high levels of outreach competition. In addition, this makes consumers suspicious of emails received from unrecognized senders.
But the good news is that you can purchase email tools to help manage your email outreach campaigns. These can automate email message sending to ensure that you're constantly optimizing your outreach to prospects. Emails are a must-have for an effective email outreach campaign, which will exponentially surge your reach, make you smarter with analytics, and create an effective ABM campaign.
Telecommunication
Phone outreach is the most effective channel to outreach. It also gives you a chance to really get to know your prospective customer and their fears and dreams so that you can:
Figure out if your product would be a good fit for the customer.
Know how to quickly and effectively communicate the value of your product to that customer.
Retarget
Once you set up accounts with the proper channels that you plan to push people to with your ABM outreach, you can create simple retargeting ads that guide them further through the customer journey. These ads will result in Calls to Action that offer case studies or white paper resources on your solution or industry to give your prospects market insights and real-world examples of how your solution can benefit companies.
On top of it, when getting your logo and message in front of prospects again, retargeting ads perform splendidly compared to traditional methods. For example, a recent MarketLand article explained that retargeting ads often have Click-Through-Rates of "0.30%-0.95%, which is 3-10x costlier than the industry average."
Resultantly, you must pay close attention to who your audience is that you're serving these ads to, as well as where and how often you're delivering them. It may seem overwhelming at first, but it'll get easier over time. A properly executed account-based campaign will provide the results you want. Doing this will allow you to reap the enormous rewards that retargeting can bestow upon your ABM campaign.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is an ABM marketing campaign?
Account-based marketing (ABM) strategy concentrates resources on a set of target accounts within a market. The campaigns designed are to engage each account, basing the marketing message on the specific attributes and needs of the account.
How do I make an ABM campaign?
Follow these steps to make an effective ABM campaign:
Create a team that is dedicated to ABM only
Clear your goals and then make a strategy
Find your technology
Identify the right accounts
Pick the right channels
Execute your campaigns
Measure everything
Choose messaging platform
Spread relevant content (messages)
Why is ABM important?
ABM supports structure marketing efforts and resources on your key accounts to drive the most revenue. Doing ABM will maximize the efficiency of your B2B marketing resources. It will also help build the communication channel with sales to have an aligned sales and marketing organization.
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Account Based Analytics
Article | August 3, 2022
In Part I of this article, we discussed the importance of the ABM foundation, ideal momentum of change, team training, and analyzing data to understand the performance of your ABM strategy.
In this part, we will look at how CX, sales enablement, a strong team and consistency matter in successfully transforming your organization into an account-centric one.
ABX: Endorse Experience
Focus on the kind of experience you want to offer your target account. Offer them a customized and account-centric experience. Involve every department at a granular level to achieve an excellent customer experience.
Enablement: Sales Resources Are Vital
Support your sales teams through communication that works for them. Provide them with the right tools, content, insights, and data, even if they know how to do their job. Support and motivate them to close more deals.
Consistency: Checking What’s Working
Review your performance weekly and discuss outcomes with your teams—improvements, hurdles, and failures included. A full view of your strategy will show you where you need to make changes so you can fix them and make your ABM efforts work.
Experience: Hire ABM Experts
Executing ABM can be an overwhelming experience if you are new to it. Consider bringing in someone who has already run some successful ABM campaigns to make the process smoother. Doing this will guide and support your long-term efforts.
Businesses and Customers Reap Rewards
When an organization focuses solely on its target accounts, it achieves:
Higher conversions and ROI
Effective target audience reach
Reduced customer attrition
Business growth
Synchronization in cross-functional teams
Competitive edge in the market
When target accounts choose an account-centric company, they get:
Customized solutions to their pain points
Support throughout the buying journey
Excellent customer experience
Long-term business association
An ITSM Firm Addressed Revenue Concerns with an Account-Centric Approach
A British IT service management (ITSM) analytics SaaS firm re-evaluated its ABM efforts to address revenue concerns. It increased relevance across all channels — LinkedIn profiles, content, and messaging to directly address decision-makers.
It aligned its sales and marketing teams. Furthermore, it changed its focus to improving customer interactions along the buying journey. As a result, it gained customers like GoDaddy, British Airways, and JCPenney. A larger firm with a presence in North America, the UK, Europe and APAC acquired it as a part of a business expansion strategy.
Wrapping It Up
Amber Bogie, ABM Strategy Lead at Degreed, says, “In terms of attribution, if it's an ABM account, and it's seeing success, I'm attributing that to a company-wide effort of focusing on the right accounts using an ABM strategy.”
Amber Bogie, ABM Strategy Lead at Degreed, says, “In terms of attribution, if it's an ABM account, and it's seeing success, I'm attributing that to a company-wide effort of focusing on the right accounts using an ABM strategy.”
Remember, ABM works differently for different organizations. Therefore, there is not a one-size-fits-all approach, so you need to zero in on what works best for your organization to get everyone on board to achieve ABM success.
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Buyer Intent Data
Article | June 24, 2022
Selling more and selling faster is the goal that drives B2B marketers. Strategically implementing account-based marketing (ABM) to target individuals with hyper-personalized messaging across different channels is what helps them achieve it. But what is Buying Group Marketing (BGM), and why do B2B marketers need to keep up with it?
Buying-Group Marketing (BGM): Taking ABM up a notch by focusing on an entire buyer group instead of the account as a whole, it’s called buying-group marketing (BGM).
According to a recent Forrester survey, 94% of B2B organizations sell to groups of three or more. They do this instead of spending time identifying a set of ICPs and making a purchase decision.
Let us take a look at what BGM is all about.
Buying Group Marketing: The Next Evolution of ABM
To implement BGM, you first need to understand what buying groups are. A purchasing group is a group of people within a target account who have a say in the purchasing decision. This makes them crucial in B2B targeting. Once B2B marketers learn about their target personas, they can come up with an effective marketing plan and approach them strategically.
In large enterprises, purchase decisions are never restricted to one individual. The larger the purchase decision, the larger the size of the buying groups. When a decision involves new technologies, services, or products, an individual struggle to make a purchase decision swiftly.
According to Gartner, more than 75% of customers describe these purchases as very complex or difficult. With the help of BGM, the decision-making process can be streamlined and shared among multiple people within an organization.
Driving Success with BGM
To better execute BGM, organizations need to change their mindsets, processes and technologies and work to understand how buying groups work together. Until demand management matches the ways buyers are making purchasing decisions, marketing and sales alignment will not be possible.
Organizations need to first understand how buying groups work together, then align their mindsets, technologies, and processes to efficiently execute BGM. When the marketing and sales teams align their demand management goals with the decision-making groups, only then can they drive success in their campaigns.
Interest from more than one person from a single company can lead to more success and influence in the buying phase. B2B marketers need to move beyond the idea that only the first person to respond from a company should be entertained as a lead if a second person from the same company shows interest in their product or services. They need to understand that no matter how tempting account-based advertising may seem, it doesn’t guarantee success. They should focus on engaging the actual decision-makers of their target accounts.
When customer personas are mapped according to their buying roles within a group, organizations will have the much-needed intelligence required to make personalized sales. The success of BGM demands the delivery of content that resonates with an individual as per their role in a buying group. B2B marketers must meet them where they are with the content that they need.
Organizations can have crucial intelligence on their customers after mapping their personas and considering their roles in the buyer groups. Delivering content that the target individual can relate to is a prerequisite of BGM.
BGM may not be new as a concept, but B2B marketers see improvements in their performance by harnessing it as their principal strategy. Adapting to BGM will give them the edge that they seek, while the rest try to keep up with the changing trends of the ABM industry.
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