Account Based Data
Article | June 29, 2023
Third-party cookie restrictions or outright bans were an inevitable step in the evolution of data protection. As a result, B2B marketers are preparing for a cookie-less future in which third-party data will no longer direct them to potential clients. They must now prepare new tactics to execute account-based marketing (ABM) strategies.
Abhi Yadav, the founder of Zylotech, states that ABM strategies greatly depend on trustworthy data: “We believe the foundation for any successful ABM program lies in the ability to “trust” your data. This requires scalable, repeatable processes for data management and governance across all people, accounts, and activities.”
Abhi Yadav, the founder of Zylotech, states that ABM strategies greatly depend on trustworthy data: “We believe the foundation for any successful ABM program lies in the ability to “trust” your data. This requires scalable, repeatable processes for data management and governance across all people, accounts, and activities.”
In light of the demise of third-party cookies, where can B2B marketers turn for reliable information? Let us find out.
First-Party Cookies
When it comes to potential customers, first-party cookies are the most dependable source of information. These cookies assist in monitoring audience behavior when they visit our websites and engage with our content. Based on recent interactions, first-party cookie data will produce more relevant content.
Data Points
When developing ABM strategies, delve deeper into first-party data and use locations and keywords. B2B marketers can then contextualize the content and figure out what prompted the viewer to interact with it in the first place.
Tracking Technologies
Tracking technologies like reverse IP tracking are legal and can aid your ABM campaigns. This technology enables businesses to conduct reverse IP searches and access the top-level domain data that IP produces. The name of the business hosting that IP and the other details of those who registered the business IP can be accessed. Using this information, B2B marketers can develop an effective target list and pursue the target accounts with personalized content.
Contextual Advertising
Contextual advertising displays advertisements to website visitors based on the content they are currently viewing. As a result, the visitors find these ads relevant to their needs and are more receptive to them.
ABM Success Requires Reliable Data
Using primary data sources will provide direct feedback on the relevance of your content based on interactions with potential clients. As we enter this first-party world, you must remain agile, with new ABM tactics ready to guide clients toward successful partnerships.
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Core ABM
Article | June 20, 2023
Inbound Marketing
Businesses put effort into designing their inbound marketing strategies to seek growth opportunities. In inbound marketing strategies, target audiences are attracted, engaged, and delighted by businesses by using valuable content. They also communicate with the customers regularly through inbound sales calls and keep the customers happy through timely and prompt assistance.
Businesses use an inbound marketing strategy that they have trusted for years, while some still struggle to grasp the power of inbound marketing. In both cases, if the strategy doesn’t show the expected results, it becomes a matter of immediate concern.
Why Should You Conduct an Inbound Marketing Audit?
In an interview with Media 7, Daniel Englebretson, Founder of Khronos, talked about rise of AI in ABM and the success of marketing programs.
“The best programs, and the best marketers, have built their success on the back of rapid iteration and a long history of testing, learning, and continuously improving.”
Continuous improvement in marketing can happen only when you carry out regular assessments or audits of your marketing strategy, inbound, and outbound.
A marketing audit looks at the business environment, strategy implementation, systems, organization, productivity, and function of the strategy. It is undertaken when there is a change in leadership, the business is lagging compared to competitors, has rapid growth or is terribly stuck, or when a design overhaul is planned.
Here is why you should conduct an inbound marketing audit:
Identifying Weaknesses
If an inbound marketing strategy suddenly stops working, you need to find its weaknesses and remedy them in time to get the best results. This is called “strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats” (SWOT) analysis.
An audit will help you analyze the effectiveness of the channels and the tactics you use as compared to industry standards and find out the reasons behind ineffective lead generation. An effective audit also rigorously checks the marketing tools your team uses.
You can make adjustments and improvements to the strategy based on the audit. You can look into channels like websites, paid search, email marketing, social media, and organic search to assess the performance of your strategy.
Spotting Growth Opportunities
When expanding the business, introducing a new product or service, conducting an audit can add great value to your plan. You can evaluate your business position, rate your customer satisfaction and engagement, know how well you are exploiting your existing opportunities, and if you are using the right channels and messaging to get in touch with your target audience.
If you find anything amiss, you can promptly deploy resources to course-correct your team and work towards a better ROI through the inbound marketing strategy.
Reaffirming Goals
Reaffirm your marketing and business goals by assessing important data-driven perspective metrics like keyword ranking, post engagement, customer acquisition cost (CAC), email click-through rate, and lead quality. For example, if your website is not optimized for SERP and doesn’t grab the attention of your users, it could be the reason behind ineffective lead generation. In such a case, you can re-evaluate your content strategy.
Things like text-to-image ratio on web pages, irrelevant images, and weirdly placed call-to-action (CTA) buttons can affect the user’s journey. If some pages are unresponsive on mobiles or tablets, then the audit will help you find those and implement appropriate solutions.
Knowing what is working and what isn’t helps you know what you need to do next to get optimum results from your inbound marketing strategy.
Keeping Your Team Motivated
Every team is a defined stakeholder in the company's success. Right from the sales team, customer experience, IT architects, c-suite, product developers, to your marketing team, everyone will know their strengths and weaknesses through the audit. A regularly conducted marketing audit will keep your teams motivated to perform their duties well.
Boosts ROI
Boost your ROI by ditching things that do not work. Allocating resources to your business strengths instead of your marketing weaknesses will help you get the ROI you expect. You can also focus on introducing new plans to revive the part of the strategy that is no longer working. It can be anything from redesigning a few website pages to hiring a new SEO expert.
What Does a Strong Inbound Marketing Audit Look Like?
A strong marketing audit yields results that enhance your strategy, improve your ROI, and help you step up your game so you don’t fall behind in the race with your competitors. These are the characteristics a strong inbound marketing audit will have:
Autonomy
An effective audit should be autonomously conducted by a third-party auditor so you do not skip the hard parts and the management completely cooperates in the process. The more stringent the audit, the better the understanding of potential growth opportunities, managerial snags, and resource allotments.
Perfect Structure
The audit has to be systematically structured to cover all bases, like contact channels, business environment, customer experience, design, engagement, SEO, SMM, and sales management, so no crucial elements are missed.
Conducted Regularly
Conduct the audit at regular intervals of time, at least once a year. It should be a part of your marketing calendar or your strategic marketing plan.
Business-specific
The audit should factor in the technology, expertise, and experience of your business. It should consider factors like political, legal, and socio-cultural issues that arise from the location of your business. Competitors, best practices, and conditions should also be considered.
How Eclipse Software Saw a 370% Increase in Organic Traffic in a Year
Manchester-based software company Eclipse Software hit a snag when their online presence wasn’t translating into revenue, leads, or ROI. They hired Noisy Little Monkey, a service-based digital marketing agency in the UK, to help them boost their online presence. Noisy Little Monkey ran a marketing audit for them and found issues like page speeds and content offerings, and they ran campaigns using gated content. As a result of such campaigns and website improvements, Eclipse Software saw a 370% rise in their organic traffic in a year, with a conversion rate of 3.7%.
Key Takeaways
An inbound marketing audit is crucial for identifying the strengths and weaknesses of your marketing strategy. It can tell you which areas need improvement, how to allocate your resources better, and how to increase your growth opportunities and ROI through data-driven perspectives and more to achieve better results.
FAQ
At what time interval should you conduct an inbound marketing audit?
Every business should conduct an audit once every six to twelve months.
What are the characteristics of an inbound marketing audit?
An inbound marketing audit should be autonomous, periodically carried out, systematic and business-specific.
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Buyer Intent Data
Article | June 20, 2023
Large companies in the B2B domain have adopted account-based marketing. They shook up their conventional content strategy to integrate an ABM-centric approach into client-facing content. Tailored content that caters to target accounts can help you achieve higher revenues. Here are five ways for you to fuse your ABM strategy with intelligent content marketing:
Deep-dive into Researching Your Target Account
Note positives about your target account, like high revenue, quick payment, hands-off implementation, etc. Find where your target accounts meet with similar industry profiles. Identify trends and conversations. Interact with these collectives and media outlets to identify pain points your product can solve.
Determine Key Decision-makers
Map the decision-makers' behaviors in the target account. Your content strategy should target vulnerable decision-makers. Find out about their lives, online habits, hobbies, professional philosophies, online communities, and social networks in real life.
Develop a Personalized Content Strategy
Create pillar content explaining how your product solves client problems. Link clustercontent to this pillar to explain its concepts. Each pillar of your pillar-and-cluster content strategy can target a different decision-maker persona. Personalized ABM increases deal closure by 2% and reduces marketing campaign costs by 40% (Source: Terminus)
Use Targeted Landing Pages to Capture Leads
Use pillar content to target ideal accounts. Targeted ad campaigns can drive prospects to lead-capture landing pages. Create landing pages where customers enter contact info for content. Sales and marketing teams can better target leads based on the landing page where they are captured.
Improve Your Content Process
Relevant content helps you reach your target account profile. You need to release content regularly and correctly. Many marketers use marketing automation content tools to achieve this.
Wrapping It Up
Supporting your ABM strategy with a robust content strategy tailored to target your key accounts can get you the conversions you expect.
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ABM Accounts
Article | February 2, 2021
The Pareto Principle is introduced by an Italian economist - Vilfredo Pareto. According to this principle, for several results, 80% of the outcomes arise from 20% of the cause. Other variations of the Pareto principle states: 80% of the sales come from 20% of customers or 80% of marketing engagement comes from 20% of accounts.
Many researchers believe that ABM is a descendent of the 80/20 rule. By following this rule, businesses can spend the bulk on creating personalized marketing campaigns for the 20% of customers who spent the most on the product or services of their company.
How the Pareto Rule Brings Sales Growth?
In ABM, the Pareto principle can be used as a guide to overcoming the business growth obstacle and acquiring extremely productive business solutions. So here are a few strategies that will assist in bringing the resources and attention to the top 20% of customers.
1. Identify Best Customers
Companies might have hundreds or thousands of customers or prospect lists either from email, social media, or by the website. To ensure making a wise choice, it is a must to have a glance at the historical data of every account, then compare it with the ideal customer profile and determine which makes it to the list of the best customers. After finding the top customers for the business, assure to mark them as a top priority.
2. Locating Their Area
An important factor is to check the Point-of-Sale platform and find the area from where the highest number of best customers belongs to. It will lead to determining the most suitable sales or marketing strategies that can boost the growth of the organization.
3. Rank The Need Of Customers
After creating the list of best accounts or customers, try to dig a bit deeper and discover the want, need, or problems each customer has. If in case, the insight is not up to the mark, a company will have to form a team that can gather some information, by:
Tracking customer’s social media
Having a conversation with the customer
Purchasing Insights from vendors.
After finalizing the need list make sure to mark each with their importance and address them accordingly.
4. Offer Personalization Across Different Platform
Marketing according to the way that connects with each customer deeply without engulfing the resource and budget can be achieved by making the process as automated as possible through hiring developers. Some of how businesses can personalize their channels are:
Using images that shows the customer’s interested area
Addressing each customer by their name
Sharing related case studies with the customers
Including a personalized note
Remember to keep a track of the progress you made through these steps and modify your list and strategies based on them.
Take Away!
If used properly, the Pareto rule in account-based marketing helps a business in keeping the focus on what matters the most. It stops enterprises from multi-tasking all the time. With the help of the 80/20 rule, businesses can properly allocate time and resources to the areas that produce the best results. That being said, relocating the budget while cultivating time for referrals from the customers who generate long-term advantages is the core to sustainable growth.
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