Programmatic ABM
Article | June 9, 2022
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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Core ABM
Article | June 20, 2023
When a package arrives at your doorstep, you get excited as a child, no matter what age you are! Some people express their excitement, while some are really good at hiding it. But inquisitiveness and curiosity are natural feelings.
Imagine building up these feelings in the mind of the decision-makers of businesses that you are targeting. So, yes, you will stand out in the crowd and, they will notice the gesture, no matter how small or big it is!
Coming back to the point, we are talking about the strategy of direct mails in account-based marketing. This strategy has proved to be a success for many organizations practicing ABM.
So what exactly is direct mail in ABM and, are there any successful ways or ideal examples to follow? Let us see in detail.
What Is Direct Mail in ABM?
We are aware that account-based marketing is a strategy that involves targeting, personalization and conversions. But what happens when we make tangibility a part of the above process?
Well, the results are impressive.
An Infotrends report stated that the e-mail response rate increased from 7.5% to 9.5% with a multi-channel ABM strategy.
But, the biggest challenges of ABM are delivering a personalized customer experience, choosing the target accounts, and deciding on the correct content.
Thus, direct mail can help you deal with the challenge of delivering a personalized customer experience.
A direct mail strategy delivers personalized objects, messages, and more to the targeted organization’s decision-makers. The best part about direct mail is that you can get as creative as you want. Plus, it ensures that the top team notices your efforts.
“Direct mail is the new black in B2B. There is nothing more personalized than a handwritten note with a personalized direct mail that is fully customized for your prospect or customer.” - Sangram Vajre, CMO of Terminus.
Let us have a look at the best ways to incorporate direct mail in your ABM strategy.
Ideas to Implement Direct Mail in ABM
Remember, no matter what personalized goodies you plan to send to the concerned people, ensure that:
You have a bold, clear, and obvious call to action.
Your message is short, simple, and direct.
Your strategy should be less is more.
You have added the extra personal touch in your mail.
Once you have devised the direct mail strategy, here are some things that you need to keep in mind before implementation.
Determine the Stage in the Buyer’s Journey
Before sending direct mail to your target account, know where they stand in their buyer’s journey. Let us consider these three stages.
Awareness Stage
If your buyer is in the awareness stage, you need to target all the organization’s decision-makers. Sending them goodies that get them together might be a good idea.
For example:
Send a box with a personalized message about your company to one and send the key to another. Or you could gift puzzles pieces to each one that needs them to come together to decode the message.
Demo Stage
Congrats! If you reached the demo stage with the target account. Now, if you’re finding it difficult to set an appointment with them, use direct mail to get their attention.
For example: Send them a box with a clock ticking and a surprise to be opened at some given time. As if a demo can be scheduled at that time and claim the gift!
2.1.3 Final Stage
You have closed the deal and are all ready to start the dealings. But some small things seemed to be stuck from the buyer’s end. This is where your research will prove handy. You need the search for a particular likeness about the decision-maker and lure them. It will help you get their attention and close all the pending work.
For example:
Send them a password-protected gadget and, they can access that only after the deal is complete.
2.2 Know the Decision-makers
It is an essential aspect in determining the direct mail that you need to send. You should be well aware of the receiver's likes, dislikes, hobbies, and personal traits.
Thus, use social media and everything possible from the sales team to create the best effect.
Determine the Factors for Conversion
Lastly, when the package opens, it should immediately connect to the individual. Thus, when you design or assemble the package, ensure that it connects immediately. Moreover, it should address the pain points and challenges and align with the company’s goals.
Thus, determine the factors that directly affect them and, you will provide the best solutions.
For example:
If you are a hiring agency, give them a complete puzzle with just one piece missing. And a couple of options for the missing piece. Once they fit the right piece in, your puzzle says, “Having trouble finding the right person, we will help your hire!”
And ensure that you send a personalized note to every individual along with the common goal of the message.
Benefits of B2B Direct Mail Marketing
No doubt, personalization will elevate your direct mail strategy, thus promising enhanced customer involvement.
But there are other prominent benefits of B2B direct mail marketing. Lets us have a glance at them.
Higher account engagement
Less wastage of resources
Higher win rate
Shorter sales cycles
Create strong connections
The improved success rate of ABM strategy
Ideal Examples of Direct Mail in ABM
Some organizations have nailed it correctly when it comes to direct mail marketing.
Here are a few examples.
The Perry Process
(Image Courtesy: Pinterest)
The Perry Process is a renowned company that deals with used machinery and equipment for 80 years and continues to do.
Thus, it wanted manufacturing companies to sell their unwanted and excess equipment in return for cash.
So keeping this message in mind, they included fake money inserts with a flyer that said, ‘Don’t throw away your money.’
Hence, it succeeded in sending across its message most realistically!
Schott Solar
Schott Solar is a company that produces solar panels. Their solar panels came with a 20-year warranty.
(Image Courtesy: D&AD)
To amplify the selling, they included a 20-year warranty calendar along with the solar panel. The calendar stuck out 60 centimeters from the wall, thus delivering the desired message!
Wrapping It Up
So no matter what business you deal with, innovation and creativity are the way to easy conversions!
Thus understand your customers and give them what they want in a quirky style.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is direct mail in account-based marketing?
Direct mail is a tangible ABM strategy wherein products are mailed directly to customers. These products are personalized and have a direct marketing message.
Examples of such products are postcards, catalogs, personal goods, coupons, samples, and more.
What impact does direct mail create on the receiver?
A study by scientists reveals that if a person receives a physical product, it leaves a deeper footprint on the brain.
Thus, a direct mail strategy is sure to get you noticed by your customer. And the best part is that the more creative and personalized you get, the better impact it creates!
Can a simple postcard count as a direct mail strategy?
Of course, it can. If it sends a clear message of your marketing campaign, is personalized, and instigates the customer to take action, it is a successful direct mail strategy.
Always remember, the size or price of the direct mail does not matter, but the impact it creates does!
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Buyer Intent Data
Article | June 20, 2023
Personalization is an essential component of an ABM strategy. Without content personalization, it is difficult to target decision makers and influence their purchase decisions. Within this content personalization, ABM landing pages play an important role in offering your target account just what they are looking for. However, without proper personalization, your ABM landing pages will not perform as expected and remain industry-specific pages that are too generic to create any impact. With the help of technology, it is easy to create hyper-personalized ABM landing pages. Here is how you can build your landing page strategy:
Categorize Your Accounts
Break your accounts into clusters, map patterns and choose relevant, effective content for each landing page. Use industry or firmographic details in the beginning and then switch to using account-specific pain points that each segment might face. Based on this data, you can build account personas. If you can, make a separate persona profile for each job role for certain accounts. This will make things run more smoothly.
Create Value-added and Relevant Content for Each Cluster
Your deep research into your target accounts will help you understand what kind of content will be valuable for each account. With your buyers in mind, create content that empowers them and facilitates their purchasing journey. Avoid creating fluffy content that raves about your brand. Instead, give the visitor something that can help them solve their business problems.
Offer Personalized Offers for Each ABM Landing Page
In a 2019 study conducted by Hanover Research for PROS, 69% of buyers said that personalized offers helped them purchase a product and that they were willing to pay more if a specially tailored price was quoted. Having relevant promotions and offers for a landing page that targets an account can get you the conversions you desire. Every visitor that arrives on the page should know that you have created specific content for them that can add value to their business.
Delegate a Dedicated Sales Representative
Your visitors may be used to chatbot automation, but they might still want to interact with a sales representative to get their queries cleared or to make special demands. Assign one sales representative to handle an account. This representative’s information should be available on the landing page so the visitors know who to get in touch with.
Design a Personalized ABM Landing Page Layout
Your landing page should follow a layout that aligns with the customized content. It should have a nice flow and should guide the visitor towards the call to action. It should influence the visitor through content they might find resourceful. Elements like a custom logo and the company’s banner will enrich the page with branding. The most important part of the page will be relevant content pieces like the visitors’ pain points, their industry highlights, product comparisons, and case studies. These are lucrative resources that the visitors might find useful. Using a landing page builder tool that is up-to-date, you can easily make campaigns for different campaigns.
Focus on Your Call to Action
Don’t hesitate to offer your visitors multiple calls to action. Offer them lead magnet downloads, specially tailored resources, tools, app downloads, upsells/cross-sells, etc. to entice them. Think about all the possible ways that could help your target accounts throughout the buying process and post-conversion. Multiple CTAs can be your way of showing how much you care about the visitors’ needs and experience.
What’s the Bottomline?
The pressure to bring in new customers is higher than ever before. Marketers need to get creative, revamp their acquisition strategy, and start talking to their target prospects directly through relevant content. Only then can ABM deliver the results you are looking for.
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Account Based Analytics
Article | February 11, 2022
If you are a seasoned marketer, you must be aware of how hard it is to find highly qualified leads. Wouldn’t it be convenient to have an intent data strategy that helps you identify companies that are looking for a product or service you offer by tracking their internet activity? If you are an IT service provider, some businesses must be looking to rope in a company like yours to help with their IT needs. If you find these businesses in time, you could clinch a deal with them.
Your sales and marketing teams will be able to work efficiently, your company will get more conversions, and your revenue will grow. This is what buyer intent data tools do.
What is Buyer Intent Data?
In the B2B domain, knowing what your target accounts want and need plays a big part in creating and executing ABM marketing. B2B buyer intent data indicates companies that are actively a part of your buying cycle. It allows marketers to understand what buyers are interested in, what kind of solutions they are looking for, what content appeals to them, and which topics they are stuck on. This data can be acquired from buyer intent data tools that measure buyer intent signals. They are generally a part of account-based marketing software.
Some of the buyer intent signals measured by buyer intent data tools are:
Subscription behavior
Clicks on social media ads
Website visits
Length of time spent on the website
People from the same company visiting your website
What the numbers say:
According to a SiriusDecisions study, a B2B prospect is already 67 percent into the purchasing journey.
73 percent of B2B marketers use buyer intent data in their email marketing.
62 percent of B2B marketers agree that B2B intent data improves their nurturing and personalization workflows.
It is no wonder that buyer intent data tools have created a buzz in the world of B2B marketing. Platforms that provide account-based marketing services have solutions that offer intent data for lead generation and intent-based marketing.
Types of Buyer Intent Data
There are two broad types of buyer intent data: internal buyer intent data and external buyer intent data. These can be used in any intent data strategy.
Internal Buyer Intent Data
This type of data is called first-party data, and it is gathered from your website, automation systems, or from within the account-based marketing software that you use. It is further classified into data you submit manually and data that your CRM perceptively creates. Some examples of this data are: website visits, time on page, lead information submitted, job title, downloads of the bottom of the funnel content like case studies, and viewing bottom-of-the-funnel pages like product comparison pages.
External Buyer Intent Data
B2B processes and sales cycles are often complex. Tracking customers on your website may not be enough. You need to widen your net and go above and beyond your website tracking software. You need to take a look at the off-site behavior of your customers by using buyer intent data tools. This will help you understand what prospective buyers are searching for on the web and not just on your website. Could it be that they are checking some review sites, or your competitor’s website, or possibly finding answers to their queries somewhere else but not on your website?
Understanding this B2B intent data will help you expand your sales funnel accordingly. You cannot control buyer behavior, but you can definitely decide strategically how you will respond to the buyer intent data.
Leveraging Buyer Intent Data in ABM Marketing
An effective account-based marketing strategy is a data-driven marketing strategy that targets key accounts with buyer intent. This laser-focused approach to targeting makes it more successful as compared to other marketing strategies.
Here is how buyer intent data can help you enhance your account-based marketing strategy:
Enhances Demand Generation
Buyer intent data enriches the demand generation process by assisting marketing teams in identifying and planning campaigns for prospective accounts. Email marketing and personalized ads can speed up outreach and conversion.
Optimizes Content Strategies
It improves content marketing strategies through insights into prospect behavior. It becomes easier to tailor a content strategy to target a prospect once you know what your prospect thinks about a solution or product you offer.
Improves Lead Generation
Your prospect’s online behavioral data can drive your lead generation strategy. You can target specific accounts based on their intent. Your cost-per-head (CPL) will go down significantly once you generate more interest in your sales pipeline.
Strengthens ABM Partnerships
ABM implementation also involves channel marketing solutions that are complex. Intent data can make the process manageable and bring clarity to the intentions and objectives of the marketing strategy. You can easily prioritize your ABM partners’ leads for higher revenue. It guarantees the success of your ABM group channel program.
Reduces the Churn Rate
You can reduce the churn rate by monitoring the research activity of your target accounts. You can easily identify the likelihood of churn. To tackle this problem, you can create personalized offerings for prospects who are checking out your competitor’s offerings.
Helps You Tweak Your Solutions
With the help of buyer intent data, you can understand your prospects’ pain points better. Tweak your solutions, design products or services based on the trends you see or the patterns you notice in your target audience’s behavior.
13 Best Buyer Intent Data Tools for B2B Marketers
Here are thirteen game-changing buyer intent tools for B2B marketers that can help you with your intent-based marketing plan:
1. Terminus
Terminus was named a ‘Leader’ in the 2020 New Wave of ABM platforms and has more than 1,000 customers trusting its account-based marketing strategies. Its account-based marketing tools help marketers analyze how their marketing strategies fare in terms of sales. Its deep B2B account database has over 70 million businesses. Its tools can sync easily with CRM and MAP data and deliver immediately marketable segments.
2. Bombora
Bombora provides risk-free intent data that is not only comprehensive, but also privacy-compliant. It can be integrated with multiple platforms across sales, martech, and B2B advertising. Its data comes from fully consented B2B publishers. The Bombora Data Co-op captures the buying signals of nearly 3.3 million unique domains through 20.1 billion interactions a month, across more than 4000 sites.
3. ZoomInfo
ZoomInfo has an impressive and comprehensive business database that can help you run B2B intent-based marketing campaigns. Its solutions bring together your sales and marketing teams. Its buyer intent data tools have features like lead scoring, sales prospecting, territory planning, and targeted outreach.
4. Demandbase
Demandbase’s platform, Demandbase One, is a great go-to-market solution. Its buyer intent data tools use data built around data privacy and security best practices. It has cloud solutions for advertising, account-based experience, sales intelligence, and data. With this single platform, you can orchestrate and automate your buyer journeys easily.
5. Slintel
Slintel, a 6sense company, analyzes buying behavior, patterns, sales intelligence, and digital footprints of your key accounts. It has a database of more than 15 million organizations. It helps marketers understand buyer behavior and pain points using buyer journeys and keyword insights. It evaluates over 100 billion data points to identify 3% of prospects with high buyer intent.
6. Leadfeeder
Leadfeeder features a variety of filters, both basic and customizable, that allow users to segment companies based on company demographics, location, behavior, location, and more. In addition, it integrates tools like Zapier, CRMs, and other email marketing tools which help provide insights on accounts. It has a responsive support team and is easy to use.
7. KickFire
KickFire provides first-party intent data by identifying anonymous website visitors through visitors’ IP addresses. This crucial data can be used by sales and marketing teams to create personalized content and increase sales outreach. There are different tool versions like LIVE Leads and KickFire for Google.
8. DemandJump
DemandJump provides insights into the customer journey and helps analyze your competitors. You can get information on what your prospects are doing, like which websites they are visiting and what things they are searching for. You can also find out what your competition ranks for, what kind of content they publish, and what kind of ads they use to attract traffic.
9. TechTarget Priority Engine
Priority Engine gives real-time access to leads that are ranked based on their engagement level and their purchase intent. You can use this information to enhance your ABM strategy, sales outreach, and lead generation. This tool also shows the topics which interest prospects, the kind of technology the prospects use and also provides contact information for leads whenever it is available.
10. Lead Forensics
With the help of Lead Forensics, you can engage with your prospects and customers swiftly. By using the valuable data that this tool provides, you can start useful conversations with the visitors to your website. You can also identify visitors, location, demographic information, and how much time they spend on your website.
11. Pure B2B
Pure B2B is a web-based demand generation tool designed to supplement businesses with their B2B content syndication. It helps in displaying ads, developing outbound leads with the help of predictive analytics and multi-source intent data. If you want to generate high-quality leads, you should consider using this tool.
12. Triblio
Tribilo allows you to combine account-based ads, web personalization, and sales activation through a single platform. You can easily engage with your customers, grow their awareness, and get in touch with your target accounts.
13. HappierLeads
Easily reach out to companies that show buyer intent but are not converting into customers with the help of HappierLeads. This tool accurately tracks website visitors and allows you to identify anonymous website visitors, connect with decision markets, and segment traffic.
By using account-based marketing services that offer the best buyer intent data tools, you can enhance your account-based marketing strategy. These intent data providers will highlight you in front of the buyers when they are in their decision-making process. Not only will it give you an upper hand in account-based marketing, but it will also help you proactively intercept prospects without having to wait for them to land on your website.
How Daniel Englesbretson, Founder of Khronos, leveraged Terminus to run successful ABM campaigns for clients
“What I have found is that, especially leveraging technology like Terminus, the data you get from the start speeds you up substantially, and gives you a lot more perspective that you couldn’t have had or wouldn’t have had before.” – Daniel Englesbretson.
ABM has become a mindset for Daniel. Read his full interview with Media 7 where he talks about the impact of AI on the ABM landscape.
Terminus’ account-based marketing software has shown tremendous results because it has one of the best buyer intent data tools in the market. Companies saw a 30 percent increase in opportunity size for the enterprise segment and a 2X increase in the probability of an account moving to opportunity.
Summing It Up
B2B buyer intent data tools can be a great addition to your arsenal of account-based marketing solutions. They can help you with swifter lead generation, boost your sales and save costs on pursuing qualified leads. Roping in a good-intent data provider will enhance your account-based marketing strategy.
FAQ
What information does buyer intent data reveal when a qualified lead comes to your website?
Buyer intent data reveals qualified leads’ areas of interest, referral sites, and pages visited. This data can be used to personalize outreach and contact prospects.
How can you leverage buyer intent data to achieve higher close rates?
You can use intent data for lead generation. You can appeal to a lead throughout the awareness, consideration, and decision-making phases. Buyer intent data positions you in front of the prospects early on in the buyer’s journey, and that is how you get higher close rates.
What are some examples of internal buyer intent data?
Website visits, lead information submitted, time on page, job title, downloads of bottom-of-the-content, and viewing bottom-of-the-funnel pages are some examples of internal buyer intent data.
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