Account Based Analytics
Article | August 3, 2022
In 2021, 70% of marketers reported using an account-based marketing campaign. Since 2020, their numbers have gone up by 15%. One of the reasons ABM has become so popular is that it can greatly enhance customer loyalty and revenue by tailoring the buyer's journey for unique clients. ABM tactics can further enrich an ABM strategy.
In an interview with Media 7, Tim Kopp, CEO of Terminus, talked about the account-based marketing process.
“ABM flips the traditional approach of generating leads on its head. It doesn’t adhere to the idea that a full sales funnel will create a trickle-down effect leading to high conversion rates. Instead, ABM enables marketers to refine the criteria by which they identify buyers. While marketers might not have the same amount of leads, each lead is targeted and relevant — and thus more likely to convert.”
Account-based marketing is being implemented confidently by more and more B2B marketers. It is important to find ways to amplify its impact on your revenue through accurate targeting and conversions. Let us take a look at three effective ABM tactics that can help you enhance your account-based marketing strategy.
3 Effective ABM Tactics for B2B Marketers
Improve Your ABM Funnel's Performance
Account-based marketing funnel optimization may be one of the most effective ABM tactics to grow your business.
The following techniques can help you improve your funnel’s overall performance:
Audit Your Content Smartly
Check if your content is personalized according to your target accounts' personas and industry. Does it address the specific needs and pain points of your target accounts? Your content can help you narrow down your list of ideal customers.
Make Good Use of Intent Data
Dynamic ABM targeting is essential. Based on data from your CRM and other platforms, update your list of target accounts. Make sure you have a good idea of what your target audience is looking for. Are there issues with your company, products, or services that you provide? Always use this information to improve your list.
Approach Different Markets Confidently
Run multiple account-based marketing campaigns with varying degrees of customization and investment parallelly. Choose between ABM Lite (targeting a small number of accounts), Programmatic ABM (targeting many accounts), or Strategic ABM (targeting a single account) according to your business goals.
Optimize Engaged Accounts
No two engaged accounts can be in the same sales funnel stage. So, optimizing engaged accounts can be difficult. Start by tracking click-through rates, organic website traffic, email open rates, and any other digital interactions with your brand to see how effective your ads are. Your ads must be both informative and visually appealing. Reach engaged accounts through social media, email, and other suitable channels.
Unlock Opportunities
Lead generation strategies based on advertising retargeting allow your sales team to tap into accounts that have previously interacted with your ads with renewed vigour. By working with your sales team to develop an account engagement model that defines an "engaged account," you can streamline the lead generation strategies by limiting the number of accounts that your team is required to manage.
Increase Outreach
Your target account stakeholders' employees should be the focus of your outreach efforts. Target accounts can be contacted via direct mail or in-person meetings. As a result, new pipeline opportunities are now available. You can reach a larger audience by using one-on-one C-level campaigns like phone calls and demos.
Implement Marketing Automation
Artificial intelligence (AI) marketing can help you improve your B2B account-based marketing strategy. It gives you predictive insights and makes your communication more effective.
In your account-based marketing process, marketing automation can run email campaigns that can show you how people interact with your account.
CRM data is used by AI and big data to get information about people from different platforms. This information can help you make your content unique for more ABM targeting. Account-based marketing services give you the ability to run targeted marketing campaigns at scale. As an account-based marketing service, ABM automation aims to target firms with multi-person purchasing committees extensively by utilizing individualized content and engagement to influence their purchase decisions.
The immediate impact of using marketing automation in your B2B marketing strategy is a shorter sales cycle, a free marketing team, better sales and marketing team alignment, and stronger customer retention.
You can start off by creating your ICP. After that, you can set up your target account, integrate your account-based marketing strategy with marketing automation software and your CRM. Then you can create impressive campaigns, personalize content, and offer tailored engagement to your target accounts. You can access the performance of your ABM marketing strategy using marketing automation software’s dashboard and tweak your strategy to make the most of it.
Analyze and Improve Your Strategy
B2B account-based marketing requires regular testing of your ad wording, content, design, and channel aspects to see what works and what doesn't. You can improve the efficiency of your approach by keeping tabs on key performance indicators (KPIs). Instead of abandoning a tactic because it isn't working, improve it by tweaking it. Account-based marketing approaches can succeed only if you assess how they affect your strategy and continually improve its execution.
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.”
Developing an efficient B2B marketing strategy using the ABM approach requires a great deal of trial and error. Optimize your ABM approach by defining and measuring your KPIs. This B2B ABM marketing tactic is crucial to understanding how effectively you are engaging key accounts and moving them forward in the sales funnel.
Couchbase Generated $1.5 Million in Pipeline Opportunities Using ABM
Couchbase, a NoSQL database provider for enterprises, used a data-based ABM strategy to determine the interests of their target customers. They then combined real-world behavior with system-generated social personas of their customers, which helped them generate $1.5 million in pipeline opportunities.
Conclusion
These account-based marketing tactics can help you optimize your ABM marketing strategy. Concentrating on your funnel metrics and KPI and constantly improving your strategy can help you get the best results.
FAQ
What are funnel metrics?
Velocity (time spent in days by a prospect in each stage of the funnel), conversion rates (percentage of leads that move from stage to stage in the funnel), and volume (number of leads passing through any stage of the funnel) are funnel metrics. Improving them is a great B2B ABM marketing tactic.
What are the benefits of account-based marketing automation?
ABM automation is a great account-based marketing tactic. It allows you to set up a marketing process at once and then scale it across different campaigns. With the help of automation, tasks like media buying, modeling, upselling, and ad targeting are carried out efficiently.
How can you develop an effective ABM strategy?
Start by identifying key accounts. You can then map their decision-makers, create targeted campaigns to get their engagement, decide on the best channels to approach them, execute your marketing campaigns, and finally measure the results of your ABM strategy.
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Programmatic ABM
Article | June 9, 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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Buyer Intent Data
Article | June 20, 2023
Data-driven strategies for increasing time to market, pipeline, and revenue impact.
The B2B environment is incredibly complex, so it’s no surprise that more than three-quarters of B2B buyers describe their purchasing journey as very complex or challenging. A significant majority (67%) of the B2B buyer’s journey happens digitally, but B2B buying does not play out in any predictable, linear order. Unfortunately, much of today’s ABM technology lacks the capabilities required to provide personalized experiences across multiple channels, platforms, buying centers, geographies, and lines of business. This puts the target account into an undesirable linear campaign and assumes all accounts progress through the funnel at the same speed.
Instead, customers engage in “looping” behaviors during a typical B2B purchase, revisiting multiple buying stages at least once. Buying stages do not happen sequentially but rather simultaneously. This means that ABM success depends not only on a deep understanding of its audience’s needs but also on precisely orchestrating the delivery of the right message in the right channel at the right time - and on a global scale.
In the face of these complexities, ABM is rapidly maturing as a practice. New research shows that almost half (45%) of companies consider their ABM programs to be fully adopted versus experimental – up a third compared with 2020. But even as ABM programs mature, the headwinds of change are accelerating, leaving more than two-thirds of ABM marketers thwarted in their mission to drive significant revenue impact.
B2B marketers must contend with and overcome a slew of challenges that can feel beyond their immediate control. A recent study by Demand Metric and MRP found that more than three-quarters of marketers’ report that the pace of their campaigns has intensified over the past year. That percentage is higher still, at 83%, at enterprise companies that operate with high levels of complexity on a global scale. Four in ten marketers report that changing account profiles poses a challenge, as does the emergence of new channels and demand for new content formats.
Responsive buyer experiences and relevant content across channels have always been the top criteria for mature, high-performing, omnichannel account-based orchestrations. But much of today’s conversation revolves around linear, top-down campaigns, where the target account is placed in a marketing or sales play, operating within a siloed platform throughout the buyer’s journey. The result is often antithetical to the desired buyer “experience.” Addressing this reality requires rethinking how marketers engage with accounts.
The most mature account-based orchestrations are adaptive, understanding a target’s changing needs, aligning content to those desires, and delivering personalized experiences consistently across multiple channels. This demands a new approach to data management, better use of intent and predictive insights, and fully synchronized orchestration.
To make meaningful connections with prospects and customers amidst these changes, enterprise marketers are evolving their ABM initiatives to focus on highly personalized experiences tailored to the account level and individual locations and buyer roles. Increasingly, ABM leaders employ a set of principles and processes that are consistent from company to company – giving others a blueprint for success. The most critical steps for marketers to achieve significant results with their ABM programs include:
Collaborate Closely Across the Organization
Enterprise marketers must share insights widely across interdisciplinary teams. This allows campaigns to be coordinated across shared accounts. A study of top ABM performers found that nine in ten reported close cross-functional collaborations between marketing and sales. ABM leaders need to establish a standardized measurement framework so everyone is working toward the same goals and success.
Establish a Single Source of Truth
Not only are ABM leaders’ teams highly integrated, but so is their data. A single view of data allows for a deeper understanding of audience needs and improves collaboration. Eight out of ten (80%) top performers use data from three or more systems to guide their ABM practice, and even more, 84%, say that their tech stack is mostly or completely integrated. This is more than double the number (30%) of those whose ABM impact was negative or couldn't be measured.
Deliver Messages Consistently - and Across Touchpoints
Successful ABM marketers can customize the buyer’s experience based on the specific product or solution under consideration and factor in their stage within the buying journey. Almost half of leading ABM practitioners (46%) go beyond personalizing messages by industry to adapt their messages to the recipient’s job role and stage of the customer lifecycle. Highly personalized content delivered at the right time is more critical than ever since customers often skip “steps” on the buying journey and require digital experiences to adapt accordingly.
Grasping at New Buzzwords Isn’t the Answer
Calling an initiative “ABX” instead of “ABM” doesn’t make it easier to execute successfully. In fact, in a rush to accelerate the delivery of 'account-based experiences', the platforms that support it have become a critical bottleneck, creating yet another siloed system. This not only adds to the complexity but also undermines the outcomes it is intended to improve.
Today’s B2B marketers face unprecedented challenges but the enterprise must approach ABM as a guiding strategy rather than a limited tactic. Synthesizing data across multiple sources, eliminating tech and people silos, and taking a collaborative approach to ABM can give marketers a deeper understanding of what target accounts need and where to deliver it. The right tech solutions can trigger omnichannel actions based on account insights, simplifying the complexity of ABM and executing mature, omnichannel orchestrations that have a measurable impact on revenue.
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Account Based Data
Article | December 10, 2021
Introduction: Lead Nurturing
The leads in your database are there because your brand or service offers them a solution to a particular problem they are facing. Developing and reinforcing relationships with leads is critical at every stage of the sales funnel. How can you do this? By fostering leads.
To effectively nurture leads, you must first understand their wants, then address their problems, build brand recognition, and follow up until they become buyers.
Campaigns for Lead Nurturing
Lead nurturing campaigns accelerate the process of deepening your connection with a prospect. A lead nurturing campaign has elements like:
Lead Magnets
Offering relevant content, solutions to pain points, and other enticing content like whitepapers, ebooks, and newsletters in exchange for the visitor’s contact information, mostly email, can get you a lead.
Website Landing Pages
Lead magnets are hosted on landing pages to attract visitors and collect their contact information.
Personalized Content
Personalized content engages and holds the visitor's attention. Marketing software generates this tailored material.
Data Segmentation
Every marketing software allows you to segment your lead data based on differentiating metrics like geography, age, and behavior. So, you can understand and analyze your users better.
Content Development
Using case studies and whitepapers to build credibility throughout the buyer's journey shows your capacity to aid customers you can relate to. This type of content nurturing can turn a visitor into a buyer.
Emailers
Engaging and educating your leads via periodic emails can help maintain a consistent communication chain. Your marketing software will send emails through the lead nurturing workflow you choose.
Marketing Automation
Marketing automation, much like robotic process automation, leverages software to automate marketing tasks. Remember those survey and feedback emails you receive now and then? Marketing automation software sends them.
This software helps marketers align processes, technology, and people to achieve marketing goals. It automates and measures marketing tasks like email campaigns or content schedules into workflows to increase operational efficiency and revenue growth. It sends out marketing emails, grows your database, and collects data that helps with your marketing strategy.
It is used in lead generation, lead nurturing, scoring, relationship marketing, cross-selling and upselling, retention, segmentation, ROI measurement, and ABM.
Choosing a Good Marketing Automation Workflow Software
There are thousands of marketing automation software on the market. Consider the following factors to find the best fit:
Features
The more features your software has, the more you can do to entice a prospect to buy your product or service. Features like email campaigns, real-time alerts, lead management, and personalized messaging are great to have.
Budget-Friendly
The software should be affordable so you can easily implement your strategy without creating a hole in your pocket.
Customizable
Ensure the software can be customized to your needs. This may impact usability. However, customization is an important attribute if you want to track any proprietary data.
Channel Integration
It should easily integrate with other channels so it obtains relevant data to send out selected workflows.
Easy to Use
The software should be easy to use and not require any special training so that the execution process is seamless across teams in an agile environment.
Among the most widely used tools, some notable marketing automation tools are HubSpot, Pardot, Demandbase, and Marketo.
7 Result-oriented Marketing Automation Workflows Revealed
After you choose a marketing automation software that meets the above criteria, it gives you access to various marketing automation workflows that help you nurture your leads. By using specific triggers, you can create different workflows to nurture different kinds of leads. A marketing automation trigger is a unique input that activates a certain workflow when specific conditions are met.
Check out these seven effective marketing automation lead nurturing workflows that you should definitely create:
Hot Lead Workflow
This workflow is crucial for your sales team to bag a lead. Set the criteria for a hot lead workflow by considering the lead’s engagement with your content. This workflow falls into the bottom-of-the-funnel (BoFU) phase, where the lead is very close to being converted to a customer.
Lost Opportunity Workflow
If you have lost a lead due to budget restrictions, competitors, or misalignment of your product, design a workflow that gets the lead back into the sales funnel. You can send such leads special offers or discounts, information on your product’s USP, and a regular update on your products to recapture them.
Re-engagement Notification Workflow
Losing hope when engaged leads go cold on you is not an option. Remind them of your brand to wake them from their slumber. Create a trigger when the lead has spent a specific amount of time not interacting with your content. Your workflow will send this lead an email to get it back into the sales funnel. Special offers, new products or services updates, and company news can get the lead’s attention.
New Subscriber Nurture Workflow
This kind of workflow is crucial for gaining new subscribers and moving your existing subscribers through the funnel. It gets new subscribers to engage with your content. Your new subscribers should receive your newest content first, not just regular subscriber emails.
Topic-based Workflow
If you have a variety of content, create a workflow of the most relevant content that might entice your leads. Once a customer visits your website or downloads an ebook or whitepaper about a certain topic, emails with related content on that topic are sent to them regularly.
Event Workflow
Today, remotely conducted events like webinars or seminars have gained immense popularity. Engaging your target audience with the help of events is not a new trick. A pre-event and post-event workflow can help you remain in touch with event registrants. Important information like event details, agendas, and reminders can be sent to them to keep them in the loop.
Lead Nurturing Workflow
A lead nurturing workflow converts leads into marketing qualified leads (MQLs), leads that have responded to your marketing efforts. If a lead comes and fills up a form on your website, requests a demo, or subscribes to a product launch event, then sending them related content can get them closer to being a marketing-qualified lead.
How Utah-based Start-up Chatbooks Grew Their Customer Engagement by 100%
Using Blueshift’s AI-based cross-channel marketing platform, Chatbooks increased their customer engagement by 100%. They achieved higher conversion rates by engaging with customers 1:1 through personalized content and event-triggered campaigns.
“Blueshift enabled us to up-level our campaigns and provide 1-to-1 personalization using dynamic user information. We can now focus on high-intent customers that want to hear my message rather than email blasting and annoying my whole customer base. The results? A +100% increase in email engagement.”
- Stephen Cruz,Lifecycle Marketing Manager, Chatbooks
Wrapping It Up
Leveraging marketing automation in ABM by creating marketing workflows can do wonders for your ABM marketing strategy. 57% of marketers stated that lead nurturing is the most advantageous feature out of all the features of marketing automation software.
FAQ
Why are marketing automation workflows important for lead nurturing?
Marketing automation workflows make sure that your leads get appropriate engagement based on their type so that they get converted into marketing qualified leads.
How to choose a marketing automation software?
Consider factors like UI, ease of use, features, easy integration, and customization before choosing a marketing automation software.
What factors are important for the success of a marketing automation workflow?
Designing workflows for each type of lead is crucial. Other factors include creating appropriate triggers, mapping customer behavior, and maintaining CRM and technology stack.
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