Account Based Analytics
Article | August 3, 2022
Account-based marketing has been around since the early 2000s, but only recently have businesses started to implement it widely in their marketing strategies. By focusing on ideal customer profiles (ICP), businesses shortlist key accounts and target them with customized content campaigns to convert them from marketing-qualified leads to buyers. An account-based marketing strategy uses sales and marketing orchestration to transform the way key accounts are approached.
ABM marketing contributed to a 70 percent increase in the number of opportunities created. (Source: Gartner)
Nash Haywood, Global Director-Digital Conversion & Paid Media, Genesys, talked about ABM’s impact on how sales and marketing teams function.
“We wanted to have more control of the entire (marketing and sales) process, and an ABM approach allowed us to do that.”
B2B account-based marketing drives valuable engagement and leads to higher ROI as compared to other marketing strategies.
Benefits of Account-based Marketing
Account-based marketing benefits range from increased marketing efficiency and higher ROI to higher engagement and retention. Let us take a look at them in detail:
ABM Enhances Your Marketing Efforts
ABM marketing is data-driven. Account-based management becomes easy with crucial data like role, industry, and buyer journey stage. Based on this data, appealing personalized content campaigns are created to target key accounts. These campaigns optimize your marketing efforts. They also give insights on which channels and messages appeal to your targeted key accounts so that you can refine your account-based marketing strategy. According to Emarketer, 46 percent of marketers are benefitting from real-time optimization to accelerate their pipeline revenue.
Sales and Marketing Teams Synchronize
An account-based marketing campaign aligns the goals of the sales and marketing teams. It also brings other important stakeholders, like the IT team and the executive team, together to create an effective strategy for achieving goals.
Sales and marketing orchestration can lead to a massive increase in marketing revenue (up to 208 percent as stated by MarketingProfs).
ABM Improves Marketing Efficiency
Account-based marketing automation technology helps streamline marketing processes and scale ABM implementation across different marketing campaigns. Activities like ad targeting, modelling, upselling media buying, and executing lead nurturing campaigns can be done efficiently using account-based marketing software. You can cease marketing to accounts that do not respond to your campaigns and focus on the ones that do. This can help you save your money and allocate your time and resources better.
You Retain Customers Better
ABM uses hyper-personalized content to pursue higher customer engagement and retention. By showing key accounts the content they want to see, brand awareness and trust are increased. An account-based marketing campaign, especially one created to engage target accounts, contributes to an enhanced customer experience that makes B2B marketing significantly impactful. It translates to long-term associations and bigger deal sizes.
You Close Deals Faster
You can move key accounts through the sales funnel swiftly and close deals faster by identifying decision-makers of your key accounts. B2B account-based marketing saves time and resources, which can be used to generate new leads. That is why this is one of the most important account-based marketing benefits.
ABM Improves Deal Sizes
Account-based B2B marketing targets only key accounts with buyer intent. It is about quality more than quantity, and this makes a whole lot of difference in how you approach accounts and strike deals. A shorter sales cycle through account-based marketing means landing a big account that signs away more money than many small accounts would.
You Get a Higher ROI
According to a report by ITSMA, 87 percent of marketers stated that ABM delivered a higher ROI as compared to other marketing strategies. Since account-based marketing is a data-driven strategy that uses personalized content to target accounts, this approach is easier and more cost-effective as it saves time and resources because of its precision.
ABM Performance Is Measurable
Account-based reporting is a key account-based marketing benefit. Using metrics like engagement, brand awareness, target account reach, retention, ROI, and influence helps you understand how well your ABM strategy is working. You can optimize your strategy to make it perform better.
ABM Makes You the Expert
While implementing account-based B2B marketing, you gain deep insights into the conversion behaviours, preferences, challenges, and needs of your target accounts. This knowledge makes you an expert in offering solutions that your target accounts crave. It also helps with new service or product design ideas that can cater to customers in a more personal way.
Creating an ABM Strategy That Works
To create an account-based marketing program that works, follow these steps:
1. Define the key accounts you want to target.
2. Identify the decision-makers for these accounts.
3. Create hyper-personalized content for them.
4. Zero in on appropriate channels to get maximum impact.
5. Create impressive content campaigns to increase engagement.
6. Measure the success of your campaigns using the correct metrics.
Account-based Marketing Services to Scale Your ABM Strategy
To adopt ABM at scale for exponential business growth, you need to evaluate your target accounts and then expand your ABM strategy from a small scale to a full-blown ABM. Your expansion can also be across new segments or businesses based on industry or company size. Artificial intelligence and marketing automation make it easier to implement ABM at scale.
Account-based marketing services offered by companies that specialize in ABM and marketing like Marketo, Terminus, Demandbase, Optimizely, and Oracle make it easier to implement an ABM strategy at scale. These companies offer services to attract and convert prospects, scale up your marketing, and grow customer relationships through up-selling and cross-selling.
Account-based marketing automation, email marketing, lead management, account-based management, social marketing, digital advertising, mobile marketing, multi-channel marketing, account-based reporting using ABM metrics and optimization along with account-based marketing software can help you scale your ABM strategy without breaking a sweat.
How SAP Created New Pipeline Opportunities Using ABM
SAP launched an account-based marketing program to target the company's top 10% of key accounts. These accounts were responsible for a third of their revenue in America. Through their ABM program, they offered specialized marketing plans for these accounts. SAP gained new pipeline opportunities and moved $57 million down the pipeline because of the benefits of account-based marketing.
Summing It Up
The time to implement ABM in your marketing strategy is now. Adopting it into your marketing strategy can help scale your business and achieve your business goals.
FAQ
What are the benefits of account-based marketing?
Some noteworthy account-based marketing benefits are: higher ROI, sales and marketing alignment, customer retention, and a shorter sales cycle.
Which metrics measure ABM performance?
Metrics like engagement, ROI, customer churn rate, content engagement, conversion rate, and average deal size are used to measure the performance of an ABM program.
Why is ABM more efficient compared to other marketing strategies?
ABM targets accounts with buyer intent, helps with better resource allocation and is cost effective. These factors contribute to a higher ROI and bring great results.
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Buyer Intent Data
Article | March 6, 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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Buyer Intent Data
Article | June 20, 2023
Account mapping is the process of identifying and structuring your target accounts, as well as the important individuals within them, for your ABM strategy. This stage comes after you've established the objective of your ABM strategy. After you've chosen and sorted your target accounts, you can develop a communication and engagement strategy to influence them.
Account Mapping for B2B Marketing
For B2B marketers like you, account mapping comes in handy to gain insights into the budget cycles of target accounts. This helps your marketing teams run their campaigns based on the time of year where customers are more likely to have the budget to spend on new solutions. Apart from this, once you identify target personas and buyer personas relevant to your ABM strategy, your marketing campaigns can precisely target these personas. As a result, your campaigns will be relevant and successful and can bring you the conversions you desire.
Effective Account Mapping for ABM Success
While mapping account for ABM strategy, you need to follow these four crucial steps:
Identify the Target Account’s Key Decision-makers and Influencers
Target accounts with department structures are usually complex and have multiple influencers. The larger the company and the account, the more difficult it is to identify the decision makers or the buying group committee that makes the purchase decisions. Collecting contacts, documenting details, and understanding the buyer roles and responsibilities of these decision makers is the first step. Once you get this information, create a visual map of the decision markers for your team and the sales teams so your targeting strategies align.
Investigate Your Target Account’s Critical Pain Points
Gather information on the key accounts and stakeholders in the target account. Determine their requirements, pain points, challenges, and frustration. Discovery calls, search intent, social listening, Google Alerts, and press releases are some ways to find out this information. You can also engage ABM platforms and solutions providers to get deep insights into the account and the group of decision-makers. You should closely collaborate with sales so they can share insights on the challenges customers and prospects share with them. Once you have all the data you need on the target account’s pain points, move to the next step: designing a content strategy to address these pain points with solid solutions.
Develop Content and Messages that Appeal to Decision Makers
Find the right channels to approach decision makers; determine what time of the day or what days of the week they prefer to connect; and when they are likely to consume content on a particular channel. After you find this information, you know when and where to connect with them and how to engage them in a productive conversation.
Create Content and Messaging that Aligns with the Decision Makers
Each person in the decision-making group (buying group committee) may consume content differently. You need to tailor your content to target each of the decision makers to influence their buying decisions. You might not need to create all the content from scratch. Repurposing existing content in a relevant way can save you time, money, and effort. However, you need to make sure that your content is convincing enough to influence the buying decisions of the buying committee members.
Final Thoughts
Account mapping is vital for ABM success and to maintain market competitiveness. It helps you determine who the decision makers are in your target account, so you can build the right communication plan and content to convert the account into a long-term customer.
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ABM Accounts
Article | June 6, 2022
6sense, the leading platform for predictable B2B revenue growth, today announces the results of the commissioned Total Economic Impact (TEI™) study conducted by Forrester Consulting examining the potential return on investment (ROI) by deploying the 6sense Revenue AI solution. The TEI study shows organizations using 6sense Revenue AI can achieve an ROI of 454% over three years, recouping their investment in less than six months with ROI increasing steadily thereafter.
These results align with 6sense’s own analysis of customer data which indicates a significant increase in revenue growth obtained within the first two quarters of prioritizing 6sense Qualified Accounts (6QA) which are prospects in-market to buy a solution and represent an ideal fit.
“As sales and marketing teams face increasing challenges to predictably grow pipeline and revenue while optimizing resources, our customers rely on 6sense as their unique competitive advantage to help them align on targets, maximize efforts, and significantly scale growth,” said Jason Zintak, CEO of 6sense. “We believe Forrester’s findings confirm that applying AI-driven insights to prioritize and target the right accounts at the right time with 6sense Revenue AI increases revenue and drives efficiencies across sales and marketing.”
According to the study participants, before using 6sense Revenue AI their organizations’ traditional marketing and sales efforts had languished while costly time and resource investments no longer provided results. Frustrated revenue teams were ineffective, often using point solutions requiring significant manual effort while delivering little value. They selected 6sense to create pipeline more efficiently and predictably.
Leveraging 6sense Revenue AI to capture buying signals and target the right accounts at the right time, the TEI study’s composite customer experienced the following benefits:
Increased sales revenues: Interviewees reported that 6sense identified 6QA opportunities were more likely to close and had higher average contract values. By increasingly focusing on prioritized accounts, revenue teams delivered significant gains in profits for their organizations.
2X increases in average contract value
4X increases in win rate
31% increases in opportunity volume
Decreased costs: Interviewees cited using 6sense to market and sell more efficiently and effectively. Acting on insights provided by 6sense unlocks significant resource optimization gains, including:
40% reduction in aggregate costs to qualify opportunities
40% reduction in effort to close opportunities
20-40% reduction in time to close deals
Study participants reported a wide range of optimization and cost reduction benefits using 6sense Revenue AI including sales productivity gains from enhanced insights and better prioritization, tech stack consolidation, improved conversion rates across the buyer’s journey, reduced customer acquisition costs and optimized marketing spend. One interviewee indicated their customer acquisition costs dropped by nearly 50% within two years of implementing 6sense.
“6sense Revenue AI is the first and only platform to apply the power of data, machine learning, and automation across the entire buyers’ journey to provide a better customer experience and produce the kind of pipeline that converts to revenue. This means the entire revenue team makes insight-driven decisions, prioritizes time and resources more effectively, and realizes better outcomes,” said Amar Doshi, SVP of Product and UX at 6sense. “Our customers repeatedly claim results similar to those that participated in the TEI Study.”
To develop the study, Forrester interviewed nine 6sense customers, identifying the benefits, risks, and outcomes they experienced while using the company’s product experience platform. Forrester’s (TEI) consulting practice develops business value justification analysis to help organizations understand the financial impact of a technology investment. The TEI methodology has been used for over 20 years by technology organizations. It consists of four components to evaluate investment value: cost, benefits, flexibility, and risk.
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