Buyer Intent Data
Article | June 20, 2023
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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Account Based Data
Article | June 29, 2023
Getting the attention of the target audience at the right time is the aim of every B2B marketing strategy. Most consumers research products and services before making a purchasing decision. B2B companies are no different. This means potential accounts are always on the lookout for a solution to a problem they are facing in their business. These are prospects that will convert into approachable leads and eventually customers if you offer them just what they are looking for, just when they are looking for it.
To find these lucrative prospects, marketers like you need to harness B2B buyer intent data. B2B intent data gives you deep insights into your marketing ICP’s behaviour, pain points, and requirements. With this important data, you can give your sales team promising leads they can follow up on.
In an interview with Media 7, Marc Laplante, CEO and Co-founder of Intentsify emphasized the importance of intent data.
“In B2B marketing and sales, intent data is typically understood as a tool to identify or prioritize which accounts we should target for advertising, lead generation, and sales follow-up. These are undoubtedly powerful use cases. But they represent only part of the intent data’s value. You should also use intent data to convert those accounts down the funnel into customers and revenue. Intent data, if granular enough, will highlight your target accounts’ problems, interests, research into competitors, geographic location, and buying stage.”
Let us take a look at what buyer intent data can do to bring you the sales numbers you want and how it can enhance your B2B account-based marketing strategy.
Buyer Intent Data Brings You Ready-to-buy Customers
Every user has a unique online behaviour, which can be distinguished using behavioral signals that uncovers the topic, product, or service the person needs. This information gives insight into the perceived intent of your marketing ICP. As a marketer, this information will help you plan effective advertising campaigns. The sales team can use this data to design the right pitch tracks, demos, and collateral to convert members from your targeted buying group. Additionally, this data can also help your customer success teams identify existing accounts that showcase a churn risk or an upsell opportunity. It’s a win-win for three teams at once.
B2B intent data uses website data, off-site activity, CRMs, social media data, and content consumption data from online content like infographics, blogs, product comparisons and reviews, discussion boards, case studies, and news to pinpoint buyer insights.
Intent Data Improves the B2B Buyer Journey
The B2B buyer journey is a combination of accounts navigating through early stage (awareness content to identify the problem), middle stage (exploring solutions), late stage (comparing vendors that offer solutions) and finally the last stage (purchase/upsell/churn). Between exploring solutions and comparing vendors, lie hidden opportunities that haven’t reached you. Intent data can bridge this gap for you.
Intent data providers give you data that is tailored to keywords that are relevant to your business and use case. This data targets buying locations at the website level and aggregates signals across a corporate family. Deep learning and natural language processing (NLP) are used to screen the content to achieve relevancy and to map billions of unique online engagement events every week. Analytics pinpoint the accounts that are showing any kind of buying activity and correspond to your targeted keywords. All this actionable data can shorten your buyer’s journey towards conversion.
Identifying early-stage prospects
At this stage, intent data signals surge around the keywords or topics that relate to the general challenges and pain points of your prospects because they are looking at the cause of their problem. They will try to find a elementary solution and get to know more about the products and services different brands are offering.
Identifying middle-stage prospects
The intent data signals at this stage will show a higher level of activity around topics or keywords related to a precise product or service category because the prospects have already identified the root of their problem and the options they have to address it.
Identifying prospects ready to purchase
At this stage, the signals are mostly focused on topics related to your brand, your specific product names and features, and your competitors’ product names. These prospects are ready to spend and should be approached at the earliest to achieve conversion.
Sources of Buyer Intent Data
Intent data providers offer two types of intent data:
1. Internal Intent Data (First-party Data)
This data is collected in-house through a marketing automation platform or through application logs if you have a web-based app. You can control what you collect and how you collect it and act on the data instantly. You can customize the purchase intent to your liking.
2. External Intent Data
External intent data is third-party intent data and is collected outside of your business. It is sourced via IP lookups, cookies or specific websites. However, third-party cookies will be phased out soon. So, B2B marketers need to rely on first-party cookies, data points, contextual advertising, and tracking technologies to get information on their prospects. Read more about cookie-less ABM here.
B2B Buyer Intent Behavioral Indicators
Actions that prospects carry out on your website or the internet are compared with the behavioral data of prospects that become SQLs (sales qualified leads). Here are some behavioral indicators that show purchase intent:
High intensity engagement with your brand’s social media posts
Exploring your product or pricing pages
Exploring product or service customer review page
Reading articles about your product’s features on your blog
The frequency of prospects’ website visits and the actions they take
Content consumption, like downloading e-books, templates, or any other resources
What Does Buyer Intent Data Do for You?
While implementing account-based marketing techniques, you should prioritize intent data above everything else. Capitalize on the potential of intent data by incorporating it into your sales and marketing workflows. Adjust your interactions to match your prospects’ demands and establish meaningful connections with them.
Primarily, intent data helps prioritize a list of target accounts that need to be pursued. Once the sales and marketing teams are aware of a user's location in the sales cycle, they may focus on moving them along in the purchasing process with customized content. Let us look into what intent data can do for your business in detail:
Efficient Prospecting
According to a survey by HubSpot, 75% of businesses ranked being able to close more deals as their top sales priority. With intent data, a prospect that is in the market to buy is easier to find because of predictive analytics. You already have your ICP in marketing in place and when prospects match this list and are in the market to buy, buying intent data efficiently puts your brand in front of these leads. Apart from this, buyer intent also helps segment your target list based on the intensity of the purchase intent. Targeting accounts with high intent through email marketing, content marketing, advertising and direct mail becomes easier.
Enhances Outbound Sales
The higher the quality of leads, the easier it becomes for your sales team to convert them. Buyer intent data lets your sales team know the exact position of a lead in the buying cycle. Instead of wasting time emailing unqualified leads, your team can approach these prospects which match your ICP in marketing and start a meaningful conversation. Intent data also increases the ROI of your B2B content syndication efforts.
Superior Lead Scoring
Your marketing team can predict prospects’ purchase intent based on what they are researching. They can do lead scoring with precision and supplement your sales team’s efforts. They don’t have to rely on traditional lead scoring methods where they add points to a lead’s score when certain actions are performed. Intent data uncovers possible paths that your leads can take even when they are not on your website.
Personalized and Targeted ABM campaigns
Personalization is key for any B2B account-based marketing campaign to bring the results you expect. The most effective method to enhance your ABM strategy is to map out your buyer journey and sprinkle it with relevant content to influence leads. You can also use intent data to strategically personalize and rank your ABM demand generation campaigns, so that every touch point of your ABM campaign meets your prospects' expectations.
Relevant Content
Creating content that can catch the attention of your prospects while offering solutions and value is crucial to get the conversions you expect. Intent data will help you see the correlation between topics and the context of those topics with the solutions your prospects are looking for. If you are aware of the questions that your prospects have before they go to market, you can answer them through your content. Buying intent data offers you just that. Let intent data drive your content strategy to give your prospects just what they want.
Intent Marketing
Intent-based marketing is when you know just where to spend your time and budget. In intent marketing, the focus lies on analyzing the intent of your prospects and strategizing how to meet them. Spending less time trying to target and rank keywords with low or irrelevant intent can help you increase your ROI, make an ironclad content strategy and a streamlined lead generation process that results in conversion and revenue.
Assessing Buyer Intent
Understanding and calculating buyer intent is not an easy task. It depends on these three factors:
Recency
Buyer intent that reports how recently a prospect engaged with your content is valuable so that your sales team can approach leads who have visited your website.
Frequency
Frequency indicates the intensity of your prospects’ intent to buy a product or service to solve their problems. If they visit key pages that have information on pricing, case studies, customer stories, etc., your sales team can reach out to them immediately.
Engagement
When your sales and marketing teams score leads, one of the most important parameters on their scale is engagement. If a prospect is engaging with the content on your website, through a chatbot, or as a result of an email campaign, you know it’s a great time to reach out to them.
Apart from these factors, buyer intent data tools also use variables like firmographics, technographics, account size, and job titles for accurate buyer intent mapping so that you can reach out to your marketing ICP with a personalized message in your intent-based marketing strategy.
Metadata Sees 42% Dip in CPL with G2 Buyer Intent
Metadata, a demand generation platform that runs paid campaign experiments and self-optimizes them to generate revenue, invested in G2 buyer intent. Their cost per lead (CPL) dipped 42%, their click-to-open rate for ads increased 114%, and their average deal size for ads spiked by 18%.
Final Thoughts
Buyer intent data changes the way you interact with your prospects and leads. Harness buyer intent data tools to have an edge over your competitors and get more conversions.
FAQ
What are the essential elements of an intent data strategy?
Align your intent data strategy with your ABM strategy, get buy-in from the C-suite, begin with a small pilot, analyze performance metrics, and integrate your systems with intent data.
How are B2B marketers leveraging B2B buyer intent data to boost revenue?
B2B marketers use intent data to create effective content, identify buyer groups, improve lead qualification, boost team productivity, and increase customer retention to boost revenue.
How does intent data enhance your lead scoring process?
Predictive purchasing insights help you find prospects in the market so you can make a list of accounts that are close to making a purchase decision. This makes your lead scoring process easier and better.
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Buyer Intent Data
Article | March 6, 2023
ABX is about quality, not quantity.
The traditional metrics that have been used to gauge ABM success are not useful in the experience-centric realm. The new and more complex benchmarks for measuring success revolve around:
Relationship analytics
Journey analytics
Attribution analytics
Once you’ve successfully closed accounts, you want to make sure you understand which ABM programs helped to contribute to that sale so you can rinse and repeat. This is where you can evaluate how a vendor measures ABM success and the entire Account-Based Experience. You will want to choose a vendor who can help you optimize your programs from the top of the funnel to the bottom, and grow your customer’s lifetime value.
Some examples of metrics to measure include the volume and velocity of an account as it makes its way through the buyer journey. This helps you understand whether your programs are engaging enough as well as whether your sales cycle is too long.
A strong ABM vendor will also have different methods for measuring attribution since not all businesses are alike, and marketers love seeing attribution models so they can measure the success of their marketing efforts and ROI.
Other metrics to consider include advertising campaigns and website visits – but with an account-based lens. After all, you want to understand whether your advertising is reaching the right accounts and which accounts are engaging on your website. If you find you’re short-staffed, some ABM vendors offer strategic services to help you with your ABM strategy and measurement. To learn more about vendor onboarding and support, read the next section.
Because ABX has a different set of metrics than ABM, when it comes to measuring the performance of the ABM solution from the vantage point of the customer experience, the scope also changes.
The vendors on your shortlist should, among other features:
Offer a dashboard to measure ABM impact from across the funnel.
Track volume, velocity and conversion metrics for each journey stage.
Offer customizable subscriptions for all custom reports.
People and account based heatmaps.
Allow you to combine first party, third party, firmographic and technographic data for segmentation and reporting.
Allow you to compare the performance of different audiences or account lists and evaluate the impact of specific programs.
Enable you to see the engagement and activities that influenced the different stages of a deal cycle.
Measuring a journey and a relationship in the long term requires measuring as much data as possible, so find out if they also:
Centralize your existing data sources in one location?
Track B2B metrics by account?
Track and report on anonymous first-touch visitors by account?
Have strategic services in place to help you set up ROI reporting based on your strategies? Allow you to compare different timeframes for account stages?
Provide advanced BI capabilities for ABM?
The point of measuring is to take action based on knowledge and insights, and having an ABM solution that allows you to bring together all of the relevant data points for your decision-making is pivotal for the success of your business. Our agnostic Definitive Guide to Choosing an Account-Based Marketing Platform provides you with checklists like the one above as well as the reasoning behind the need for each of the features outlined in the ebook. Check it out and take advantage of the printable list we put together for your own use at the end of the guide.
ABX is about quality, not quantity. The traditional metrics that have been used to gauge ABM success are not useful in the experience-centric realm. The new and more complex benchmarks for measuring success revolve around:
Relationship analytics
Journey analytics
Attribution analytics
Once you’ve successfully closed accounts, you want to make sure you understand which ABM programs helped to contribute to that sale so you can rinse and repeat. This is where you can evaluate how a vendor measures ABM success and the entire Account-Based Experience. You will want to choose a vendor who can help you optimize your programs from the top of the funnel to the bottom, and grow your customer’s lifetime value.
Some examples of metrics to measure include the volume and velocity of an account as it makes its way through the buyer journey. This helps you understand whether your programs are engaging enough as well as whether your sales cycle is too long.
A strong ABM vendor will also have different methods for measuring attribution since not all businesses are alike, and marketers love seeing attribution models so they can measure the success of their marketing efforts and ROI.
Other metrics to consider include advertising campaigns and website visits – but with an account-based lens. After all, you want to understand whether your advertising is reaching the right accounts and which accounts are engaging on your website. If you find you’re short-staffed, some ABM vendors offer strategic services to help you with your ABM strategy and measurement. To learn more about vendor onboarding and support, read the next section.
Because ABX has a different set of metrics than ABM, when it comes to measuring the performance of the ABM solution from the vantage point of the customer experience, the scope also changes.
The vendors on your shortlist should, among other features:
Offer a dashboard to measure ABM impact from across the funnel.
Track volume, velocity and conversion metrics for each journey stage.
Offer customizable subscriptions for all custom reports.
People and account based heatmaps.
Allow you to combine first party, third party, firmographic and technographic data for segmentation and reporting.
Allow you to compare the performance of different audiences or account lists and evaluate the impact of specific programs.
Enable you to see the engagement and activities that influenced the different stages of a deal cycle.
Measuring a journey and a relationship in the long term requires measuring as much data as possible, so find out if they also:
Centralize your existing data sources in one location?
Track B2B metrics by account?
Track and report on anonymous first-touch visitors by account?
Have strategic services in place to help you set up ROI reporting based on your strategies? Allow you to compare different timeframes for account stages?
Provide advanced BI capabilities for ABM?
The point of measuring is to take action based on knowledge and insights, and having an ABM solution that allows you to bring together all of the relevant data points for your decision-making is pivotal for the success of your business. Our agnostic Definitive Guide to Choosing an Account-Based Marketing Platform provides you with checklists like the one above as well as the reasoning behind the need for each of the features outlined in the ebook. Check it out and take advantage of the printable list we put together for your own use at the end of the guide.
Read More
ABM Accounts
Article | January 11, 2022
High-value content plays a key role in account-based marketing. Account-based marketing uses content to nurture leads and address their pain points throughout the sales process.
A perfect ABM strategy is one that provides relevant content to the right prospects at the right time. ABM content needs to be personal and highly relevant to create an impact on the stakeholders of your target account.
In an interview with Media 7, Stuart Sumner, Editorial Director at Incisive Media, talked about the importance of content in marketing strategy.
“The best way to win the content war is to have better, more valuable, and more timely content than your competitors. You need to offer audiences a regular supply of high-quality, in-depth content, which they can’t get elsewhere.”
The need for effective content is all-encompassing across industries, demographics, and niche domains. It helps businesses seek solutions to their critical business challenges. Reading through the opinions of other thought leaders from the industry influences their purchase decisions. So, good quality, reliable content can convince a business that you are the ideal choice for a B2B association.
How Should ABM Content Be Organized?
Creating effective content is the need of the hour, but it can be challenging if done without a direction or goal in mind.
Your ABM content should build brand awareness, and engage the readers while also presenting value to them. It should also be personalized enough to convey your involvement and dedication to your target account. To organize ABM content effectively, follow these steps:
Conduct Stringent Research
Stringently researching your target audience can help to create a content framework that can capture the solutions to their problems, their needs, and their interests. When you investigate the target accounts in-depth, you will know what aspects you can leverage to capture their attention and interest. Then you can organize the content to engage them.
Another interesting approach is to directly ask your audience about the kind of content they enjoy and their preferred formats. These insights can help you personalize the content better because 80% of consumers prefer shopping with brands that provide a personalized experience. You might also be able to leverage content for more than one account.
Maintain a Content Inventory
The research-based content that was created before you developed your ABM strategy can be repurposed to target the accounts in your focus. Creating a content library and mapping the intent of your content can help you with repurposing the correct content. The more detailed your content library, the easier it gets to reuse it. Consider organizing your content library with dates, extra information, highlights, and formats so you can start using the content without much ado.
The content you develop should complement your ABM strategy. As a part of your ABM strategy, it should add value to your marketing effort.
Create a Content Matrix
Create a content matrix that lists out the target accounts in your focus. It is a tool to organize your data to meet your marketing objectives. Based on your objectives, you can carry out content mapping to influence purchase decisions for these accounts. This can help you decide on the purpose of your content strategy. Do you want to create awareness or incite action from your readers? By figuring out what you want, you can use your content matrix to understand the scope to personalize the content in line with your ABM goals.
Analyze Your Performance
Experiment with different formats, visuals, and messages while creating your content. Measure the success of your content strategy like you measure the success of your ABM strategy using KPIs. Gauge how your audience reacts to different formats and visuals to know what to focus more on. Revise, retest, repurpose the content till you get the best output. It all boils down to how well you organize your ABM content.
ABM Content Best Practices
Best practices should be followed when creating content to achieve sales and marketing alignment, drive ROI, and target key accounts. Periodically engaging in website content mapping and content research to see how your content is doing is vital. Here are the ABM content best practices you should follow to organize ABM content:
1. Personalize the content to suit your target account’s needs.
2. Conduct regular SEO and content audits to find any flaws or unresponsive content.
3. Optimize your content to meet search engine optimization needs.
4. Repurpose your content regularly to make the most of it.
5. Support your content with good design.
6. Focus on creating interactive ABM content.
7. Your content should build trust in the minds of your target accounts.
How Coca-Cola’s Fanbase on Facebook Increased by 39% Because of Organized Content
Coca-Cola’s famous ‘Share a Coke’ campaign targeted Australian millennials to improve their sales numbers in the summer of 2011. Under this campaign, Coca-Cola offered name-branded coke bottles to the customers. Through stringent research, understanding their audiences’ preferred formats (TV commercials, newspapers, bus ads, and social media), and implementing strong CTAs in their ads, Coca-Cola gained a 39% increase in its Facebook fanbase.
Key Takeaway
The way you formulate and organize ABM content plays a key role in driving results from your ABM strategy. It is crucial that you dedicate time and resources to creating, personalizing, organizing, presenting, and analyzing the content you offer to your target accounts. You can drive a higher ROI from your ABM and content strategy only when your approach to content is as focused as your ABM strategy.
FAQ
What is a content matrix?
A content matrix is a tool that a marketer can use to plan and offer the right content in the right format and on the right platform to the target audience.
How can you use old content in your ABM strategy?
You can use your old content by repurposing it to better target your key accounts.
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