Buyer Intent Data
Article | September 11, 2023
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
Discover the top 10 buyer intent data tools for businesses to leverage advanced data analytics and real-time intelligence for gaining valuable insights into buyer intent and drive revenue growth.
The ability to effectively harness and leverage buyer intent data has become imperative for organizations striving to stay ahead of the competition in the dynamic modern business landscape. In this era of empowered consumers, businesses must go beyond surface-level understanding and delve into deeper motivations and preferences of their target audience. As organizations strive to understand their customers on a deeper level, sophisticated buyer intent software and tools have become indispensable for extracting actionable insights.
With the implementation of these sophisticated solutions, businesses can unlock invaluable insights into customer behavior, preferences, and purchase intent, enabling them to make informed decisions, tailor their marketing strategies, and ultimately drive substantial business growth. The following are some of the best buyer intent data tools and software essential for organizational growth:
SalesOS
Developed by ZoomInfo, SalesOS is a cutting-edge go-to-market platform tailored for B2B companies. It boasts the largest, most accurate, and regularly updated database of insights, intelligence, and purchasing intent data pertaining to companies and contacts. Complementing this wealth of information, SalesOS incorporates additional tools such as Chorus for conversation intelligence, Engage for sales engagement, and RingLead for data orchestration. Integrating these tools with existing systems, SalesOS equips go-to-market teams with the necessary resources to engage prospects and customers effectively. With SalesOS, organizations can optimize their sales efforts, close more deals, and achieve their sales targets with precision and efficiency.
Terminus Intent Data
Terminus Intent Data is a robust software solution that equips sales and marketing teams with precise insights to identify their most promising opportunities and evaluate their conversion potential. It leverages a combination of first-party and third-party intent data, enabling teams to focus their efforts strategically. With its native, multi-channel ABM campaigns, organizations can select and prioritize accounts demonstrating intent to buy throughout the entire buyer's journey. In addition, by initiating targeted brand promotion to companies exhibiting intent interest, Terminus helps businesses establish an early impression and activate their sales teams at the optimal time. With Terminus Intent Data, companies can optimize their go-to-market strategies, enhance customer engagement, and drive growth by capitalizing on valuable intent-driven insights.
Demandbase One
A comprehensive and intelligent go-to-market (GTM) suite, Demandbase One, empowers businesses to outpace their competition. With its single platform for orchestrating and automating seamless buyer journeys, Demandbase One enables organizations to accelerate their go-to-market strategies. The platform revolves around robust account intelligence, allowing teams to identify opportunities earlier, engage prospects more intelligently, and streamline the deal-closing process. It offers a complete GTM package, encompassing solutions for account-based experience (ABX), advertising, sales intelligence, and data. Alternatively, businesses can adopt the specific solutions they require at their own pace. Whichever path they choose, Demandbase One optimizes GTM operations, leading to a superior buying experience and positioning organizations for success in the competitive marketplace.
Identification
Identification, a powerful software solution developed by RollWorks, offers B2B businesses the capability to identify and engage their target accounts with precision. Leveraging advanced data intelligence and machine learning, Identification empowers marketers to uncover the companies visiting their websites and gain valuable insights into their intent and interests. It assists businesses in accurately identifying both known and unknown website visitors, enabling them to personalize their interactions, tailor messaging, and prioritize outreach efforts. With Identification, companies can optimize their account-based marketing strategies by effectively targeting high-value accounts, utilizing ideal customer profile (ICP) insights, and accessing sales intelligence. By capitalizing on this comprehensive tool, organizations can enhance engagement with their most valuable accounts, resulting in increased conversions and revenue growth.
Integrate Marketplace
Integrate Marketplace, powered by a global network of trusted partners and expert campaign strategists, empowers B2B businesses to execute turnkey brand and demand programs that generate qualified, compliant, and marketable leads. With its custom programmatic display campaigns and diverse content syndication partnerships, the software enables businesses to establish brand recognition among target accounts and drive demand effectively. Integrate also helps companies to leverage unified technology to run precise, holistic campaigns while gaining valuable data insights by incorporating media channels and providing a consistent buyer experience. The key features of Integrate Marketplace include predictable pipeline generation, meticulous brand campaigns, and beautiful cross-channel buyer experiences, facilitating businesses to drive measurable results and accelerate their demand generation efforts. As it works with vetted partners, Integrate Marketplace expands its reach on a global scale, ensuring that brand and content exposure reaches the desired markets.
Company Surge
Company Surge, a comprehensive data intelligence solution developed by Bombora, provides businesses with valuable insights into buyer intent. Leveraging a vast B2B intent data database, Company Surge empowers organizations to gain a deep understanding of the topics and interests potential customers are researching across the web. Businesses can refine their understanding of their target audience, identify key accounts displaying buying signals, and optimize their marketing and sales strategies accordingly by harnessing this database. Company Surge helps businesses enhance their lead-generation efforts, personalize their messaging, and improve overall marketing effectiveness, resulting in higher conversion rates and revenue growth. With the power of intent data, businesses can make informed decisions and strategically align their efforts to meet the needs and interests of their prospective customers, driving meaningful business outcomes.
MRP Prelytix
MRP Prelytix is a purpose-built software solution that addresses the specific needs and challenges faced by enterprise sales and marketing teams. With over 20 years of experience in serving these teams, MRP Prelytix simplifies the complexities of the operating environment and enables coordinated account-based programs alongside existing marketing initiatives on a global scale. The software's key features include enterprise administration for efficient management, omnichannel orchestration for cohesive marketing campaigns, pre-built integrations for seamless data connectivity, and revenue-driving analytics for actionable insights. Recognizing the distinct requirements of enterprise-class marketers, MRP Prelytix offers a mature and sophisticated platform that facilitates seamless coordination of ABM programs across teams. Integrating the capabilities of MRP Prelytix, enterprise sales and marketing teams can optimize their operations, enhance customer engagement, and drive revenue growth in their highly sophisticated operating environment.
6sense Revenue AI
6sense Revenue AI transforms the way organizations drive pipeline and revenue, offering advanced capabilities for capturing anonymous buying signals, targeting ideal accounts, and recommending effective channels and messaging. Removing guesswork and streamlining sales efforts, the platform empowers sales, marketing, and customer success teams to improve pipeline quality, accelerate sales velocity, increase conversion rates, and drive predictable revenue growth. 6sense also enables businesses to uncover hidden signals and missed opportunities in their funnel, utilizing intent data from multiple sources to accurately match buying signals to accounts across devices, channels, and locations. With features such as dynamic account targeting, predictive analytics, and a centralized tech stack, businesses can craft precise audience-building strategies, automate workflows, and engage buyers through hyper-targeted advertising campaigns and conversational emails.
Capture
Capture, offered by Clearbit, is a versatile software product designed to assist businesses in obtaining accurate and comprehensive lead data in real time. With Capture, sales and marketing teams can instantly enrich lead information by entering an email address or domain. Key features of Capture include the ability to reveal hidden pipeline opportunities, find critical buyer contact information, add new records to the CRM, and seamlessly integrate with the entire technology stack. Leveraging Clearbit's vast database and powerful algorithms, the software provides valuable details such as company information, social media profiles, and job titles. It also empowers businesses to streamline lead qualification, personalize outreach, and enhance the effectiveness of sales and marketing campaigns by seamlessly integrating with existing workflows and systems.
PurePush
PurePush, offered by Demand Science, is an innovative software solution that revolutionizes B2B content syndication. It enables businesses to effectively target their desired audience and deliver tailored content across various digital channels. PurePush leverages advanced targeting capabilities and precise audience segmentation to ensure the right content reaches the right individuals at the optimal time. It also assists organizations in amplifying their content visibility, expanding their reach, and driving engagement with high-quality leads. The software provides actionable insights and analytics to optimize content syndication strategies, allowing businesses to nurture prospects, generate quality leads, and accelerate their sales pipeline. With PurePush, enterprises benefit from dedicated customer experience managers who provide exceptional support and guidance throughout each campaign, ensuring a seamless experience.
Conclusion
The integration of buyer intent data software and tools has become essential for businesses aiming to maximize their growth potential in the business landscape today. The top 10 tools for finding intent data discussed in this article offer a wide range of features and capabilities that enable businesses to gain valuable insights into buyer intent, optimize their marketing and sales efforts, and drive revenue growth.
The growing integration of advanced technologies, such as data analytics, machine learning algorithms, and real-time intelligence in buyer intent data tools, further empowers businesses to identify high-value accounts, personalize their messaging, prioritize their outreach efforts, and deliver exceptional buyer experiences. With the ability to uncover hidden signals, target the right accounts at the ideal time, and make data-driven decisions, businesses can significantly improve pipeline quality, accelerate sales velocity, increase conversion rates, and ultimately achieve their growth objectives. Embracing these buyer intent data tools as part of a comprehensive business strategy will give organizations a competitive edge in the dynamic and ever-evolving B2B landscape.
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Buyer Intent Data
Article | October 7, 2022
In 2018, Demand Gen Report’s ABM Benchmark Survey found that 25% of participating B2B companies used buyer intent data and monitoring tools. 35% of them planned on using intent data within a year. Cut to 2022, and about 99% of B2B marketers are using some form of B2B intent data in their marketing campaigns to target accounts (Source: InboxInsight).
In his exclusive interview with Media 7, Gil Allouche, CEO of Metadata.io, talked about how data helps convert leads.
“With access to valuable data, marketers are focused on leads that are more likely to become buyers. They can also work on targeting their messaging towards these potential buyers.”
Buyer intent data helps in creating a robust foundation for your marketing efforts. Let us look at how intent marketing can help you get the sales and ROI you desire.
Intent Marketing: The New Normal in B2B
Intent-based marketing uses consumer data that signals purchasing intent through consumption of relevant content like blogs and infographics; product comparisons; product reviews; message boards; case studies; and news. Through this data, you can find out what your prospects are looking for, which stage of the customer journey they are in, if they are researching solutions or ready to make a purchase, and what kind of steps you can take to get in front of them.
One of the most important benefits of intent marketing is that it removes the guesswork out of your marketing campaigns and ensures that you are targeting the correct prospects. This targeting can be done through either intent-based branding or intent-based marketing. Intent-based branding decodes the behavior of your target audience online while intent-based marketing harnesses data on the prospect’s buying behavior so you can tailor your marketing offerings accordingly. Consequently, your sales cycle is shortened.
Power-up Your Content Strategy
The biggest challenge B2B marketers like you face today is to cut through all the noise and create an impact on their prospects. Consumers have a host of content options. However, they do not want to consume unnecessary information. When the content is personalized to match their needs and goals, they are more likely to engage with it. Intent data helps you plan your content as it provides you with information on the theme, buyer personas and their behavior, buyer journey maps, content formats, copy, call to action (CTA), and keyword strategy that will best suit your prospect targeting efforts.
An intent-based content strategy can deliver leads while increasing conversion rates and sales. It can give you the competitive edge you need to influence your prospects at the right time.
Drive Sales and ROI
Intent marketing brings in more conversions on landing pages and overall higher traffic and qualified leads to your website. It uses intent information to recruit engaged prospects for sales demos and events. It helps sales teams to effectively rank their leads and accounts so that they can focus on the right leads at the right time and not miss out on any sales opportunities. Your sales teams can execute effective nurture campaigns and create sales pitches with messaging that appeals to a target account’s buying committee. This messaging addresses the account’s pain points and requirements and accelerates the buying decision.
Additionally, intent marketing helps improve customer retention rates and makes it easy for teams to identify cross-sell and upsell opportunities. It takes into consideration the existing customers’ signals to find any at-risk accounts to prevent churn and increase renewal.
Data-driven Marketing Personalization
Intent data makes it easy to personalize your marketing efforts and provides an accurate report of prospective signals, their needs, and interests so that you can segment and categorize them. Once this segmentation is done, you can determine what kind of content needs to be created and displayed for these accounts depending on their position in the buying cycle. With this kind of personalization, your target audience gets to know that you care about them and you can connect with them on a deeper level.
Increase ABM Efficiency
B2B buyer intent data helps your marketing, sales, and customer success teams align their goals so that they can agree on target accounts, establish lead hand-off processes, and diversify investments to target newer, relevant accounts while maintaining the current customer list. Intent data provides marketing intelligence for creating ICP in marketing, messaging, and brand positions for B2B account-based marketing. Additionally, it provides account intelligence for target account list creation, ways to increase engagement, improve lead scoring in ABM and lead nurturing tracks, thus increasing the efficiency of your account-based marketing.
Summing It Up
Intent-based marketing helps B2B marketers like you to understand potential customers so you can find high-value accounts and nurture them through customized content and targeted campaigns.
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Account Based Analytics
Article | June 14, 2022
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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