Buyer Intent Data
Article | June 20, 2023
Intent data is an essential piece of the account-based marketing puzzle. It’s the type of data that can give B2B companies a competitive edge as they look to identify engaged, active prospects at prioritized accounts that show a clear pattern of interest in a product, service, or solution. As importantly, intent data can pinpoint signals in a buyer’s journey that lets you know what their next step might be, helping you target them with personalized, contextual messaging.
There are a couple of flavors of intent data, but in this case, third-party intent data is the focus.
Third-party intent data originates from external sources and may include many potential online interactions that have occurred away from your website and your company’s interactions. Website visits at competitor sites, webinar attendance, downloads, product reviews, social media interactions, and online subscriptions to publications in your industry or sector are fair game for third-party intent data insights. Like an intricate spider web woven from numerous data points, third-party intent data offers a view of online behavior for potential prospects as they traverse their buying journey.
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Account Based Data
Article | June 29, 2023
Personalized engagements are the foundation of account-based marketing. Without customized and relevant content, B2B marketers cannot steer target accounts towards conversion, nor can they create a lasting relationship with them. That said, tailoring messaging for every contact on a target account’s buying committee can be overwhelming because each contact is at a different stage in the buyer journey.
Marketing teams struggle to achieve optimal success at ABM because they cannot scale their content personalization efforts to create engagement to ease the work of the sales teams.
You can easily overcome these challenges with conversational ABM. Let us take a look at how:
Creates Meaningful Engagement
Buyers have evolved from engaging with marketing emails, ads, whitepapers, and webinars. They expect personalized two-way conversations that focus on their requirements and pain points. So it is no surprise that 90% of customers want to use messaging to communicate with businesses (Source: Twilio Customer Survey).
How does conversational ABM create meaningful engagement?
Did you know that when you contact a lead within the first hour, you are seven times more likely to qualify the prospect? (Source: Harvard Business Review)
Conversational ABM engages customers with real-time conversations using chat bots, voice bots, or interactive web pages. B2B companies engage in conversational ABM through social media, websites and paid advertising. These AI-powered conversations replace static lead capture forms with one-on-one conversations with target accounts. Target accounts can get in touch with your business and receive instantaneous responses. As they move through the funnel, they can have a seamless, personalized, consistent experience, thus increasing the likeliness of conversion and ensuring a holistic customer experience.
Accelerates ABM Revenue
Conversational ABM drives engagement towards revenue-generating actions. It fuels your pipeline with leads who want to take the next step. Apart from doing this, conversational ABM also brings your sales and marketing teams together and enhances the personalization quotient of your content. It routes your leads effectively through instantaneous responses and increases annual contract value (ACV) because your sales reps understand exactly what your customers want. Additionally, it automates messaging based on specific account attributes. These features help you put your ABM strategy into action and get the sales you want.
TLDR: Game-changing Attributes of Conversational ABM
Helps you know the moment a target buyer arrives on your website
Alerts your sales team for immediate conversation
Supports live chat, voice calls and screen sharing option
Scales your personalization strategy for content
It is available around the clock
Increases ABM revenue through meaningful engagement
Ideal Conversational ABM Solution Features
Matches contacts to best personalized conversation
Validates contact’s interest and qualifies them
Initiates a prompt, two-way dialog; takes regular follow-up
Uses insights to improve account segmentation and personalize content accordingly
Summing It Up
While implementing ABM, building thousands of messages and managing hundreds of workflows can be tiring. Conversational ABM can save you time and let you tailor key parts of your conversation with a specific account to make your ABM strategy work better.
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Buyer Intent Data
Article | March 6, 2023
Intent data is a modern sales intelligence tool that helps you capture a prospect’s buying signals. By using an effective intent data strategy, you can be the first to reach out to a prospect and aim for a conversion.
In an interview with Media 7, Gil Allouche, CEO of Metadata.io, talked about the importance of data in converting 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.”
According to SalesIntel, 97% of B2B marketers agree that intent data will give brands a competitive edge.
Intent data collects signals that come from consumption of content like:
Blogs and infographics
Product comparisons
Product reviews
Message boards
Case studies
News
However, it can be challenging to incorporate intent data into marketing and sales initiatives. Regardless of whether you're working with first-party, second-party, or third-party intent data, it can have multiple applications across a range of systems and workflows and may overwhelm your team.
An excellent B2B intent data approach can ease the process and use of intent data. Motivate your team to harness the power of intent data to drive business growth.
5 Essential Elements of an Intent Data Strategy
52% of B2B tech companies implement an intent data strategy in their account-based marketing program. (Source: SalesIntel)
This statistic shows that more and more B2B marketers are seeking the help of intent data to make their account targeting more effective.
Let us look at what essential steps you should take while integrating B2B intent data into your account-based marketing program.
Alignment: Your Intent Data Strategy Should Line up with Your ABM Strategy
To get the results you expect, synchronize it with your ABM marketing strategy. You can use intent data in different ways to optimize your account-based marketing. Here are two of the many ways it can help you with target account prioritization:
Bind the intent data to your ICP criteria. Which ones show buyer intent out of the accounts that match your ICP? This information can help your marketing team push these accounts further into the funnel. Your sales reps will have meaningful communication with these target accounts. Overall, the chances of conversion will go up because you know the intent of your ICP-based target accounts.
There may be net new accounts showing buyer intent but they fall outside your pre-defined ICP. Segment these accounts and increase your sales pipeline. If your company doesn't have a lot of data, this use case can help you change or define your ICP criteria and help your sales pipeline.
Buy-In: Bring Your Teams Together
For all the teams to come together and work towards the same business goals and objectives, you need to get buy-in from the C-suite of your company. Only your leadership can drive your sales and teams to break silos and work with the mindset of establishing processes and using tactics that can create harmony between them. Ensure that the teams understand what you want to achieve with intent data for ABM. Share it with them and align on a follow-up strategy, metrics, and key accounts. Set up training programs so that your teams understand the newness and precision that intent data will bring to account-based marketing.
Testing: Begin with a Small Pilot
Apply your strategy to a small set of accounts. Involve limited sales team members within your company, probably a team you are closely associated with, to oversee the use of intent data in B2B marketing through your ABM program. This can help you understand where the strategy needs to be tweaked and what approach you need to use while using intent data. Pilot testing is an effective way of streamlining and recording your processes. It can be the foundation for implementing all your intent data initiatives for other sales teams over time. Get everyone on board to analyze the results of your pilot test and then decide on the best way to integrate intent data into your account-based marketing program.
Analysis: Examine the Performance Metrics
To gauge the impact of intent data on your account-based marketing program, you must collect conversion rates before the pilot test. This way, you can compare the before and after rates and examine how intent data helps ABM. Marketing and sales teams can look at what works and eliminate what doesn’t. This learning curve is crucial before you use intent data companywide.
Integration: Collate Your Systems with Intent Data
You can amplify the impact of your data strategy by integrating it with your systems like CRM, marketing automation software, and ABM platform. Through intent-based marketing, you can increase the performance and visibility of your brand throughout the sales funnel. Integration can also spearhead landing deals and expand your account-based strategy across different domains.
Implementing an intent data strategy step-by-step can lead to success and benefit all teams across all departments, increase customer satisfaction, and enable you to scale your business.
Kazoo Saw a 2-3x Increase in Reply Rates after Using Bombora’s Company Surge
Kazoo, an employee experience platform, integrated data from Bombora’s Company Surge buyer intent data tool with its 6sense account engagement platform data. It saw a 2-3x increase in reply rates.
Conclusion
When combined with additional data, B2B intent data can help you develop a scoring model that considers fit and engagement, making it more effective. If you use intent data in B2B marketing correctly, it can be a great way to improve your ABM strategy.
FAQ
How can an intent data strategy enhance ABM?
It can help in ABM marketing by indicating early buyer interest, facilitating content personalization, and helping with creating targeted account lists and lead scoring.
How can sales and marketing teams benefit from intent data?
Sales and marketing teams can use intent data for ABM to create effective go-to-market strategies, accurate target account segmentation, and personalized outreach.
What does intent data do to improve lead scoring?
Intent data provides predictive purchase insights. With the help of this information, you can approach the accounts close to making purchase decisions.
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Core ABM
Article | December 18, 2021
ABM in Marketing
Account-based marketing (ABM) is diametrically opposite of traditional marketing. Instead of targeting all kinds of customers with generic content, it targets only the most lucrative accounts using personalized content. This concentrated targeting results in more conversions, longer business associations, expansion, and account retention.
In an interview with Media 7, Clive Armitage, CEO of Agent3, said,
“If you are not utilizing the power of data, technology and content then you are failing to be a modern marketer.”
ABM leverages firmographic data (basic info), technographic data (data about the kind of technology the lead uses), intent data (lead behavior), and engagement data (data gained through form filling, and event attendance) to target accounts and segment them based on priority.
A 2020 benchmark study by the Information Technology Services Marketing Association (ITSMA) found that 76% of companies reported a higher ROI with ABM than other marketing types.
How Does ABM Contribute to Revenue Growth?
ABM drives higher ROI and measurable sales using marketing campaigns created by both sales and marketing teams.
A successful ABM strategy has components like these:
Targeting the right accounts and managing them
Cross-channel engagement
Measuring and dynamically optimizing the ABM programs using specialized dashboards to map targets, programs, and revenue metrics created by an account-based marketing software
ABM helps scale business revenue in the following ways:
Shows a Clear ROI
Businesses prefer precise results from their marketing strategies. ABM prioritizes ROI. It gives the highest ROI compared to any other B2B marketing strategy because it targets the highest-value accounts that meet defined criteria through custom campaigns addressing their needs and pain points.
Helps with Resource Allocation
ABM focuses only on high-value accounts. Consequently, companies can allocate their resources better and save time and money.
Engages the Audience
Personalized content means targeted accounts see only the content they can relate to so there is increased engagement and interaction.
Can Be Tracked Every Step of the Way
ABM metrics can be tracked every step of the way, so there is a clear idea of what is working and what isn’t. Important metrics include ROI, engagement, awareness, target account reach, and influence.
Aligns Sales and Marketing Teams
ABM aligns sales and marketing teams by helping them find common ground for their goals and objectives.
5 Must-ask Questions about ABM Strategy Implementation
Account-based marketing questions about ABM technology and strategy arise when businesses transition from traditional lead generation techniques to ABM. The following five must-ask questions about account-based marketing can be the keys to transitioning to ABM:
How to Create an ABM Strategy That Works?
To create an ABM strategy that works, follow these steps:
Define your target accounts.
Identify the key decision-makers of your target accounts.
Personalize your content to cater to your target accounts.
Choose appropriate channels to approach your target accounts.
Formulate campaigns to engage the target accounts.
Measure the success of your campaign using correct metrics.
What Things Should You Consider Before Allocating a Budget for ABM?
It is pretty challenging to find the correct answer to this question. The cost of tools, channels, and individual items keeps varying. Money spent on-field events, content creation to cater to target accounts, ads, trade shows, research, and intent data collection factors into budgeting.
To make budgeting easier, consider bifurcating the expenses into categories like technology (CRM, marketing automation systems, and data management platforms), human resources (data analysts, social media associates, and content strategists), events (one-on-one meets, trade shows, and webinars), media campaigns and direct mail.
How to Decide on the Size of the Target Accounts?
The size of your target accounts depends on your business goals (acquisition, retention, expansion), team size, and initiatives on an organizational level. Tiering accounts into three categories using data, technology, and thorough research has worked out for several businesses.
Tier 1: These are the accounts that fit your ideal customer profile (ICP) bill perfectly and have high strategic value.
Tier 2: These accounts have an excellent ICP but lower lifetime value.
Tier 3: These accounts meet only some criteria of ICP. Pursue these accounts but don’t go overboard to get their business.
What Metrics Should Be Used to Map ABM Success?
The biggest advantage of an ABM strategy is that its success can be measured. To measure this success, you need to focus on important KPIs like:
Engagement: This includes email metrics, social metrics, consumption rates, and offline activity metrics.
Awareness: This KPI measures how aware your target accounts are of your brand, how credible they think it is and how they respond to it.
Influence: Measure how your ABM campaign contributes to the lead conversion rate, and increase the frequency and volume of your lead interactions.
Target Account Reach: With the help of ABM tools, this KPI measures the percentage of the target account’s engaged decision-makers.
ROI: Mapping ROI is essential for assessing the success of an ABM strategy. ABM gives better ROI as compared to other marketing strategies.
Other metrics to consider are value, customer retention, and sales metrics.
Who Should Be on the ABM Team?
To begin with, your ABM team should have leadership that knows ABM and its implementation. Key decision-makers from the marketing, sales, and operations departments should be on this leadership team. It should work on setting goals, overseeing the implementation of the ABM strategy, and mapping its success.
How DocuSign Used ABM to Increase Their Customer Engagement and Sales Pipeline by 22%
“We have more awareness and educational content that’s reaching our non-engaged accounts. And we will dedicate a lower level of spend to that program so that we are prioritizing our spend on our more engaged accounts.”
- Perri Gardner, Director of ABM, DocuSign.
By using ABM to target high-value accounts and categorizing their spending based on the value of those accounts, DocuSign increased their customer engagement and sales pipeline by 22%.
Conclusion
Transitioning from a traditional marketing strategy to account-based marketing is vital to drive ROI, engagement, brand awareness, and influence. Correctly implementing an ABM strategy contributes to revenue growth through quicker lead conversions, proper allocation of resources, and a targeted approach.
FAQ
What is the first step in implementing an ABM strategy?
The first step of implementing the ABM strategy is to define the accounts you want to target.
Is ABM better than a traditional lead-based marketing strategy?
Yes. As of 2021, 70% of marketers are using ABM and are seeing a remarkable increase in their ROI.
What does an ABM strategy depend on?
An ABM strategy depends on high-quality intent data. Content personalization, account segmentation, and lead nurturing cannot be achieved without it.
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