Buyer Intent Data
Article | September 11, 2023
ABM is B2B marketing with a higher ROI. It involves going after fewer accounts with a more personalized approach. So, account selection is vital. No matter the budget, if you fumble the ball in the account selection process, your campaign is bound to fail. Guesswork is not an option. You need to stringently research your ideal accounts based on your ICP (ideal customer profile).
In an interview with Media 7, Maliha Aqeel, Director of Global Communications at Fix Network World, talked about the common mistakes companies make while implementing brand strategy. Not budgeting your ABM strategy correctly may be one of them.
"One of the most common mistakes companies make is implementing a brand strategy that isn’t aligned to the organization’s overall business goal."
Businesses that want to transition into ABM are often confused and have several questions about ABM implementation. One of the most important questions they have is about budgeting.
According to a 2016 report by SiriusDecisions, 33% of companies allocated at least 30% of their marketing budgets to ABM. In 2017 that number increased up to 52% — a 57% year over year increase. Their 2019 State of Account-Based Marketing Study showed that the average ABM budget is around $350,000 excluding head count costs.
Going by these statistics, how much should you invest in your ABM strategy? It is common to finalize a strategy way in advance. Allocating budgets to a certain strategy and then deciding to execute ABM can be a pain.
Before deciding on your ABM budget and streamlining your ABM funding strategy, consider the following factors:
Factors to Consider for ABM Funding
Know Your Target Accounts
Business size, decision-makers, departments, positions, interests, demographics, get all the information you can on your target accounts. Make sure you are investing your money in the right target accounts. The bigger your target account, the more stakeholders, and departments there are to manage. This may considerably increase the cost and complexity of your campaign.
Your Advertising Budget
Zero in on the platforms you want to use to engage your target audience. Once you do this, you will get an idea of how much you need to spend to reach your audience on these platforms and get maximum engagement.
Additional marketing techniques like seminars, webinars, conferences, and other events should also be considered in your ABM funding.
Brand Awareness
Gather information on how well your target accounts know your brand. If they already know your brand, then you are saving time and money on creating a new relationship from scratch. However, if your brand does not have a good reputation or reach, creating new leads requires more resources than creating new opportunities.
Your Product’s Complexity
If your product or service complexity is high, you need to work harder to explain its advantages and benefits to convince the stakeholders of your target accounts. This effort is directly proportional to the amount of money you need to spend.
Your Customer’s Needs
The customer’s need for your product or service defines how much you need to spend on advertising. If there is no urgency or if there are many similar solutions that they have used in the past, it becomes difficult to convince them to use your product or service. In short, if they don’t need your product, you need to spend a better part of your budget on impressing them.
Your Competition
The more competitors you have, the more aggressive your campaign needs to be. An aggressive campaign will need a bigger budget. It gets trickier if your competitors already have an established relationship with your target account.
However, if you have the target account’s CLV (customer lifetime value) figured out, you can easily determine how much you need to spend on pursuing a particular account.
Technology Integration
To deliver hyper personalized account-based experiences, you need to find suitable technological platforms to launch your ABM strategy. Platforms like ABM Unified Workforce are an ideal start because of their unified approach to strategy implementation. Consider allocating a part of your budget to technology integrations so you remain up-to-speed with modern implementations like marketing automation. It will also help you optimize your campaign results.
ABM Partners
You need knowledge, human resources, and technology to launch and successfully run account-based marketing campaigns. Alternatively, you can also hire new staff or train the people you already have. Partnering with an ABM agency is also a great option. It not only saves you the time and effort of finding the right marketers, but it also delivers the results and metrics you expect. There are many service providers in the market who can help you kick-start your ABM campaign.
Funding Your ABM Strategy
Now that you know the factors that should be considered for your ABM funding, let us look at some tips to enhance your budgeting.
Identify Target Account CLV
In ABM, less is more, so identify target accounts based on their CLV. It may require three or more years for your ABM campaign to show results, so make sure you periodically assess your target account’s CLV before making big investments.
Harness Technology
Tie your technology budget with sales. Support your goals and streamline your processes by using martech. Collaborating with specialized agencies that have talent and technology can uplift your ABM campaign. Not only do agencies quickly launch your campaign, but they also save you the trouble of recruiting new staff. However, make sure you engage a trustworthy agency with the best technology offerings and expertise.
Get Approval and Support from Stakeholders
Get your stakeholders on your side by justifying your budget with a list of target accounts and their projected value. If you are planning to implement ABM, then you should already have a preliminary version of your ABM funding proposal ready.
Measure Your Performance
Use relationships, reputation, and revenue, the three crucial R’s to measure your performance. These should be your benchmarks and should be assessed periodically.
Conclusion
ABM funding takes effort and time but doing it diligently can bring an increase in ROI, brand awareness, revenue, and confidence in ABM.
FAQ
What is the first step in your ABM funding strategy?
The first step in your ABM funding strategy is to know your target accounts through stringent research.
What are the three important Rs for measuring ABM performance?
The three important Rs for measuring ABM’s performance are relationship, reputation, and revenue.
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Buyer Intent Data
Article | August 23, 2022
Account-based marketing in healthcare helps marketers reach institutional decision-makers based on intent and target accounts. However, ABM becomes a bit more complex in the healthcare domain where the needs, regulations, and procurement processes vary widely, and so do the ways healthcare providers communicate. For an ABM strategy to work in this domain, effort, time, tailored content, and deep customer insights are necessary.
ABM Strategy in Healthcare
Here are the co-ordinated steps you need to take to implement ABM in the healthcare domain:
Getting Buy-in
Get buy-in from sponsors at the highest level and coordinate with functional stakeholders. Create client-centric teams and decide on KPIs that matter.
Identify Key Accounts
With the help of sales representatives and relationship managers, identify key HCP accounts that can benefit from your ABM strategy.
Conduct Extensive Research
Deep-dive into research on these key accounts, their history, buyer journeys with you. Find out their current and future needs and issues, and their status within the market.
Tailor Your Content
The research will help you tailor the content for your content marketing strategy. Address the decision-makers with content that solves their pressing issues to get the conversions you want.
Analyze & Adjust the Strategy
Analyze campaign results from time to time (preferably quarterly). Based on your identified KPIs, check what is working and what isn’t bringing the expected results. Adjust your strategy accordingly.
What to Expect from ABM in Healthcare?
Salesforce recently conducted research among healthcare marketing professionals. The results showed that 70% believed connected customer journeys positively impacted client loyalty and willingness to recommend products to others. So, ABM could be a great way to increase your revenue and get a higher ROI as compared to any other marketing strategy.
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Account Based Data
Article | August 19, 2022
Introduction
The application of AI marketing technology is picking up pace because of its many advantages. According to a 2020 Deloitte survey, 74% of AI adopters agree that AI will be a part of all their enterprise applications by 2023.
What does an AI-based marketing strategy look like, and how do you make the most of it? This article gets into the nitty-gritty of AI marketing technology and how to implement it in ABM so you can maximize your business performance and outputs.
AI’s Role in Marketing
Thanks to its accuracy, B2C businesses use AI marketing technology to target their customers with product or service recommendations. The following are some use cases of AI-based B2C marketing:
Personalization
AI helps businesses with their 1-to-1 marketing strategies by personalizing their content to cater to every segment.
Event Communication
Emails informing customers of upcoming sales, special access, or exciting offers are sent out via AI technology. Weekend offer emailers, special discount codes, and new product updates are a result of event communication automation so that customers can be informed before time about upcoming events.
Real-time Content
Trending topics, investments, event promotions, webinars, customer feedback, product availability, bestselling combo, weather reports, and new blog post updates are provided in real-time to maintain an active connection with customers.
Businesses do this by using the ‘open time content’ AI technology. Manually executing 1-to-1 marketing strategies is nearly impossible, impractical, and does not see much success. AI helps streamline these strategies and executes them effortlessly.
What Goes into Creating an Effective ABM Strategy?
For an ABM strategy to work, businesses need to follow these steps:
Preparing for the ABM Strategy
Organizational readiness is crucial for implementing ABM. Make sure you have a budget and an achievable timeline to execute the strategy, team members who can anchor it, and an understanding of ABM metrics so you can make the most of it.
Synergy Between Marketing and Sales Teams
Your sales and marketing teams should be in sync and not at loggerheads due to account-level communication issues. Discussing the benefits of ABM with both the teams beforehand and coming to a strategic agreement to implement ABM can help them align their goals while executing the ABM strategy.
Identifying Target Segments
Your ABM strategy can do wonders for your business only if you have a precise segmentation of data. Use dimensions like business size, annual revenue, current spending, projected spending, targeted products, geography, open opportunities, closed opportunities, etc., to identify your target segments.
Zeroing-in on a Priority
Having a clear priority helps you streamline your ABM strategy. It should either be acquisition (acquiring new accounts), retention (retaining existing accounts), or expansion (expanding the scope of accounts). Without a clear priority, any ABM strategy may not yield expected results because the efforts won’t be concentrated towards a single goal.
Leveraging AI in ABM Strategy
In an interview with Media 7, Daniel Englebretson, founder of Khronos, spoke about AI’s impact on the future of ABM.
“From my perspective, B2B marketers have faced countless challenges that have formed the basis of new technology – problem brings a solution. I expect AI will solve identity resolution, resolve data challenges, and enhance targeting. I expect AI will address 1:1 content at scale, unlocking the rapid deployment of 1:1 brand experiences.”
Introducing AI into your ABM strategy can help you in the following way:
Content Personalization
Once you know your customer’s pain points and interests, you can focus on providing them personalized solutions, products, or services they desire. Of course, personalizing content is complex, but AI makes it easier by offering the technological capacity to deliver what your customer wants.
Efficient Resource Management
Without customer profiling, an ABM strategy cannot achieve the expected output. AI can assist with data crawling the internet to find out important customer information. Also, it segments data acquired from CRM, which gives you more information about a customer than any other generic data. This data is helpful for lead qualification and creating heavily personalized content for a customer.
Since AI does all the heavy lifting, you can allocate your resources to building and nurturing a relationship with the customer.
Automation
AI-based marketing in ABM generates automated insights for lead generation. It also highlights campaign performance related to specific, high-value accounts and suggests steps to engage a prospect.
Digital marketing and automation are a dynamic duo where AI brings about intelligent marketing automation. Efficient email campaigns are run when executed by automation. Email marketing companies like MailChimp target customers based on insights to achieve more conversions. When AI and big data use CRM data, large chunks of user information can be collected from different platforms. This information can help with formulating a successful ABM strategy.
ABM Optimization and Predictive Insights
To analyze intent, AI processes data in real-time and gives predictive insights to help with ABM optimization. As a result, it is easier to merge data from different sources with AI-enabled tools, achieve predictive analysis, manage recommendations in real-time, and understand competitor strategies through social media. AI can also interpret images correctly.
Enhancing Communications
Use AI for building a strong relationship with your customer. Personalizing communication by using customer data can be easily achieved with AI.
What Is the Future of AI-enabled ABM Strategy?
ABM, with an AI marketing strategy, has a bright future ahead of it. Demandbase recently conducted a survey in which they found that 80% of marketers had plans to integrate AI into their ABM marketing strategy. Another survey conducted by MarketingProfs concluded that businesses that used AI in their ABM strategies had 59% higher closing rates as compared to others. They saw a 58% increase in their revenue and a 52% increase in their conversions.
Ways Salesforce's AI Einstein Aided U.S. Bank in Growing Revenue
The U.S. bank used Salesforce’s sales cloud AI, Einstein, to boost their revenue. Their lead conversion rate increased 2.35 times after implementing Einstein. They were able to create a model to predict lead conversion. They did this by using Einstein to search through customized historical lead data.
“We work to build high-quality, personalized relationships between our customers and their financial advisors or commercial bankers. There is nothing that replaces that person-to-person interaction. What AI allows us to do is augment that relationship. We can provide our teams with better data and smarter insights, which helps them establish stronger relationships.”
– Srini Nallasivan, Chief Analytics Officer, U.S. Bank
Summing It Up
AI-based marketing can enhance your ABM strategy only if qualitative data is available. Therefore, businesses will need to have clear marketing goals and turn data into an asset.
FAQs
What are the challenges in the AI-based ABM strategy?
Managing, protecting, and enriching data obtained from CRM and other customer support systems can be challenging.
How can AI help in strengthening your ABM strategy?
AI helps with personalizing content, automation, ABM optimization, and providing predictive insights for lead conversion.
What does a strong AI-based ABM strategy do for your business?
A strong AI-based ABM strategy helps with account profiling, analytics, reporting and hyper-individualized content, which leads to increased lead conversion.
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Core ABM
Article | February 22, 2022
Since the introduction of account-based marketing, B2B marketing has evolved. According to Forrester, as of 2025, "account-based marketing" will be overtaken by "account-centric marketing," which will be the way most B2B companies find, plan, manage, and measure purchase and post-sale actions.
A Brief
The marketing departments of multibillion-dollar corporations were early users of ABM. Over the years, they have made significant investments in their ABMprocesses and technologies. The exercise worked flawlessly for them. Their business circumstances made them ideal candidates for ABM, for instance lengthy sales cycles, high transaction sizes, and several decision-makers in purchasing committees. They have now realized that shooting in the dark and probably what sticks around is not the ideal method to develop a sustainable GTM process for their organizations. Moreover, they're debating whether to maintain their investment in inbound marketing methods and alternatively abandon it entirely!
On the other hand, smaller businesses are lagging behind in ABM implementation. They are aware that their existing spray and pray procedures are inefficient and require immediate improvement. They are powerless to ignore the continual buzz about the benefits of ABM and the larger good it may unlock for their firm. And yet, they are confused about how to begin. Additionally, they will learn how to integrate ABM into their current marketing processes. They exist in a perpetual state of contradiction, torn between the fear of missing out and the danger of prematurely disturbing the apple cart (the switch to ABM). Their meager marketing budgets and resources do little to aid them in decision-making.
As a result, marketing teams (large and small) are faced with a fundamental question: "Should I abandon inbound marketing methods in favor of ABM?"
The answer is a strict no! Both are essential.
Why Are Marketers Skeptical of the Efficacy of Inbound Marketing Strategies?
Current inbound B2B marketing practices are fragmented and generic, attracting the wrong types of leads. With a heterogeneous set of digital touchpoints, each with its own data silo, insights are dispersed throughout the organization, owing to multiple native dashboard management and data collectors.
What's behind the inbound demand funnel?
Inbound marketing is majorly concerned with attracting users or customers to your business's offerings. Three stages comprise the inbound funnel: attract, engage, and close. It enables marketers to communicate with each of these categories on a value-based basis. Things get muddled when there are a lot of digital touch points for inbound marketing strategies, like search engine optimization, social media marketing, digital and offline branding, and so on. This results in the decentralisation of insights. Marketers increase interaction through the use of social media and landing sites.
The sales team generates leads through email campaigns.
Client Relationship Managers respond to inquiries via automated content management systems.
Due to the dispersed nature of the touchpoints, the issue is ensuring that communications are consistent and personalized across the various account segments.
What's behind the ABM funnel?
Identify: Identify the accounts that most closely match your company's ideal customer profile criteria.
Engage: Use personalized and specialized content to reach out to and nurture those accounts, and urge them into conversion.
Establish and Expand: Attract new customers and uncover possibilities to expand existing accounts through a variety of customer marketing methods such as cross-sell, upsell, and retention.
ABM & Inbound Marketing - the Convergence of the Funnels
A common misunderstanding is that an ABM funnel and an inbound funnel are opposed. ABM and inbound marketing are not mutually exclusive strategies. Indeed, they complement one another. Both are facets of the same coin.
B2B marketers use ABM and inbound demand generation to have maximum impact. These two tactics combine to create a new funnel known as the "dual funnel." The dual funnel strategy entails maintaining a high-volume demand generation funnel in addition to a highly targeted account-based funnel. Both funnels function in tandem to engage a target demographic with a high level of intent and an inclination to buy.
This dual funnel strategy enables the identification of target accounts and the provision of tailored experiences through account-based approaches.
In a mature ABM program, marketers keep an eye on target accounts, retire underperforming ones, and replace them with new high-intent clients found and qualified through the inbound demand generation funnel, which is how they find and qualify new clients.
Conclusion:
When these two procedures are integrated, inbound marketing successfully generates leads. Additionally, account-based marketing focuses on customizing and delivering one-on-one messages and engagements to target accounts. Optimize your inbound marketing approach to generate the highest quality leads across all channels. When you set up your ABM funnel, only use it to get the most qualified leads. Then, use it for highly personalised and targeted marketing.
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