Buyer Intent Data
Article | September 11, 2023
Account Based Marketing (ABM) is not a new concept in B2B marketing. However, as an important integrated B2B marketing and sales approach, we don’t think it is widely understood or used as it should be in B2B media/events businesses and professional membership organisations.
Regardless of the size of your organisation, product types, or the sectors you serve, every senior business leader and marketer should be embracing ABM and integrating it as part of their overall marketing strategy.
If you’re keen to learn more about ABM – what it is, why it is important and how you put it into practice, read on!
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Account Based Data
Article | June 29, 2023
In Part I of this article, we discussed the importance of the ABM foundation, ideal momentum of change, team training, and analyzing data to understand the performance of your ABM strategy.
In this part, we will look at how CX, sales enablement, a strong team and consistency matter in successfully transforming your organization into an account-centric one.
ABX: Endorse Experience
Focus on the kind of experience you want to offer your target account. Offer them a customized and account-centric experience. Involve every department at a granular level to achieve an excellent customer experience.
Enablement: Sales Resources Are Vital
Support your sales teams through communication that works for them. Provide them with the right tools, content, insights, and data, even if they know how to do their job. Support and motivate them to close more deals.
Consistency: Checking What’s Working
Review your performance weekly and discuss outcomes with your teams—improvements, hurdles, and failures included. A full view of your strategy will show you where you need to make changes so you can fix them and make your ABM efforts work.
Experience: Hire ABM Experts
Executing ABM can be an overwhelming experience if you are new to it. Consider bringing in someone who has already run some successful ABM campaigns to make the process smoother. Doing this will guide and support your long-term efforts.
Businesses and Customers Reap Rewards
When an organization focuses solely on its target accounts, it achieves:
Higher conversions and ROI
Effective target audience reach
Reduced customer attrition
Business growth
Synchronization in cross-functional teams
Competitive edge in the market
When target accounts choose an account-centric company, they get:
Customized solutions to their pain points
Support throughout the buying journey
Excellent customer experience
Long-term business association
An ITSM Firm Addressed Revenue Concerns with an Account-Centric Approach
A British IT service management (ITSM) analytics SaaS firm re-evaluated its ABM efforts to address revenue concerns. It increased relevance across all channels — LinkedIn profiles, content, and messaging to directly address decision-makers.
It aligned its sales and marketing teams. Furthermore, it changed its focus to improving customer interactions along the buying journey. As a result, it gained customers like GoDaddy, British Airways, and JCPenney. A larger firm with a presence in North America, the UK, Europe and APAC acquired it as a part of a business expansion strategy.
Wrapping It Up
Amber Bogie, ABM Strategy Lead at Degreed, says, “In terms of attribution, if it's an ABM account, and it's seeing success, I'm attributing that to a company-wide effort of focusing on the right accounts using an ABM strategy.”
Amber Bogie, ABM Strategy Lead at Degreed, says, “In terms of attribution, if it's an ABM account, and it's seeing success, I'm attributing that to a company-wide effort of focusing on the right accounts using an ABM strategy.”
Remember, ABM works differently for different organizations. Therefore, there is not a one-size-fits-all approach, so you need to zero in on what works best for your organization to get everyone on board to achieve ABM success.
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Account Based Analytics
Article | August 3, 2022
ABM influences key accounts that show buyer intent. This influence is internal (B2B through personalized content) and aims to sway decision-makers who green-light a purchase.
In an interview with Media 7, Mark Emond, Founder & President of Demand Spring, talked about the importance of content in marketing.
“Content is at the heart of great marketing today. It needs to educate, inspire, and convert. It must be tied to the unique rational and emotional needs of each target persona.”
ABM’s focused approach leads to faster lead conversions and a higher ROI. However, B2B marketers still face the following challenges in their marketing strategy:
Maximizing Marketing Efficiency
B2B marketers must consistently drive higher ROI on their efforts while working within a limited budget.
Improving Customer Experience
Cutting through the noise of thousands of competitors and delivering an enhanced customer experience is challenging.
Generating Trust in Customers
Marketers need to humanize their approach and reach a level of undeniable authenticity to generate trust in the minds of customers.
Why Should You Use Influencer Marketing in ABM?
According to a CSO Insights report from Marketing Charts, brands fail to incite enough trust in their target audience. Interestingly, it is what the subject matter experts and third-party influencers from the industry say that counts. So, external influence is driving purchase decisions. Internal influence, though crucial, cannot sideline external influence and how it impacts sales and key decisions.
When you integrate ABM with influencer marketing, you co-create relatable, impactful content with relevant influencers to encourage your target accounts to move ahead in the sales funnel. An influencer becomes a credible touch point, powerful enough to convert a lead. The influencer’s performance-oriented content resonates with the target audience, engages, educates, and informs them of the strong points of your business, creating a strong foundation for lead conversion.
Here is how it can help strengthen ABM strategy:
Increases Content Authenticity
The words of a trusted subject matter expert or third-party niche content creator hold more weight than static website content or brand ads. Their followers trust them and consider their views authentic. If such relevant influencers create content with you, your target audience is bound to be positively influenced. This leads to higher conversions and ROI, qualitative reach, and better engagement.
Attracts New Audiences
Influencers attract new audiences that are similar to your ideal customer profile (ICP). Interactions, content promotions, and publicity can create brand awareness generate more interest in your brand.
Encourages Brand Advocacy
Positive reviews, customer success stories (voice of customer), testimonials, and word-of-mouth publicity that comes from influencers and their followers promote brand advocacy. Influencers also create incentives for referrals, thus bringing in better engagement.
Humanizes the Buyer Experiences
B2B storytelling is the key to conversions. It has more impact than any other form of advertising. Influencers humanize the buyer experience by sharing their opinions, reviews from other businesses, and highlighting success stories through their content. This content is impressive as compared to any other content the brand hosts and promotes.
B2B Influencer Content is Priceless
B2B influencer content has high value because it has third-party credibility that attracts trust across all brand channels. Another advantage is that you can easily access the creativity of the influencer without having to hire someone. All the content that influencers publish on their platforms is brand content, highlighted with the voice of the customer. Influencer marketing generates traction and engagement for businesses.
Integrated Influence
Influence can be integrated through social media marketing, content marketing, PR, SEO, branding, and ABM.
How to Create a Powerful, Influencer-based ABM Marketing Strategy?
Brainstorm a Strategy
To make the most of influencer-based ABM marketing, you need to streamline a process and strategy. Find the answers to these two crucial questions:
1. Who influences your target audience?
2. Which topics interest your target audience?
Once you find the answers to these questions, you can zero in on a relevant influencer and approach them to participate in creating/co-creating high-quality marketing content (text, podcast, video, interactive). Integrate the content and publish it on brand channels, and influencer channels. Promote the content via blogs, ads, other influencers, and brand sites to target your key accounts. Monitor the promotions (URLs, engagement) and adjust the campaign for maximum output. Most importantly, create and nurture relationships with industry influencers for future campaigns.
Understand the Demand
Understanding the demand of the target audience through keyword research and data analysis can boost the results of an influencer marketing campaign. Offering audiences solutions to their problems or information that will help them scale their business assist in lead nurturing and conversions.
Identify Ideal Influencers
Choosing a suitable influencer can help kick start your influencer campaign powerfully. An ideal influencer should be proficient in their domain, passionate about content creation, capable of publishing content across platforms, popular in the industry with keen followers, and knowledgeable and eager to promote content across different channels in different formats.
You can employ software to identify and qualify relevant influencers who create credible, high-quality content on the topic you want to promote. Filter influencers based on how much they charge and how well they align with your company values and brand voice. Focus on creating a long term association.
Shuffle the Content Formats
By shuffling between marketing content formats like blog articles, live video, third party analyst reports, videos, case studies, webinars, podcasts, industry presentations, infographics, and interactive content, the target audience can be engaged on multiple channels, and data can be collected to analyze which formats work best.
Remain Connected with Influencers
As a B2B marketer, you should connect one-on-one through email, phone, or in-person meetings with influencers frequently. You should monitor and engage with influencers on social media when they mention your brand.
By interacting with and sharing relevant influencer content on social channels, you can build a community and promote advocacy through continued partnership and engagement. Additionally, you can recycle content made by influencers to show you value the association.
Sixty-three percent of marketers believe they would have better marketing results with an influencer marketing program, while seventy-four percent of marketers agree that it improves customer and prospect experience with the brand.
How Cherwell Software Witnessed a 437% Year-over-year Increase in Content Shares?
Colorado-based Cherwell Software is an IT Service Management (ITSM) company. It engaged TopRankMarketing to create an influencer marketing campaign with the aim of increasing brand awareness, targeting CIOs, CTOs, and IT Directors of companies for business, and increasing sales and revenue.
With the help of the content 15 ITSM thought leaders created and amplified across five channels, Cherwell Software saw a 170% growth in their audience views and a 437% year-over-year increase in their content shares.
Key Takeaways
In B2B marketing and ABM, influencer marketing can help reach customers you would have otherwise missed. Engaging in an influencer marketing platform to maximize ABM strategy outputs is crucial to remaining ahead in the race.
FAQ
What characteristics should a good B2B influencer have?
A good B2B influencer should be proficient, passionate, popular, a dedicated content promoter and creator.
How does influencer marketing help B2B marketers?
Influencer marketing can help B2B marketers target key accounts by leveraging content created by industry experts.
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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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