Account Based Data
Article | August 19, 2022
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 | June 20, 2023
Buyer intent data is sourced from either internal or external parties. When combined, it provides a comprehensive picture of how your targets behave online. Internal marketing teams provide first-party intent data through your company's website, automation platforms like CRM, or other in-house applications. Third-party data is gathered from buyer intent data tools.
According to a Gartner study, more than 70% of B2B marketers will use third-party intent data to target prospects by the end of 2022.
In an interview with Media 7, Laura Goldstone, Director, Communications and Branding Strategy at AdDaptive Intelligence, talked about the importance of correct messaging in sales and marketing once you know your audience.
“I think the newest trends revolve around being a strategic resource, aligning marketing and sales, and using analytics to tailor messages to your audiences’ preferences or funnel stages.”
Buyer intent data tools provided by intent data providers like Bombora, Slintel, and ZoomInfo collect high-quality intent data to help you identify the accounts that show buyer intent, making it easier for you to understand their requirements and deliver solutions through effective content.
Let's find out how intent data can help your ABM strategy by making sales easier.
Buyer Intent Data: 5 Impactful Ways It Can Help You Boost Sales
Let us look at five benefits of buyer intent data that can help you boost sales:
Create Effective Content
In ABM marketing, the marketing team supports the sales team by generating qualified leads through effective content that addresses the prospects’ needs. There are more than a billion websites competing for a prospect’s attention. Focusing more on engaging your intended audience than on your search rankings could translate to more sales. This B2B intent data will allow your marketing team to analyze the volume and quality of responses to various online 'triggers' like keywords and social engagement. This way, the marketing team eliminates the guesswork in analytics and content research. B2B intent data can assist your marketing team in its intent-based marketing endeavors. The team can develop hyper-personalized, relevant, and timely content that can be used in your sales process to engage with new leads.
Identify Buyer Groups
In the B2B domain, multiple decision-makers sign off on purchase decisions. Your key accounts might have buyer groups, and this may pose a problem for your sales strategy. You will need to appeal to multiple personas who will then make unanimous decisions when purchasing your products or services. When combined with accurate, up-to-date contact information, intent data can assist in segmenting the purchasing process into relevant stages. Buying intent is useful not only for tracking and analyzing individual target prospects, but also for tracking and analyzing entire organizations. Overall, sales teams can craft perfect messages for any target persona that crosses their path, thanks to quality intent data.
Improve Lead Qualification
After your sales and marketing teams have developed an ideal lead generation strategy, you'll want to target leads with purchase intent. The majority of leads generated may not completely align with your ICP (ideal customer profile). If your product or service isn't even remotely relevant to what they're looking for, an automation system that is a part of your ABM services can remove them from your lead list. By delving into their product research activities, using intent data in lead management and outreach helps remove some of these roadblocks. It is critical to have a nurturing system in place and implement a lead scoring process. Intent data reveals where these leads fall within your segmentation, how interested they are in your solutions, and how their purchasing process works, so your effort or time is not wasted.
Increase Customer Retention
The same buyer intent technology that is used to find new prospects and customers can also be used for customer retention. According to Brain and Company, a 5% increase in customer retention can result in a more than 25% increase in profit. Monitoring intent signals can help you identify when a current customer interacts with a competitor or looks for alternatives to your product. It allows you to engage with them earlier and provides you with another opportunity to maintain your customer relationships.
Boost Team Productivity
According to HubSpot research, 40% of salespeople say prospecting is the most difficult part of their job. Buyer intent data eliminates prospecting (such as connecting on LinkedIn, getting past the gatekeeper, and sourcing emails), which results in more sales for your company. The most effective buyer intent software solutions can provide not only company-level intent information but also contact information for key decision-makers (all whilst complying with GDPR rules). This means your sales team can get right to the point and use the most up-to-date business intelligence to engage in more conversations with the right prospects. B2B intent data keeps your sales team on top of their game by allowing them to analyze and comprehend prospects on a more granular level.
Cloudera Generated over 30 Significant Business Deals Using Intent Data
Cloudera, an enterprise management company, harnessed intent data from Bombora and Just Global to run a hyper-targeted account-based marketing strategy across its sales, advertising, and marketing teams. As a result, it generated over thirty significant business deals.
Conclusion
B2B buyer intent data can help you boost sales by accurately identifying target accounts that show buyer intent. Using buyer intent tools that give clean intent data can help your sales team generate revenue and scale your business.
FAQ
How does intent data help with sales?
With the help of intent data, your sales team can target and qualify leads swiftly and accurately as it provides all the crucial background information on the leads. Accurate targeting translates to more conversions and sales.
Where does the intent data come from?
Intent data is usually provided by third-party data providers through buyer intent data tools. These tools collect intent data from data-sharing points like B2B websites, media publishers, and other relevant sources.
How is intent data beneficial for improving an account-based marketing strategy?
With the help of intent data, you can personalize your website, focus on your inbound leads with respect to their engagement with your content, nurture leads with email marketing, and identify prospective customers who haven’t engaged with you yet. These factors can enhance your ABM strategy.
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Buyer Intent Data
Article | September 11, 2023
B2B buyer intent data provides insight into a user’s purchase intent. With this information, you can identify when a prospect matching your ICP is actively considering buying your product, or similar products or solutions. This intent data is collated from different digital sources that use cookies to analyze key intent search terms to zero in on when a prospect is in an active buying journey. With this information, B2B companies like yours can make campaigns that are very specific to these prospects and are more likely to convert them.
Let us take a look at how B2B buyer intent data can assist sales teams to achieve their revenue goals.
Identify High-Intent Target Accounts
In account-based marketing, a target account list has companies and accounts that are most likely to buy your product. This target account list helps your sales and marketing teams concentrate their efforts to push high-quality leads through the sales funnel. Using B2B buyer intent data, the sales team can know which prospect is showing key signals of purchase intent. These B2B intent data key signals include downloading resources, reading blog posts, signing up for a free trial, booking a demo, viewing the pricing page, and revisiting your website after the first interaction. Your sales team can segment the target list based on this information. Every lead can be broken down into three segments: high intent, medium intent, and low intent. Now that your sales team has the high intent leads, they can target these leads and convert them without wasting time on low intent leads that may not be ready to buy.
Your Sales Cycles Are Shorter than Ever
Salespeople often struggle with closing deals faster. The reasons behind this could be anything from wrong contact details to chasing imprecise, low-qualified leads and cold prospecting. Reaching out to accounts that do not show any intent to buy is a waste of time your sales team cannot afford if it wants to meet the revenue targets. With the help of B2B buyer intent data, your sales team gets actionable data insights on the accounts that are in the market and what they are looking for so they can approach these accounts confidently. Popular intent data providers provide more than 95% accurate contact information, company structure, and buyer group details on accounts so your sales team can connect with decision-makers directly and close deals faster.
Lead Prioritization is No Longer a Struggle
Prioritized lead scoring effectively puts sales managers and salespeople in a position to see real opportunities. B2B buyer intent data allows them to see what other paths leads can take even if they do not visit your website. They can understand which leads are in the final stage of the sales cycle in real-time. Leveraging this information, sales managers can align sales representatives based on the comprehensive overview of accounts without worrying about the initial ranking of the account with the help of intent-based marketing. It helps the entire sales team take advantage of the foresight that intent data provides to create an agile method to capture demand accurately.
Improved ABM Implementation
Enriching the B2B buyer journey with hyper-personalized content to target ICP in marketing as a part of intent data marketing becomes easy for your marketing teams. They can prepare content for each stage of the buying funnel, which consists of awareness, consideration, and decision-making stages. In the awareness stage, you can help your prospects narrow down their search and lead them to your brand. In the consideration stage, your sales teams can get in touch with the decision-makers who respond the most to your marketing campaigns and are in the stage to purchase your product. In the final decision-making stage, your customer support and sales teams can provide the prospects the assistance they need through content on crucial pages via a product guidance tool or a chat service. This way, your B2B account-based marketing strategy can be implemented with added accuracy.
Final Thought
Saving costs, generating more leads, and boosting sales becomes easier with the help of buyer intent data. Rather than letting your sales team wait for prospects to stumble upon landing pages, your business can leverage B2B intent data to gain a competitive edge by finding them first and offering them solutions to their problems through your products using buyer intent data strategies.
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Core ABM
Article | July 20, 2022
When it comes to ABM vs. demand generation, most businesses struggle to find the right balance. Swinging too far one way or the other can completely derail your performance — and your organization's trust.
Here are some things you can do to get the best of both ABM and demand generation:
Check If You Are Too Heavy on Demand
If you are someone who focuses more on demand, then you should:
Gather insights from data, intelligence, and signals to develop a strong ICP. A strong ICP will help you target the individuals that make up the buying committee.
Keep your TAL (target account list) short and base it on buying intent.
Build an ABM program that encompasses teams, channels, and activities to gauge output and refine the use case.
Engage the double funnel to understand where you should draw the line between ABM and demand generation.
Are You Too Focused on ABM?
For the account-based marketer in you, it must be very hard to think beyond your target accounts. To balance this out, you should:
Get more information on the channels and tactics that your buyers respond to.
Draft messaging that creates urgency around your target account’s pain points.
Test your content on a large audience to see which gets the most engagement.
Use these insights to find the right balance between your demand generation strategy and ABM.
Beat the Odds When Implementing Strategies
Issues like no alignment between your sales and marketing teams and a superior insisting on implementing 100% ABM may arise. To address such issues, you should:
Expertly measure your data so all your responses are data-driven.
Chase directional improvements instead of trying to perfect your strategies right away.
Define a single metric for success, so your teams work towards achieving the same goal.
Keep your efforts balanced when implementing demand gen and ABM strategies.
Conclusion
If you do not strike a delicate balance between your ABM and your demand generation plan, your SDR teams will get overwhelmed and may not reach the level of efficiency you desire. Remember, your demand generation program should supplement your ABM efforts and not drive them.
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