Companies now are witnessing a paradigm shift to personalized campaigns from blanket campaigns, thereby, leading to a surge in use of account based marketing (ABM) strategy. Though this B2B strategy is not new, but there is a renewed interest in it by the sales and marketing teams, to acquire specific high-value customers, owing to the ease with which the data for targeted accounts can now be attained. Contrary to the belief predicted that it was a short-term trend, it has proven to be one of the most effective strategies for sales and marketing teams.
ABM has proven to be effective for numerous companies because it appeals and influences the concern and interest of all stakeholders in the buying committee. In order to cut through the noise and get the attention you seek from your prospects, especially in a time where personalization is gaining more weightage than the spray and pray approach, you need ABM.
If you already haven’t started focusing on account based marketing, it can appear to be overwhelming. So, for today, we are going to describe the basics of this approach in terms of- what is it, how does it work, and what are the required resources to get started in no time.
Account Based Marketing: What is it and how does it work
Account-based marketing is a B2B strategy that targets businesses, or “accounts”, instead of individual contacts, or leads, inside the organization. This helps to concentrate the marketing and sales resources on a well-defined group of target accounts within a market. The first step in getting started with the process is to find a list of target accounts. Then, the sales and marketing teams work in alignment to deliver personalized contents or messages to these specific high-value contacts. This strategy is used to nurture prospects and leads through their buyer’s journey until they become a paying customer.
The role of B2B data lists in account based marketing:
1. Prospect and customer data enables easy formation of Ideal Customer Profile.
ABM is highly dependent on effectively choosing your target accounts, which is a major part of this strategy and is solely dependent on customer and contact data.
In order to effectively hit your list of target accounts, create an Ideal Customer Profile commonly referred to as ICP. Highly accurate data is required to create an effective ICP, by which you can easily identify your best fit accounts.
Turn to your customer/contact data and analyze to find the similarities between your best customers. You can take into consideration, information such as industry, company and buying committee size, revenue and budget, tech stack and location of the company.
Finally, your ideal customer profile will act as the blueprint and guide you through the entire account targeting process.
2. Correct account and contact data ensures effective account coverage.
Your ability to identify and effectively penetrate multiple target accounts is very important in the success of your campaigns. If you have a very long list of target accounts but are unable to reach contacts of those accounts, you just cannot turn them into paying customers. But, if you have selected a few accounts to target and are able to reach all contacts from target accounts, you will acquire new paying customers.
Primarily you will need two different types of data for effective account coverage- contact data and business structure data.
- Contact data: It is quite obvious that you cannot reach contacts within your target accounts if you don’t have their accurate contact data. Having access to direct dials of contacts in your target accounts is a huge asset especially when you are trying to target high-level stakeholders. A study found that with direct dials, you are about 46% more likely to reach contacts at director level, and are around 147% more likely to reach a contact at the VP level. Approaching B2B list providers is a smart way to extract accurate prospect data.
- Business structure data: It points to the data about an organization’s hierarchy and decision-making process. If you already don’t have access to data regarding contact information and business structure, your campaign is likely to fail. The remedy here is, to work with B2B database providers or contact data providers like Infotanks Media, to ensure the success of your campaign.
3. Data enables the required effective alignment between sales and marketing.
In order to run an effective ABM program, sales and marketing teams must share data with each other. Even though the approach enables the alignment between sales and marketing teams, you need to leverage data to make sure both teams are on the same page on every aspect at all times.
4. Data helps to facilitate personalization.
We have already stressed enough that personalization is the top-most priority in account based marketing strategy. But, how would you personalize the content and messages of your campaign when you don’t know anything about the person or accounts you are trying to target.
Well, having access to the correct data will help you to personalize your content and messages which is relevant to the contact you are trying so hard to target. Always remember, your campaign strategy has to appeal to the specific problems, preferences, and interests of each contact within your target accounts.
Look beyond basic demographic data and gather information regarding your prospect’s pain points, their position in the buying cycle, and online activity. This data will help you to create content that addresses directly to the topics which are very crucial to your prospects. Account based marketing companies can help you here, with accurate data extracted based on your prospect’s persona.
The benefits of account based marketing strategy:
Refined customer experience: Personalization is the most important aspect of the impact and success of an ABM program. When a company offers highly personalized content and messages to each contact within an account, you address their specific requirements, thereby, soothing the pain points. This kind of personalization yields a unique, stress-free customer journey and buying experience to make your prospects and customers feel valued and appreciated.
Highly time and resource efficient campaigns: As account based marketing is highly targeted approach, with the help of intent data, you won’t have to waste crucial time and resource on the prospects that are not ready to buy. By targeting very specific target accounts after comparing them with your Ideal Customer Profile, you can be certain that accounts that are highly fit to be your customers enter your pipeline.
Better alignment between sales and marketing teams: ABM isn’t just another marketing strategy; instead, it is an effective strategy which requires both sales and marketing teams work in alignment around the target prospects. Thus, leading to a solid collaboration between sales and marketing by putting both the teams to work together very closely on each targeted account.
Conclusion
Executing an account based marketing program without data from B2B data providers could be considered as a journey without any roadmaps. Even if you set very clear goals that you want to accomplish from your ABM campaign, without the data you won’t have the information and insight you need to accomplish your set goals.
We at Infotanks Media engage tools and technologies to provide more than 12 data fields for a single contact. These generally include Company Name, Contact Name, Job Title, Phone Number, Email Address, Physical Address, City, State, Postal Code, ZIP Code, Country, Fax, SIC Code, Industry, Employee size, Revenue size, Website address and Linked IN Profiles. The accuracy rate being more than 90%. Thus, we can surely help you as a Company or a marketer to excel in your strategy to capture your targets successfully.
To learn more about how our B2B contact data and technographics data can help you to boost your marketing efforts, contact Infotanks Media today.
