In the last few years Account-Based Marketing (ABM) has emerged as the most promising tactic for B2B Marketers. According to the ITSMA ABM benchmarketing survey, around 69% of the B2B companies report higher revenue per account with ABM. While the results have been promising, marketing teams continue to struggle to scale their ABM efforts. Right from expanding the number of accounts to collecting user interaction data across multiple touchpoints.
A successful Account-Based Marketing strategy requires collecting the right data and providing a shared repository of customer information accessible to both sales and marketing teams.
Some of the common bottlenecks that marketing teams face in this endeavour are,
- Combining the information scattered across multiple platforms
- Selecting the right accounts & contacts to go after
- Retargeting these contacts with relevant messages
- Ability to attribute performance to the bottom line
So, how can a Customer data platform (CDP) help support ABM strategies?
From random website visitors to Account-Identified visitors
Most ABM strategies do not take into account the time & efforts for each interaction. For example, a user visits your website, downloads a case study and leaves without getting in touch. Using a data enrichment tool you identify all these visitors and trigger ads & emails. After all this work, you realize that they do not match your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) 🙁
So, how can a CDP effectively streamline this process?
The Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is defined before beginning this process.
When an anonymous visitor lands on the website, their company information can be demystified using data enrichment tools (Clearbit, Albacross or Datanyze).
A CDP can help compare your ICP with the enriched visitor information. If both match, relevant next steps such as informing sales teams or triggered introductory emails can be executed.
Prioritizing target accounts
Sales teams definitely don’t have the time to talk to all your ideal prospects. They would rather convert accounts that have a higher probability of success. So, prioritizing target accounts plays a major role. Introducing an account scoring model based on the information gathered from multiple platforms (website, app, email and offline) can help prioritize target accounts.
In this case, a CDP can combine user behavioral data across multiple platforms (website, email, ads, offline). All this information will be sent to Hubspot or Salesforce. Using the advanced segmentation capabilities of a CDP, you can seamlessly segment and pull only the accounts with high scores from your CRM.
This data will be sent to sales teams through Slack for immediate follow-up or to multiple ad platforms to retarget with relevant ads.
Speaking of retargeting, how do you know if you’re actually retargeting the right people in the organization?
Retargeting the right stakeholders
Most marketing teams tend to burn their advertising budget by unnecessarily targeting everyone who visited their website or upload a custom list of target companies to LinkedIn. But, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re targeting the right person!
This has given rise to a new approach called ‘Person-based Marketing’ (PBM). Person-based marketing puts a human in the centre of communication. Traditional marketing talks to target audiences, Account-Based Marketing talks to accounts, while PBM talks to the person.
This enables marketers to streamline their ABM efforts by tracking how stakeholders from target accounts react to their messages and tailor their communication in various ways such as ads, blog articles, website sections, social media posts.
Once a person from the list starts engaging you can use the personalized tracking to decide on how you want to carry on the conversation.
Personalized tracking means that you know who clicked on your display ad, read your content, visited your website. You know the name of the person, their contact details, the company they worked at, their position in this company, right after they interacted with your content. So, the interaction with is completely personalized.
Using a PBM platform such as Influ2 along with a CDP can help marketers get a complete view of their target customers & their engagement in one place.
Attributing ABM performance to bottom-line
The most important bottleneck for marketers is attributing & measuring the impact of their ABM tactics with pipeline and revenue. However, with a wealth of customer information in one place marketers can draw accurate attribution reports without depending on external teams.
Some of the common reports apart from various attribution reports (First touch, Last touch, Time decay) include ROAS, Ad Performance, Behavioral & Cohort reports.
However, CDPs also provide the ability to power data visualization tools such as Tableau enabling marketers to build the reports they need to get maximum insights into the customers’ journey.
Summary
Customer Data Platforms enable marketers to take their ABM execution to the next level by,
- Triggering subsequent workflows only when a prospect’s profile matches with the companies Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
- Prioritising target accounts for sales teams to follow up efficiently
- Targeting the right person in the company rather than simply targeting everyone
- Build customized marketing reports to measure the revenue impact of marketing campaigns
