Targeted marketing is the future of B2B marketing.
When it comes to B2B sales, one of the biggest challenges brands face is finding the right customers. There are so many different types of businesses out there, and each one has unique needs that must be addressed by a particular kind of marketing strategy.
To make matters worse, most B2B brands are trying to market their products/services to a huge customer base—which means they have to spend time and money reaching people who don't need their product or aren't interested in it. The result is wasted effort on marketing and lots of time consumed without any results to show for it.
What if B2B companies could filter out the best customers from a large pool and conduct targeted marketing to increase their chances of conversions?
For this to happen, the brand’s sales and marketing teams must be aligned to find the best fit. This is possible with account-based marketing.
Account-based marketing (ABM) is a strategy for targeting specific accounts through personalized campaigns. ABM allows marketers to prioritize and optimize campaigns by focusing on qualified accounts that are most likely to purchase from them.
What is account-based marketing?
Account-based marketing is the future of marketing. With an increased focus on quality over quantity, and a shift to personalized, customer-centric marketing, ABM is the way of the future.
When information is available in a large amount, marketers can get confused about what will help them bring out better outcomes. To tap the right audience, the marketing teams must employ effective sales and marketing techniques to locate, interact with, and close deals with high-value accounts that matter the most. It is where account-based marketing comes into play. It allows you to remove less-valuable companies.
By focusing on those accounts that matter most to your business and building relationships with the individuals within them, you can nurture a long-term relationship that leads to higher retention rates, more sales, and increased customer satisfaction.
With the implementation of the ABM strategy, you can improve your marketing ROI, drive desired revenue, generate higher conversions and qualified leads, and align sales efforts with marketing ones.
"The ultimate goal of a customer marketing ABM campaign is to increase revenue, decrease churn and build lasting relationships with your clients" - Jason Katz, strategic success manager at Terminus.
How ABM can help you create better marketing campaigns
A targeted approach is considerably better than a broader marketing approach. The latter could bring down your ROI. When you launch a successful ABM campaign, it turns around many things in your favor. Let's take a look at them below:
1. Helps you prioritize ROI
"ABM delivers the highest return on investment of any marketing strategy or tactic," an online ITSMA survey reported. With ABM, you can focus on the accounts that are most likely to provide the highest return, rather than spreading yourself too thin across many small opportunities.
ABM allows you to identify, target, and engage with customers who are most likely to buy your product or service. It also helps you track the effectiveness of your campaigns so that you can see which channels are working best and allocate more budget accordingly.
2. Efficiently utilizes time and resources
When there's no clarity concerning the type of customer you need to reach out to, you waste considerable time, budget, and workforce. With account-based marketing, you invest time in promising and higher-value accounts. In addition, it helps you launch personalized marketing programs for your target accounts.
3. Builds better engagement with targeted customers
This is where the personalization aspect of the ABM strategy works. Account-Based Marketing has the ability to build better engagement with targeted customers by providing a more accurate understanding of their needs. This allows for more tailored messaging, which can increase the chances of converting prospects into customers.
4. Helps track goals and metrics
Account-based marketing helps you measure the effectiveness of your campaigns. Given that you deal with a selected few, you can better monitor the success of your marketing efforts across email, ads, web, and events. Plus, the information gathered in this condition is in-depth and delivers insights you couldn't obtain otherwise.
5. Helps you align marketing and sales teams
One of the biggest issues that account-based marketing can solve is helping you align your marketing and sales teams. When it comes to account-based marketing, the goal is to create a single database of information about your customers and prospects. The database includes everything from demographics, like age and gender, to information about their interests and buying behaviors.
The idea behind this kind of alignment is that you want both your sales team and marketing team to work with a common set of facts about each customer so that they can work together more effectively. In traditional marketing, your sales team might have a list of leads for accounts that are potential buyers but not necessarily ready to make a purchase right away. Your marketing team might have a list of leads that are much further along in their buying cycle—they've already expressed interest in making a purchase but aren't quite ready yet.
When these two lists are combined into one database with all the pertinent information, it's easier for both teams to work together toward one goal: closing deals with customers who need what you have!
6-step process to use web data for creating effective ABM campaigns
A successful ABM campaign deals with creating a list of high-value accounts. Once defined, get your marketing and sales teams to craft and deliver personalized campaigns to bring out a better outcome through the proper channels.
1. Step 1: Identify and define your high-value accounts
The first step in building a successful ABM campaign is creating a list of high-value accounts. For this, use all of the data you can collect to help you identify and prioritize high-value accounts.
This is where the sales and marketing teams can collaborate their efforts. While the sales department is involved in qualifying leads, determining revenue potential, likelihood of making a repeat purchase, the marketing team can focus on turning this data into an ideal customer profile (ICP). It will serve as a guide in the search for potential accounts. It is somewhat of a monumental task to look for such businesses randomly on the internet. However, with an ICP on hand, you can have a greater stroke of luck hunting for these potential customers.
2. Step 2: Map accounts and identify vital internal players
Identify how your target accounts are structured, decisions are taken, and who the decision-makers and influencers are. The task at this stage is the sheer amount of data that you need to collect as you begin to build a complete profile of your target accounts.
This profile information is critical for the sales team. It can help them have informed conversations with potential customers. However, if there's no automation to handle the massive amount of data, your ABM campaign can flop.
3. Step 3: Define content and personalized messaging
When you understand your potential customers, you can personalize the way you want to interact with them. With an effective ABM initiative in place, you get to create content that provides clarity regarding solutions to the business challenges your target account faces. Of course, you must think before you send out the message and personalize content depending on your target account's pain points. Still, if you get all this right, there's a possibility that not every account will be planning to purchase your services. It can be bad timing, a wrong decision-maker on the other end, and a lack of understanding of the impact of their problem.
4. Step 4: Determine optimal channels
Use those channels of communication employed by your respective audience. It can include web, mobile, and email. Once you figure out the most effective channel for the respective businesses, the outcomes will be much better.
5. Step 5: Execute targeted and coordinated campaigns
You derive the best results when you synchronize your campaigns across different channels and combine your marketing and sales teams' efforts. This critical step is achievable with technology that allows marketers to coordinate and execute ABM campaigns at a much grander scale and efficiency than it was in the past.
6. Step 6: Measure, learn, and optimize
Remember, you must always test the effectiveness of your ABM marketing campaigns. And if you find out that there's a gap in expectations and the outcome, make continuous improvements. Plus, after you've launched the campaign, be sure to analyze the results of every individual campaign. Even study the trends of every targeted account to understand whether your ABM strategy has proved advantageous for you.
Wrapping up
If you're an ABM marketer, we have some good news: you can use web scraping to fuel your account-based marketing campaigns.
Web scraping is a great way to get the information that you need to nurture and engage with your target audience. It gives you access to valuable data about who they are and what they like, which will help you craft a more personalized experience for each individual customer. With web scraping, you can create a better user experience and boost ROI by engaging with exactly the right people.
If you're looking for a way to fuel your account-based marketing campaigns with data that is more accurate than what's available in public databases, we have a solution for you.
At Datahut, we help organizations get access to high-quality web data to help run detailed, personalized campaigns to tap your target audience. To get the best out of your ABM campaign, look no further, and contact us today!