In recent years, Account-based marketing (ABM) has gained much traction among B2B marketers. According to a survey, over 90% of B2B marketers have considered ABM a vital part of their marketing strategy. And more than 70% of marketers confirmed that ABM improved their customer lifetime values and delivered higher ROI.
The B2B marketers embracing the ABM approach also considered B2B intent data the most critical tool. They can customize their interactions and content to address issues with the help of this data.
The reality is that around 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are consumed each day. But only a few of the B2B marketers attempt to consolidate this data from different sources to boost their ABM programme.
As a B2B marketer, if you want to succeed in ABM, you must use intent data from different sources to inform your sales and marketing processes. It is one great way to expand your reach and gather insights you can't pick by yourself.
So how can you use intent data in your ABM programmes? How will it supercharge your ABM programme? In this article, we will walk through all the questions one by one.
What is Account Based Marketing(ABM)?
In the age where marketers are fighting for the attention of their potential customers, every B2B company has to focus on increasing their ROI to place their attention on high-value accounts and marketing penetration.
To do this, marketing and sales teams have to employ strategies to locate, engage, and close deals with best-fit accounts and turn them into valuable customers. It is known as ABM or Account-based marketing.
In simple words, ABM acts as a core strategy for B2B companies, designed to deliver awareness and growth with high-value accounts.
4 Common ABM challenges B2B marketers face
As a B2B marketer, if you are also embracing the ABM program, sometimes you will face challenges that can impact your long-term relationships with your high-value accounts.
Therefore, you have to identify and overcome these issues as soon as possible to stay focused on the proper accounts and get better results. Below, we will walk through some ABM challenges with their respective solutions.
1. Aligning marketing and sales teams
As aligning marketing and sales teams is not an easy task, around 42% of marketers cannot run effective account-based marketing programs. The marketing team is responsible for all the activities needed to persuade the target customer, and the sales team has to build a personal connection with them and close deals.
However, both teams have to work together to drive more revenue, which they can't do separately. So as a solution, they have to switch from traditional sales and marketing silos to a collective vision and results-oriented ABM efforts.
2. Identifying and engaging with the critical decision-makers
An ABM campaign will be more successful if you can identify critical decision-makers and pass their contact information onto the sales team as soon as possible. However, getting access to decision-makers is not an easy process.
Around 75% of B2B marketers cannot identify the right people matching with target profiles. Therefore, you must understand that deep insight into the account and organizational structure is necessary for effective targeting.
3. Delivering personalized and scalable content specific to buyer's needs
Delivering the right and scalable content that addresses your buyer's needs is one of the top ABM challenges. It mostly happens due to the lack of insights into your buyer's needs.
In this case, you must better understand the buyer's roles, responsibilities, and interests. It will help you deliver thought leadership content that addresses your buyer's specific needs.
4. Keep track of ABM activities
Measuring and keeping track of ABM campaign success is another most challenging part. However, traditional lead metrics will not tell you the complete story and ties revenues to leads, not the accounts.
Therefore, as an intelligent B2B marketer, you have to apply the suitable analytical model at each stage of the ABM program to decode the actual results of your efforts.
How intent data supercharges an ABM programme?
Here are some benefits of using intent data in an ABM programme.
1. Better Targeted Content
Intent data will enable clear insights into accounts that are experiencing specific challenges. Further, these insights will help your business to address which accounts are actively looking to adopt solutions to overcome the challenges.
As a result, it will let you deliver better-targeted content and messaging to your ideal accounts.
2. Optimized Sales and Marketing Resource
Optimized sales and marketing resources require a substantial time and resource investment. The intent data will solve your problem in a second by letting your marketing and sales teams focus more on the clients that are receptive to your messaging instead of a scattergun approach.
Moreover, it will also ensure that you will engage with them at the right time. So there is no need to chase clients who aren't in the market for your service.
3. A Better Understanding of Client Pain Points
Suppose you are handling a SAAS business in which you are selling email security software. With the help of B2B intent data, you can see that clients often look at publications and blogs for solutions to phishing emails.
With the help of this information, you could make a broader interference on the pain points of the target industry.
4. Better Understand The Demand For Your Services
Suppose you have a few content pieces that do not get much traction? Intent data will give you the answer. If the data shows that your target clients are not searching for the intent keywords you are monitoring around your services, you have to pivot your services to match their needs better.
How to use intent data in an ABM programme
Here we will introduce you to the steps for using intent data in an ABM programme.
1. Gather Intent Data
Gathering data from different sources is the first and foremost step in using intent data in the ABM program. The best way to know who is interested in your offering is to look at who is contacting it.
To do this, you have to pay attention to the first party intent data that customers generate when they contact your company.
Several first-party data sources include phone inquiries, website contact forms, chat questions, email inquiries and many more.
2. Classify Intent Data
However, all the data is invaluable to a company. But still, it is vital to note that prospects can contact your company for different reasons. Some will seek how to solve an issue, and others want to buy your services.
So, depending on context and any other criteria, you have to classify inbound accounts. It will enable you to narrow down the prospects that are interested in purchasing your offering.
3. Boost Content Marketing Strategy
Customizing your content marketing strategy is critical to driving ABM program success. As a B2B marketer, you have to combine the first-party data and third-party data to get a broader perspective of prospects' needs.
It will enable you to boost your ABM program by creating content that attracts prospects early in the research process to outsmart competitors.
4. Identify High-Value Prospects
The highest impact that intent data will leave on your ABM programme enables your sales and marketing teams to identify high-value accounts.
You can use this data to identify accounts already engaging in a proactive search for solutions your company offers. To do this effectively, you can examine public interactions like evaluating discussions on industry forums, social networks and comments on the content.
5. Score AndNurture Leads
Identifying marketing and sales qualified leads will all depend on the B2B marketer's ability to understand prospect intent. Now, it is time to use intent data to leverage prospect online behaviour to identify qualified leads.
With information like what prospects read, what they click on and much more, you can use personalized content to nurture those prospects down the sales funnel.
6. Make The Sales Process Shorter
As we all know, the B2B buying process involves different decision-makers that make this process long and complex. As a result, pushing prospects down the sales funnel becomes time-consuming for marketing and sales teams.
So intent data will enable you to shorten this process by eliminating calls, emails and avoiding outreaches that prolong the sales process.
Why LeadadsIntel
At LeadsIntel. We not help our clients with ABM but with highly targeted ABM. We use Intent Data that amplified by Human Intelligence and completely aligned with your ICP.
Do write to us at hello@leadsintel.io for a free data sample.