ABM, or account-based marketing, has been around for some time now. In fact, 98% of B2B marketers are either using or planning to implement an ABM strategy. Thus, it isn’t a trend that’s fading anytime soon.
When it comes to ABM, your success depends on the data that drives your strategy and supporting programs. That’s why many B2B marketers use intent monitoring tools. 59%, according to Ascend2, to outperform other technologies such as measurement and reporting tools, web/content personalization tools, and more.
Using intent is more crucial than ever to obtain ABM success. With intent data, you’re more likely to find buyers who are more ready to purchase. Moreover, this doesn’t just apply to individuals but to entire accounts. Thus, making intent data the perfect partner for your ABM strategy.
How Can ABM and Intent Data Work Together?
One of the effective ways that you can use intent data is by integrating it into your abm marketing campaigns. This allows you to find ready-to-buy accounts so that you can effectively tailor your marketing efforts and messaging based on their specific interests.
Intent data allows you to reach customers early on in the buying process. This guides them in decision-making before a competitor is aware of their interest.
With that said, here are ways that you can use intent data to enhance your ABM strategies and improve your program results:
1. Identify and decisively target buyers
With intent data, you can easily find the right audience for your campaign by tracking online behaviors such as content engagement, site visits, and search term usage.
You can use this data to look for the accounts looking up detailed information, such as particular products, pricing, competitors, etc., giving you signs that they’re about to make a purchase. This lets you focus your sales and marketing efforts on companies that are likely to convert into customers.
2. Create a content marketing plan
Sending generic messages puts you at a disadvantage since they’re only relevant to prospective buyers. To compete for the attention of others, you need to create unique experiences.
With intent data, sending the right content, messages, and engagement strategies is easy since you can use it to know where the accounts are in their buyer journey.
Intent data helps you with the development of content for various accounts, and at different levels of the buyer’s journey. You can utilize the intent signals and phases mapped in the content and messaging matrix to develop content assets.
3. Create account-targeted paid media programs
The thing is, a buyer’s journey is never linear. Prospects will use various sites, tools, and channels to help them understand the problem, and ultimately come up with a solution. That’s why you must use a combination of engagement strategies to ensure that your messages get in front of the right decision makers at target accounts.
So, the first step towards ABM’s success is to surround target accounts with brand-specific messages relevant to identified challenges and pain points. Integrating programmatic advertising and intent data is a great way to accomplish this task.
Intent signals tell you which accounts are in the market. Moreover, they will also show you which challenges they’re concerned with the most. That way, you can choose the creative assets that resonate with every account.
You can boost the impact of individual channels if you run lead generation campaigns that are intent driven along with programmatic ad campaigns. It also increases the likelihood that your content and messaging will get in front and resonate with decision-makers at target accounts.
4. Align marketing and sales
Early on, if you’re planning your ABM program, the marketing, sales, and customer success team should work hand in hand to create a lead hand-off process. This expands investments from customer accounts and agreeing on target accounts.
Account intelligence for engagement tactics, target list creation scoring models and nurture tracks are some of the bits of intelligence for marketing available.
5. Enhance market segmentation
When you use intent data to inform your ABM strategy better, you could go beyond the firmographic data that marketers usually rely on to create the ideal customer profile.
When you track the behaviors of the personas within your key accounts, it’s easier to build greater granularity in your segmentation strategies. You can also easily focus your sales efforts on the accounts close to making a purchase.
6. Measure the success of your campaign
Finally, if you track buyer behavior and actions before, during, and after your campaign, it’s easier to identify key drivers of conversion and engagement. Using intent data in your ABM practice lets you measure your campaign’s success and identify where you could have fallen short.
Suppose you focus your campaign on promoting a new product, for instance. In that case, you can use intent data to track the number of users who have searched for a particular product information, visited your site’s product page, and bought from you.
You can also assess your campaign’s overall performance and look for potential areas for improvement in your future campaigns.
Final Thoughts
As marketers, we always seek to engage with the right audience at the right time. Thus, high-quality intent data with excellent ABM content is one of the best ways to make that happen.
These tactics will help you build a solid foundation to find and target accounts you’re more likely to purchase, letting you fine-tune your campaign strategies. Good luck!
