Data is a critical component of a successful ABM strategy. How can you leverage data-driven insights for effective marketing?
Designing a winning ABM strategy begins with market research, understanding your prospects and their buying patterns, and aligning sales and marketing teams to pursue the accounts. In this article, we have compiled resources to help you utilize data-driven insights to enhance the performance of ABM campaigns and achieve the desired outcomes.
Accelerating ABM with data
The success of ABM is paramount, with the tailored messages and personalized customer experience. And without data-driven insights, it can be challenging to hit the mark. The secret to accelerating the performance of ABM programs is to use the right database. A data-driven ABM approach will enable you to understand your best prospects and curate campaigns that resonate with them. An ABM program driven by data helps to launch a fast, effective start and makes it convenient to identify high-performing content.
Gathering and analyzing customer data is an essential ingredient of ABM’s targeted approach. You need current and accurate data to evaluate relevant target accounts, their pain points, preferences, and needs. You can procure relevant information using various routes, such as surveys, customer interactions (emails, cold calls, social media channels), and website analytics. The goal is to find out whether the target accounts resonate with your offerings and how you can tailor campaigns to win their interest.
Optimizing data
In the digital age, when information is abundant, you need to strategically use data to optimize the buyer’s journey. There are three steps to accomplish this:
Prepare the Data
The first step is consolidating information from all corners of your business. Bring all the data in one place and clean them to get a clear overview.
Enrich Data
You can enrich existing data by adding unique data points to get clarity about the customers. The more you know about them, the easier it gets to curate personalized campaigns.
Conduct Market research
Utilize data visualization tools to identify the segments where your strengths lie and where you have scope for growth. It also helps align sales and marketing teams to pursue the target accounts. Without a shared understanding between these departments, discrepancies may arise while utilizing organized data and implementing personalized ABM initiatives.
Data-driven insights for Targeting specific accounts
Precise targeting is the highlighting feature of data-driven ABM. When you identify the pain points and ideal solutions of prospects, you can personalize messages that help build strong customer-brand relationships. Categorize the data into segments, making it easier to identify the accounts you want to target first.
Implementing Predictive analytics
Analyze customer data using relevant information and statistical algorithms to understand the future outcomes of customer behavior. Predictive analytics can be utilized to identify the ideal customers for your business based on the data collected, including historic buying patterns. It saves time you would rather invest on accounts less likely to respond.
Segment data for ideal profiles
ABM allows account targeting and segmentation to divide potential accounts into groups based on relevant characteristics aligned with the brand’s goals. These are some types of data that can be used for account segmentation and targeting, such as demographic, behavioral, and customer feedback.
- Demographic: gives an overview of the characteristics of the customers within the target accounts, including age, gender, designation, location, etc.
- Behavioral: looks into the buying patterns of the target account segments, their actions, and interactions with a company’s offerings. You can utilize this information to understand their purchase history.
- Feedback from customers: this can be a valuable resource to improve ABM by identifying the key accounts interested in the brand’s offerings and the decision-makers.
Integrate ABM customer base into sales and marketing data
Combine customer information for an ABM campaign with data outsourced from other marketing and sales efforts. This would give you a holistic view of the campaign performance by providing an idea of its impact on the sales and marketing efforts. The integration allows you to understand how the campaign impacts their efforts, thereby allowing informed decision-making. For instance, if a brand is launching an ABM campaign to target a specific group of accounts, they can learn how these prospects interact with other marketing initiatives like email campaigns, webinars, etc.
Wrapping it up
For your ABM strategy to be effective, the target-specific database must be robust. You need to know your ideal prospects at a deeper level. And one way to achieve this is through data-driven ABM insights. While incorporating such information, identify the key metrics important to your brand like customer lifetime value, acquisition cost, and retention rate. Then, using a CRM system you can track and analyse them. The data can be utilized to create customer segments based on shared characteristics. You can utilize this data to deliver personalized messages and design customized campaigns. These can be launched on social media channels frequented by the prospects.