MAP’s Next Chapter: Account Based Engagement Platforms

Over the past decade, the marketing automation industry has undergone massive transformation. Spending in the United States is forecast grow to 25 billion U.S. dollars in 2023 according to Forrester. As B2B buying cycles become increasingly more complex, marketing teams are feeling even more pressure to provide performance at scale across multiple channels and platforms.  Originally focused on email, many of today’s marketing automation platforms (MAP’s) include functionalities that support content management, multi-channel orchestration and advanced analytics and data management capabilities.

But while advances in marketing technology make it easier to automate account selection, data enrichment, and content personalization, marketers still find themselves continuing to rely on old-fashioned legwork to gain account intelligence, leaving the process ripe for automation.

As the marketing landscape undergoes rapid transformation, maybe it’s time we rethink how we classify the very technologies that have been catalysts for change. As today’s sales and marketing efforts are become more focused on bespoke target account engagement, is it appropriate to continue to describe automation as we currently are? Perhaps it’s time we rename marketing automation platforms to Account Based Engagement Platforms?

One of the greatest opportunities within automation today is the integration between the insights and actions of marketing’s most valuable platforms, the ABM platform. Assimilating marketing automation as an integral component of an account based engagement strategy, can connect the scale of marketing automation to the power of account based marketing orchestration.

While automation is a prolific process, it is also one that is data-rich. Automation has the potential to enable marketing and sales teams to become more effective by providing a canonical view of every account relationship. From lists, segments, and accounts, to funnel stage and revenue impact, automation provides an opportunity to keep ahead of your target accounts, adapting to their changing needs, at each stage of the buying journey.

Leveraging the relevant data sets such as firmographic, demographic, and engagement data, in order to offer uniquely customized and purpose-built segments can dramatically improve account targeting. Achieving this through advanced programmatic technology, organizations can then distill meaningful insights from an ocean of dynamically changing data. These insights serve to continuously optimize a marketer’s decision-making ability. Moreover, B2B marketers are able to drive and measure their revenue impact more effectively within their ABM programs.

In fact, engagement aligned marketing automation offers marketers the ability to synchronize orchestration seamlessly for maximum effectiveness. When a platform is capable of multi-channel orchestration, organizations can differentiate themselves and create a sales and marketing strategy that is more precisely timed, relevant, and coordinated with the buyer’s journey.

With the wealth of personalized and collated data within the account based environment, marketers can arm themselves with the power of channel-synchronized communications. A programmatic marketing solution can utilize these insights to improve marketing’s overall capabilities. With account based solutions, automation can no longer be about blindly automating processes. Instead, it needs to become the insight-driven tool that allows marketers to access and converge their disconnected message streams and deploy them towards targeted account engagement. Maybe now is the time of the MAP 2.0?