You know it is vital to target the right customers with the right message when allocating your marketing dollars. You also know if you get this right, it will produce an attractive ROI on that critical investment. At the same time, missing those targets will undermine an entire campaign.
Here’s something you might have figured out about ABM by now: success might look different from what it looked like in your company’s pre-ABM era. Maybe you don’t know what it looks like at all — which wouldn’t be surprising, considering research shows that 82% of ABM programs fail to achieve measurable success.
The ABM story has, so far, gone like this: its general principles are as old as sales and marketing themselves, but in 2013 and 2014, marketers began focusing on turning this methodology into a system that works like a well-oiled machine within their organizations.
Intent data helps you to identify a customer’s purpose in looking for your brand or services. It helps marketers determine what their customers need or want. Intent data can help marketers determine who your true audience are, predict what behavior audiences will exhibit, and allow for feedback on marketing and sales efforts.
After a long weekend of celebrations with my loved ones, I finally sat down and got the chance to reflect on the year that’s passed. 2016 was my first year as a CMO, and I was absorbing everything and anything that I could about what people were talking about.
The thing that every company is focused on improving right now is the customer experience; I’ve been reading a lot about it. But one thing I’ve realized is that MRP doesn’t think of the customer experience the same way that everyone else does.
I spent the week in Miami at the Forrester B2B Conference and I got to see several of our competitors in the predictive analytics space talk about their solutions. I had recently discussed with the analyst at Forrester how all of the different definitions of account-based marketing are confusing the marketplace, and at this event I noticed there’s a similar effect happening in the predictive analytics sphere.
As we work on applying ABM principles throughout our internal pipeline, a big challenge is finding the right mix of tactics to continue engaging a prospect organization’s buying center without overstepping the boundary.
In conversations about our predictive solution, one of the topics that tends to come up is how we leverage it internally. The uncomplicated answer is that we’re tracking the behaviors of our target accounts and when they trip a certain threshold that lets us know they’ve entered the pre-purchase research phase, we have a whole set of programmed online and offline tactics that execute, automatically, based on buyer journey.
When the ABM Consortium decided to host a webinar on the topic of “what’s around the corner” for ABM, I was actually surprised at how quickly the idea of BANT – budget, authority, needs, and timeline – came to my mind.