ABM – Using Account Insights to Find Your Perfect Customer

Account-based marketing is a strategy that is laser-focused on an individual account or group of accounts. Consequently, its success depends on your ability to find the perfect customer from the very beginning. Besides, ABM is resource-intensive. Therefore, you should not waste your resources on a low-quality target, especially when you can find a better one using insights.

How do you choose your ideal client? Where do you get this data, and how can you use the information effectively to create successful experiences? We have the answers to these critical questions in this article on using account insights for ABM.

How to Gather and Store Data of Potential Customers

Before digital marketing, the sales team created target account lists. The process was time-consuming and very ineffective as the account-selection process relied heavily on gut instinct. Then came the digital age.

In this age of digital marketing, marketers can access a lot of information about any target account as long as the account has some level of an online presence. The information is more accurate, which makes it easier to select a quality lead. You can gather insights on target accounts from:

Firmographics: Unlike inbound marketing, this new strategy focuses on marketing to the key figures in a company, not the industry. Firmographics provide basic details about the target company, such as name, location, number of employees, key decision-makers, and the target’s net worth.

However, these account insights are not sufficient for creating a successful ABM campaign. You need to dig further into the last two essential information sources.

Intent source: It identifies the accounts that have shown interest in products or services related to yours. They may be searching for, or currently engaging with your competitors’ content. You can gather this information from advertising sources.

Understanding how an account expresses its interest will help you determine how and where to reach it. The gathered details will also let you know when you can successfully market to these accounts and the type of content they like.

Engagement source: Once you know the accounts interested in related products and services, you can take this more in-depth and filter out the ones that engage with your content. They may be consuming your content now or did so in the past.

Customers show interest in different ways. Some of them are by reading your blogs, signing up for newsletters, signing up for an event, attending your seminars, following your business on LinkedIn, among others.

This super-focused information helps you know which accounts you may win easily and how to do it. The information also gives you insights on which of your strategies worked or did not work for the given account. Additionally, it creates a softer launching pad, especially if the initial engagement was a success.

Storage

Account information storage is essential for seamless marketing, mainly because account-based marketing is a cyclic process. It does not end with closing the first deal. Customer retention is part of the campaign.

Choose storage and file-sharing systems that promote seamless communication between the sales and marketing departments. It is the first step to the alignment of the two estranged teams, which is crucial for the success of ABM. The two departments should also agree on the format of presenting the stored information. It will make creating an account-based experience more comfortable for either side.

How to Use Information Effectively

Daniel Burrus famously said that the power of information lies in your ability to take action with it. The same is true for gathering account information; it is useless if you cannot use it effectively.

Having lots of accurate and properly sorted out information on target accounts makes it easy for your marketing and sales team to create an ideal company profile, ICP. It also makes them more confident when choosing the account that matches the ICP.

However, dealing with a large amount of information is burdensome and time-consuming. Here is where account insights, artificial intelligence and machine learning platforms come in handy for ABM.

Benefits of Account Insights in Account Selection

AI speeds up the processing the information you have collected from the three sources. As a result, it improves the scalability of your account selection process. You can also use AI to create a predictive list of target accounts with insights that fit into your ABM campaign strategy. It can then match the lists with your ICPs and pick out accounts that best fits.

Despite its benefits, it is worth noting that an AI tool is only as capable as the amount and type of information it is designed to handle. Therefore, understand your needs before selecting an AI tool.

How to Create Account-Based Experiences

Once you have your perfect accounts filtered out, it is time to get to work. However, do not rush into bombarding the target company with the same content from the CEO to the junior sales representative. Most of the time, the people who consume that content are irrelevant. Therefore, spend time developing your campaign. Below are steps that will get you started:

Identify the primary and peripheral influencers in the selected accounts. Peripheral influencers may include the HR, IT, and Finance departments.
Understand the level of the account in their business network. Is it a branch, a franchise, or the parent company?
Work on sales and marketing alignment. Ensure the two provide complementary information to the client. It increases conversion rates by 67%.
Decide on the level of personalisation. Depending on the number of accounts you wish to reach at the same time, you can opt for either a one-to-one, one-to-few, or one-to-many strategy.
Create a winning edge in your personalised content aimed at the company through the key influencers. It requires understanding the needs, the preferences, pain points, and perspective of the individuals. You will also have to find out where they “live” online.
Launch your campaign, measure the result, improve, and repeat.

Conclusion

The mass migration to account-based marketing is not a result of overrated online hype. The strategy makes marketing sense, and the benefits are proven and attainable. Nonetheless, its success requires the accurate collection and effective use of account insights, when selecting the target account and creating competitive experiences for ABM.

We hope this guide has been helpful. Contact us for any inquiry on account insight and profiling.