With every B2B company adopting ABM as its go-to-market strategy, instinctively ABM is crucial for B2B Sales and Marketing initiatives . Over the past few years, ABM continues to be a major force for B2B companies to innovate their services and their ways of interacting with the key accounts. The reason behind ABM’s wide adaptation is due to its strong focus on personalization, sales and marketing alignment, and buyer-centric experience. ABM is now being embedded into marketing strategies of organizations as more dedicated resources: people and budget are allocated to it.
Account-based marketing has become more efficient mainly due to availability of the immense amount of data. Over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every single day, and it’s only going to grow from there. It’s estimated that 1.7MB of data will be created every second for every person on earth by 2020. Simply meaning more buyer insight available than ever before.
What is Insight and How Can It Help You?
Insight is gained by analyzing data and information. Insight is the ‘gold’ companies are looking for when selling into other businesses. Insights are the key to understanding target accounts and industries. With an abundance of data availability, companies have access to millions of data at the tip of their fingers. But a pile of numbers alone doesn’t give out anything valuable unless turned into insight. Any data or information can be turned into insight by analyzing properly as per the requirement.
A clear understanding of the target account’s landscape makes it easy to win as well as in better alignment of internal teams. Insights are widely popular because of the success it guarantees. Insights help in knowing which accounts are more likely to make use of your services based on their recent activity. Authentic and reliable insight can put you ahead of competitors and prompt conversation with your target accounts. For any ABM program, insight acts as a strong foundation. Insight can be easily generated through a simple desk research. The plethora of up-to-date account data and insights available at your fingertips through the internet means that simple secondary research can be the solution for your data and insights problems.
What exactly is Intent Data?
Intent data is a known concept, yet B2B marketers have not been able to fully utilize it. Digital footprint of the B2B buyers helps to better understand their need as well as target them accurately. Intent data analyzes the online activity of the prospects and helps to analyze buyer’s behavior and establish where they are in the buying journey.
Intent data is of two types: first-party and third-party. First-party data is every possible data you own, unique competitive dataset on your buyers that no-one else has. Whereas, third-party data includes data collected from interactions that take place all over the web, and your competitors also have access to the same dataset.
So, how can one identify intent data?
- If someone engages with your social media accounts by following, sharing, or liking your posts.
- If someone views content from your website and views additional pages as well.
- If someone shares content on social media on key topics in your space.
- If someone engages with industry influencers of your space.
- If someone downloads whitepapers, case studies, tech publications
As marketers are constantly looking for ways to accurately calculate buyer behavior, intent data can help them stay ahead in the game. Many marketers are seeing success by combining intent data with their ABM campaigns as it is taking sales and marketing teams to new levels.
Combining Insight with Intent Data
Insight and Intent Data can be combined to research about prospects and know when they are ready to move ahead in the buyer’s journey map. Insight can help in further narrowing down the list of accounts to chase that has been generated though intent data. Intent data alone doesn’t give much information about the target account alone, but a simple desk research does.
Aligning intent data and insight in any ABM campaign can help to personalize the approach, on an account by account basis by making the messaging and creative campaign more relevant. Whatever insight is collected through desk research is delivered at precision as well at scale, something which current sales intelligence software simply cannot provide. When insight gathered from desk research is integrated with intent data in any ABM strategy, the outcome can easily be maximized. The combined effort helps to make informed decision, rather than just throwing darts against the wall.
According to SiriusDecisions, the average B2B buyer is usually 67% through their buying journey when they get in contact with a salesperson. By the time they reach out to you, they will already have formed a clear picture of what they need. But what if, you could get in contact with those buyers at the right time by leveraging the potential of intent data. Intent data captures digital activity of the individuals at target accounts.
B2B companies can seamlessly use insight and intent data together in several ways. Identifying in-market prospects and qualified accounts can be one of them. Whereas, uncovering those accounts that are proactively evaluating your solutions could be the other one. Combination of the two also helps to provide an in-depth knowledge of the decision makers and their priorities. So, using insight or intent data separately might not yield desired outcome but mixing one with the other will most definitely bring success.