No one can deny how crucial insight is for the success of any marketing strategy. Be it an inbound marketing strategy or an ABM strategy, insight is the bedrock to scaling any marketing program. B2B marketers and ABM practitioners rely heavily on authentic and relevant insight to scale their ongoing ABM programs. The importance of insight at every stage of the funnel is undoubted.
Insight is pivotal for helping you build an understanding of the strategic priorities of your target account. Insight provides you with a holistic view of your target account, it will not only help you to develop a hyper-personalised content strategy for them but also identify the channels to best engage with them. One of the common challenges faced by marketers is securing the right data and insight.
86% of ABM practitioners struggle with getting enough data and insight.
B2B Marketing
What is Insight?
Let’s begin by understanding what insight is not. Many correlate insights with data. Data is raw unprocessed facts and figures that have no purposeful meaning. Whereas, insight is gained by analyzing data to understand what is going on. This is however a generic definition. We, at Business Brainz like to define “insight” as nuggets of high-value information gathered from highly relevant sources, processed and interpreted by human intelligence.
Insight fuels Account-Based Engagement through the understanding of ideal customer profile companies, facilitating sales and marketing alignment and meaningful conversations with target prospects.
Why Insight is elemental for Account-Based Marketing (ABM)?
Every one of us is aware that ABM is data and insight-driven, and not a finger in the air approach. Since ABM is all about highly targeted, personalized campaigns to win specific accounts, the need to have a robust foundation – insight is necessary. Particularly at the earlier stages of the ABM Program, the inclusion of insight is necessary as it forms a strong knowledge base.
The early stage of the ABM Program involves account selection and knowledge on those selected accounts implies the importance of insight itself. Both account selection and insight on those accounts are dependent upon desk-based research. Equipping yourself with insight is a step closer to becoming customer-centric and aligning value proposition around their needs and priorities.
Let’s dive into how insight helps to fuel ABM programs:
Personalization at scale
The overall reason for companies behind implementing any ABM program is personalization at scale. As the B2B landscape is changing drastically over the years, buyers are in a constant search for personalized experiences as they’ve been accustomed to platforms like Netflix and Amazon in their everyday life. One of the sure-shot ways marketers can grab attention is through personalized content. 73% of B2B buyers say they want a personalized, B2C-like customer experience.
The essence of every ABM program is the ROI it yields. The ROI is generated only if the content is better resonated with the audience. That is when the importance of insight comes into the picture. Sophisticated and relevant content can be produced with the help of insight.
Building Strong Buyer Relationships
Insight helps to build better relationships with target accounts. According to a survey by DemandBase, 83% of companies use ABM as it increases engagement with their target accounts. Using insight, sales and marketing teams can develop persona-based journey maps. This will ultimately result in a better understanding of the buyer’s goals, priorities, and perspectives. With the help of insight, marketers can create industry-specific contents that are relevant at every stage of the buying process. The insight you have on your target accounts will be a differential factor between you and your competitors.
Sales and marketing alignment
According to ITSMA’s 2021 State of the Marketing Profession, creating a data-driven marketing culture and enhancing sales and marketing alignment remain two of the top priorities for professionals.
Closing deals in B2B was never easy – and is getting more complex each day. According to Gartner, “The typical buying group for a complex B2B solution involves six to 10 decision-makers‚ each armed with four or five pieces of information they’ve gathered independently and must de-conflict with the group”. Because of this, the need to align sales and marketing is even more.
According to a joint study by Marketo and ReachForce, when sales and marketing are aligned, they become 67 per cent better at closing deals. Sales and marketing alignment drives positive business results such as higher ROI and growth. Insights help in knowing which accounts are more likely to make use of your services on the basis of their recent activity. Making it easier for marketers to build engagement with the target prospects and once the momentum is set, sales can start prospecting.
Since we’ve been talking a lot about insight, how can anyone gather insight and what are the go-to sources?
Actually, insight can be gathered in-house or outsourced to third party insight companies. There is an abundance of data and insight available at your fingertips through publicly available sources. All you need to do is build out the capability to turn the information into insight.
The different nuggets of information that adds value to insight are:
- Overview of the target account covering areas such as company size, revenue, geographic presence, the industry they operate in, and financial information
- Strategic business priorities and challenges along with opportunity areas
- Information about the decision-makers and their area of interest
- Also include intent data and engagement data to know their intent to purchase
You can also have a look at one of our earlier blogs “What To Research About Your Must-Win ABM Accounts” to learn more.
It is pretty evident that the need for insight has intensified even more after the pandemic. The need for digital transformation has spiked and has become more of a compulsion than a choice for companies to invest in digital space. The word ‘buyer’ now is used for a buying group rather than for an individual. It is reported that 63% of purchases now have more than four people involved compared to 2017 where 47% were involved. Buyers were found to be doing a lot of self-research checking various sources like forums, social media, webinars and online events to learn about the service or product they were trying to purchase. So, those companies that can show their presence on relevant channels and add value to those buyers can achieve big wins.
How insight can help scale your ABM program?
Every ABM program whether it is ABM one-to-one, ABM one-to-few or ABM one-to-many needs to have the following five steps regardless of the size of the campaign.
Selection of target accounts > Identifying people and insights > Generating relevant messages and content > Instrumenting account-focused campaigns > Measuring success
If you are keen on diving a little more into steps to implement an ABM program, check one of our earlier content: Getting started with Account-Based Marketing.
Selection of target accounts
Getting started is the hardest and most important part of an ABM program. Deciding your target account should succeed after you’ve identified your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) from your Total Addressable Market (TAM). Select your target accounts from the ICP with the help of FIT, Intent data and Engagement data. The selection of accounts should be insight-backed and not on hunches. Gather internal data from CRM, website analytics or do basic desk research.
After you’ve done some internal data gathering, it becomes extremely easy to identify insight gaps that you might have. You might be lacking understanding about your target accounts plans for the next two years or you might want to understand how the pandemic has changed their priorities. Doing everything in-house might not be the most economical, the time your sales and marketing team invest could be used for a better purpose. Working with desk-research companies can yield much better insights, as well as the in-depth knowledge you want to have, can also be achieved.
Identifying people and insights
After you’ve selected your target accounts, now it’s time to gather insight in the form of account dossiers also known as account insight reports. Also, seek information on the buying committee and competitors. Every person in the buying committee will have their own stance, and trying to build engagement with each individual is a lot of hard work in itself. Try to build persona insights or executive insights to have comprehensive information on them, their goals and aspirations, and their priorities. It is always better if you know their trigger points and offers value to meet their concerns.
While trying to gather information on the decision-making unit, exploring their social profiles can be extremely helpful. One of the effective ways to build traction with them than usual email could be via their social media profiles. Analyzing their recent activity, their interests and the time they spend on different social media site can be a valuable piece of information. Using battle cards, org charts and competitive intelligence reports marketers can add an enormous amount of knowledge to their bucket.
Generating relevant messages and content
Insight puts marketers in a better position to build a thorough content plan that is personalised to build engagement with their target accounts. Creating different forms of content at different stages of the buyer journey: trigger or awareness, problem identification, solution exploration, requirement building, supplier selection needs to be well-thought of and done with the help of insights. The idea is to try different tactics and formats to engage with the target audience. Some personas read blog posts, while others would rather watch webinars. Every kind of content used in a normal sales and marketing process will be effective — as long as it’s targeted and relevant. While drafting messages one should be extremely careful that the messages need to be personal and should add value to the receiver. Another aspect is the mode of communication such as social networking sites, direct mails or in-person events to make the relay of message more effective.
McKinsey & Company found that personalized engagement reduces acquisition costs by as much as 50% and increases revenues by up to 15%.
It is often suggested that 10-12% of the total budget for the ABM program must be allocated for insight requisites. Ensuring that gathered insights will meet the purpose: building relevant content and return on ROI is extremely important. While doing ABM, it is of top priority to push engaging content at different stages of the buyer’s journey. Since ABM is all about personalization and building a strong relationship, nurturing prospects with targeted content can elevate through leadership and buyer enablement aspects.
Instrumenting account-focused campaigns
According to Forrester, by 2025, the term ‘account-based marketing’ will disappear and ‘account centric’ will become the way most B2B companies identify, plan, manage, and measure buying and post-sale motions.
For every account-based marketing strategy, it is essential to combine and synchronize content with different interaction channels. Marketers need to ensure target accounts see and absorb customized messages coordinated through different campaigns and platforms. Once you have everything ready, it is time to launch your targeted campaign. Marketers often segregate content depending upon the stage the buyers are at. Blogs are mostly for buyer enablement, whitepapers and webinars for thought leadership whereas case studies, videos, and surveys are done for demonstrating expertise. This is the stage where different KPIs and metrics needs to be set.
Measuring success
Ideally, we would always be able to measure the success of an ABM program using closed deals and revenue. For measurement of the effectiveness of any ABM program, there has to be a solid assessment system. Since the impact on revenue cannot be seen immediately, metrics need to be able to justify the efforts invested.
While determining metric the following factor needs to be considered:
- return on investment
- deal size
- sales cycle,
- win rate
- retention rate
Conclusion
Insight is integral to steer any ABM campaign. Marketers need to build a more solid ABM program around the insight. Reliable and up-to-date insights help in scaling and fueling ideas for growth. Proper use of insight at every stage of the ABM program should start with a deep understanding of the target account, the environment in which they operate, their pain points, and opportunity identification. Every step in the ABM process – from selection of target accounts to the messaging, all the way through to the ultimate conversion. The overall process has to be led by an in-depth understanding of each account.
Feel free to have a quick look at our reports to know how insight can help scale your on-going ABM programs.