Account-based marketing (ABM) has been an important B2B marketing strategy for some time now. It’s a strategy that just makes sense: Focus on your high-value, target accounts that are most likely to buy. But in a recent survey on "The State of B2B Marketing Budgets 2022" conducted with Demand Metric, we found that ABM is losing traction with B2B marketers. In fact, today, only 27% of marketers say that ABM/ABX is a key part of the strategy and 54% plan to spend less on ABM in 2023.
Why is that?
It’s because account-based marketing in B2B is incredibly hard to get right. We’ve heard horror stories of B2B marketers with unwieldy, ever-growing target account lists that become a data management nightmare. Or campaigns that left potential buyers and existing customers feeling underserved or excluded. Or the interminable limitations of measuring and monitoring account-based activity.
At Integrate, we are building products that make B2B marketing easier and better. We know that B2B marketers around the world are employing both traditional demand generation strategies and ABM to their programs. But they’re also employing those strategies across the multiple channels our buyers consume information today, whether it’s on social media, on blogs, through content syndication, from in-person events and webinars, or digital ads. That’s why we recently launched three new features within our Demand Acceleration Platform that make ABM more powerful with a Precision Demand Marketing approach.
Feature 1: Account Profiles
An important part of your ABM program is understanding how your accounts are engaging so you can develop more personalized, precise buyer’s journeys. If you’re marketing to your target account list, but you don’t know which accounts are engaging with you, you’re not leveraging the core principles of good B2B marketing. If you have to go into each and every channel manually to see account performance, you’re wasting time, energy, and budget, and losing the ability to scale.
Our new Account Profiles feature enables an easy-to-view dashboard of target list reach and account engagement across multiple channels. This helps marketers understand in an easy way how accounts are engaging across channels. And it can also help marketers evolve a target account list based on engagement over time.
Feature 2: Target Account List Import
We recognize that there are multiple ways in which marketers develop their target account lists. Whether it’s through ABM vendors or from Sales lists or Customer Success teams, we’re making it easier to import target account lists from various sources, eliminate manual target account list uploads, normalize the data before it’s imported, and maintain lists.
Our new Target Account List Import feature gives marketers a chance to optimize their target account lists and ultimately do a better job of targeting accounts. Marketers can select a target account list from a drop down, select the list that aligns with a particular campaign, and pull it directly into the campaign as a domain list. What’s more, marketers can evolve their target account lists over time on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis with new domains.
With this new feature, marketers can broaden the scope of what a target account list can contain and target more accounts across channels.
Feature 3: Target Account List Optimization
For many B2B marketers, large, enterprise companies are their high-value accounts and the key targets on their target account list. But when building target account lists, it’s easy to over-index on large companies. Or there may be organizations that are competitors, not a good fit for your product or services, or generally spammy organizations one might want to avoid reaching out to.
That’s why we’re introducing Target Account List Optimization, which helps control leads coming from a campaign by setting a domain cap at the campaign level. Marketers can restrict the number of leads per account to prevent over-saturation of a given account or lack of contacts across all accounts. This helps optimize ABM campaign spend and saves time and budget. The result: no one account is overly engaged, and marketers have control over the number of leads a particular account can have.
Powering Precision in B2B Marketing
Today, options abound for B2B marketers, whether it’s strategies, channels, or technology choices. We understand how difficult it can be to navigate B2B marketing in today’s ever-changing world. Whether it’s making ABM programs more precise through greater insights and visibility across channels, or automating target account list imports with clean data, or driving more precision in spend by optimizing target account lists, we’re giving control back to B2B marketers with the tools and technology to enable more precision in B2B marketing.
To learn more or see a demo, please visit our Platform page.
