In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, B2B marketing has experienced a significant transformation. As businesses increasingly rely on remote interactions and digital channels, marketers must adapt their strategies to engage and convert target accounts effectively. A key approach to achieving this is with data-driven, multichannel, account-based marketing (ABM). By leveraging data for better personalization, B2B marketers can drive higher engagement and accelerate conversion across the sales cycle.
The Importance of Data-Driven ABM
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 reconcile with the group. This is where data comes into play: Marketers need data to not only identify the accounts actively in-market, but also to prioritize the buying group members within these trending accounts who are researching and engaging with relevant content and messaging. By utilizing data analytics tools and technologies, marketers can improve targeting efficiency by focusing on the accounts aiming to purchase a solution and the buyers with significant involvement in the decision-making process.
What’s more, data-driven ABM enables marketers to monitor the effectiveness of their campaigns with greater accuracy. By measuring success based on real-time pipeline impact, marketers can determine optimization opportunities faster based on multichannel engagement.
The Role Of Personalization In B2B Marketing
While personalization was once considered a “nice touch,” it’s now a marketing standard: McKinsey research revealed that 80% of consumers are likelier to purchase from brands that offer personalized experiences. By creating personalized experiences and content, marketers can establish a deeper connection with their audience, increase engagement and drive conversions.
Personalization goes beyond simply addressing a customer by their name; instead, it involves tailoring the entire customer experience to match their unique preferences, pain points and interests. This can be achieved through various tactics, such as personalized email marketing, targeted content creation and customized product recommendations. It also involves an engagement strategy that delivers content and messaging that speaks to their specific and individual pain points at each stage of the funnel.
This is where an account-based strategy comes into play — by personalizing campaign strategy at every stage of the sales cycle, marketers can increase conversion rates by choosing content and messaging that uniquely meets buying committees with the information needed. According to Forrester, 56% of marketers validate this approach, saying personalized content is key to a successful ABM strategy. The beauty of ABM lies in its ability to understand an account and engage with them at a level that demonstrates empathy in a way other B2B tactics can’t. By delivering tailored content and messaging to specific segments, marketers can increase the likelihood of engagement and conversion.
Implementing Data-Driven Personalization Strategies
To effectively leverage data and personalization in ABM, marketers must adopt several key strategies to create more targeted campaigns that resonate with their audience and drive results:
1. Break Down Data Silos
With nearly half of organizations (47%) pointing to siloed data as their biggest barrier to gaining buyer insights, marketers need to deconstruct these data silos with tools and ABM platforms. The best systems combine an organization’s first-party customer data with their proprietary historical performance data.
2. Develop Accurate Buyer Personas
By creating detailed buyer personas, marketers can better understand their audience’s motivations, pain points and preferences. Using first-party data in combination with third-party data sources such as intent, technographic and historical engagement helps marketers develop stronger buyer personas.
3. Design Personalized Content & Messaging
Serving generic, broad and impersonalized content to any single decision-maker typically won’t move the needle. Marketers should consider engaging with other teams — such as sales and customer success — to better understand target accounts.
4. Implement A Multichannel, Full-Funnel Strategy
Buyers don’t typically spend all their time researching solutions on one site. To effectively engage accounts, marketers must surround all buying committee members with personalized information through a multichannel approach. When used with a multichannel approach, a full-funnel strategy provides potential customers with a comprehensive and consistent experience throughout the buying journey, from initial awareness of a problem to post-purchase engagement.
5. Continuously Measure & Optimize
Data-driven personalization strategies must be constantly measured, tested and optimized for optimal results. Instead of looking at vanity metrics like impressions, open rates, site visits and downloads, focus on data points that help drive improvements over time. This could be the changes in pipeline volume, velocity and the measurable value an account provides.A/B testing can also compare different personalization approaches and determine which strategies are most effective.
Today’s buyers have all the power and require much more personalized and relevant experiences throughout the buying journey. By embracing data to develop more targeted and personalized campaigns, marketers will stay ahead in the competitive landscape and maximize their marketing ROI.
Vin Turk is the Chief Operating Officer of Madison Logic, an account-based marketing platform.
