Three questions encompass everything a c-suite or board wants to know when it checks in with its marketing organization:

1. How are we performing?
2. How much is it costing us?
3. Is it getting better or worse?

Sounds simple, right? You might be shaking your head right now, having full knowledge of the scramble and stress associated with coming to that table with clear-cut answers to those questions.

While account-based marketing (ABM) has proven to deliver higher ROI than other types of marketing, if you use ABM by itself, you’re missing out on potential revenues. That’s because marketers also need inbound demand gen tactics to supplement and support ABM. In fact, 90% of the market is running either demand generation, or a mix of both demand gen and account-based marketing (ABM).

Most marketers don’t automatically think of data and analytics when it comes to ABM. However, industry experts agree that ABM is a data and analytics challenge because you have to leverage data and analytics to understand who you’re going to target, what you’re going to say to them and how you’re going to drive action throughout the company based on the accounts that matter most to you.

In a climate where buyers are expecting and demanding relevant engagement at every touch point, B2B organizations are looking for deeper intelligence on buying signals, even before a prospect visits their website or fills out a registration form.

Demand Gen Report has announced its upcoming Buyer Insights & Intelligence Series. The week-long webcast series will take place July 9-13.

The series is designed to explore new models for identifying, engaging and converting prospects with precision. Experts from Triblio, Lattice Engines, Netline Corporation, Demandbase, Full Circle Insights, LeanData, Bound, TechTarget, Content4Demand, SaleScout, ON24, CaliberMind and Vidyard will share examples and best practices on topics such as:

• Account-based marketing;
• Personalization;
• Content strategy;
• Data strategy, and more!

"We believe the Buyer Insights & Intelligence Series is one of the most important events we produce," said Andrew Gaffney, Editorial Director of Demand Gen Report, in a statement. "The early days of demand generations were largely focused on generating as many leads as possible and setting up campaigns that got buyers to raise their hand. Now, smart marketers realize they have to use a variety of tools and tactics to monitor buyer behavior and identify prospects even before they are willing to fill out a form."

Click here to register for the series.

CaliberMind, a B2B customer data platform, announced that it has joined the Marketo LaunchPoint Technology Partner Program to help marketing and sales teams connect, analyze and automate data across their entire tech stack.

CaliberMind, a B2B marketing intelligence provider, announced a $3.2 million seed round of funding from Newark Venture Partners and Buran Venture Capital.

With targeting and segmentation becoming bigger priorities to support ABM, lead nurturing and related initiatives, new tools and tactics are being deployed to help marketers prioritize and better engage new targets.

For example, commercial real estate software provider Apto was having trouble separating its ideal target prospects (commercial real estate brokers) from the rest of its database (residential real estate brokers and non-brokers in general). The company recently started working with a company called Calibermind to help clean up and segment its database.

“We tend to get a lot of inbound interest and traffic to our website from people in commercial real estate,” said Michael Bevan, VP of Marketing at Apto. “We just inadvertently added others over the years—like appraisers, property management companies, investment companies and developers. So we worked with Calibermind to separate our actual target prospects from all of these other people in commercial real estate that are not really viable prospects for us now.” 

Bevan said he began segmenting brokers from non-brokers by analyzing prospective customers’ websites and LinkedIn profiles pertaining to specific phrases identified through trial and error.

“The residential broker audience is so much larger than the commercial audience,” Bevan said. “Even adding a few of them to the sales funnel will just overwhelm our salespeople, so it’s important to us to filter them out.”

After identifying the right brokers, the next step was to identify which specialty vertical they belonged to, as well as what property types they sell and their role within brokerage. Once these segments are identified, the company leveraged an email nurture program featuring personalized content.

“Once a month, we send out a mass email to the whole database to announce a new piece of content or something that is potentially relevant to any broker regardless of specialty or role,” said Bevan. “Then, we have nurture programs and workflows set up so we can send more frequent emails to people based on their specific challenges or interests. We have workflows for specific functions and titles, as well.”

Bevan said Apto is using Calibermind to enhance its existing database of 100,000 contacts with more information to help “refine and expand those target groups.” While it’s still too early for Apto to see measurable results, the company was able to update and validate 100,000 contact records.

“Our biggest result right now from a strategic standpoint is having this new insight in our database to help us realign our sales initiatives, discover new segments and refine and personalize our messaging in ways that didn’t make sense before.”

Top To-Dos For Effective Segmentation

While agreeing on the potential payoffs of segmentation, industry analysts remind marketers that effective segmentation starts with really understanding your target audience. Experts point out that too many marketers rely on the titles rather than understanding the needs of the buyer.

With segmentation, it’s important to understand the relationships between the stakeholders involved in buying what you sell. 

“I often hear B2B marketers say they have to reach a CXO,” said Ardath Albee, Author & CEO of Marketing Interactions. “With segmentation, it’s important to understand the relationships between the stakeholders involved in buying what you sell. Engaging the role responsible for research and evaluation can be much more fruitful than banging your head against the wall trying to attract a CXO who’s too busy to be interested in what you have to say.”

Allison Snow, Senior Analyst at Forrester Research, added that in order to build a robust persona, marketers should build the segment first. “[Figure out] what you need these to look like, and then carefully match your value proposition to that persona,” she said. Ask yourself the following questions:

• Why does this person care about what you’re doing?
• How will it help them with their job?
• What does their boss ask them for every day?
• What competitive threats do they see?

“Then, you have to examine your value proposition tools against [the persona’s] problems and translate it,” Snow said. “Segmentation is about not asking people to do that themselves anymore. Personas really guide that.”

Other key tips for successful segmentation industry experts suggest include:

• Think about the end result. “Defining segments with greater specificity can help you think about how to deliver content that’s more targeted or messaging that’s more personalized,” said Apto’s Bevan. “You can fall into the trap of over-segmenting and being too specific because, if you do that, there is no value to actually speak to one segment audience differently.”
• Data hygiene is crucial. “You need to keep up with your data hygiene,” said Albee. “Contact information changes pretty quickly. Marketers need to pay more attention to the integrity of their data.”
• Relevant content is nuanced. Snow said content must be personalized to the point where you are delivering your value proposition and what your company can do for this prospect. It must also be relevant to the prospect’s stage in the buying cycle, as well as the person’s role on the buying team.

I hate being the bearer of bad news, but I must tell you something — just about everything you’ve been taught about buyer personas is wrong.

CaliberMind is a B2B buyer intelligence software that provides buyer and content engagement data for account-based marketing. The solution can develop personas to provide prescriptive recommendations for sales, product and marketing teams to accelerate sales cycles and increase revenue and conversion.