arrow-left back to all posts

How Cloud Marketers Can Achieve Account-Based Marketing Success with the Right Data

Are you obsessed with data yet?

With the influx of data readily available, begging to be implemented into marketing and sales efforts, you may be feeling a little overwhelmed about how to get started. But the better you understand both your existing data and newly acquired data, the easier it becomes to apply different types of data in thoughtful ways that lead to a higher ROI.

Sifting through all of the data types available today can be somewhat of a daunting task. That’s why we’ve boiled it down to this simple guide on how to use data to understand your ideal customer profile, create a target account list, develop content, execute campaigns, and measure the success of your account-based efforts.

Understanding your ideal customer profile (ICP)

All successful account-based marketing efforts begin with an intimate understanding of your ideal customer profile. Examine your current accounts as well as your biggest successes (and biggest failures) to iron out exactly what your ideal client profile looks like.

How do you do that? With data, of course.

  • Current customer data. Consolidate existing customer data from all channels, including CRM, billing systems and databases. Then, use this data to analyze your current top customers and what they have in common. This is the foundation of your ideal customer profile.
  • Firmographic data. Firmographic data provides deeper insights about the operational details of your ideal customers. With this data, you can find out the number of branches a company has opened or closed in the last year, its estimated revenue and even details about its employees.
  • Technographic data. Technographic data allows you to go deeper into the wires of your ideal customer. Curious about what CRM software a company is using? Would it benefit you to know how much money it’s already investing in marketing automation? Technographic data can give you those answers so you can position your solution in a way that resonates with your target’s current pain point.
  • Contextual data. Beyond the basics of knowing which technology a company is using, contextual data allows you to know how it’s using these tools and, more importantly, how much it’s currently spending on its technology stack. This allows you to filter for hidden gems, like if a company is spending on CDN networks, it’s likely to need an OVP platform.

Creating a target account list (TAL)

The more you know about your accounts, the easier it will be to curate your target account list. This may seem obvious, but make sure the data you’re using is current and accurate before applying it to your target account list efforts.

Go deeper with your data by looking at different dimensions of your target accounts, like solutions purchased and annual revenue. To ensure you’re finding a healthy number of target accounts as well as their contact information, implement these three types of data:

  • Contact data. This is the most basic type of data available, but don’t overlook it. Ideally, you want to acquire direct phone numbers and email addresses to improve your chances of reaching the stakeholders and decision-makers.
  • Business structure data. This type of data allows you to view the hierarchy of a company, meaning it gives you a glimpse of who is making the decisions. Use business structure data to create hierarchy reference maps. This will help you remember where your stakeholders reside within the hierarchy and what obstacles you may encounter when trying to reach them.
  • Intent data.Intent data allows you to glean insights about a user’s observed behavior so you can see which accounts are searching for information regarding your solution. Intent data is best used in conjunction with technographic, contextual and behavioral data.

Developing content and playbooks

Using the right data can help you customize your content and playbooks so you have an easier time reaching and resonating with your target accounts.

When reviewing data, look for information related to your targets’ specific pain points, behaviors, interests and business priorities as well as which stage they’re at in the buyer’s journey.

Be sure to dig deeper than basic demographic data. Look to technographic data, intent data and contextual data to get a clearer picture of the unique issues your accounts are facing. Then, work with the marketing department to craft engaging content that reaches them at the right time.

Executing campaigns

You have your ICP, and your target account list is stellar. Now, it’s time to execute. But before you kick off your ABM campaign, take the crucial first step to make sure your sales and marketing teams are aligned and working with the same data. Otherwise, executing a campaign will be a waste of everyone’s time.

Marketing should be able to clearly communicate the data justifying their selection of certain accounts, while Sales should have real-world insights about experiences with current accounts to ensure your target account list is accurate and usable.

The information gathered from both teams can then be used to execute campaigns.

  • First, review data trends to define the objective of your campaign.
  • Then, decide which channels and media platforms to use. There are plenty of channels to choose from in ABM, but not all of them will make sense in any given campaign. Review your target accounts and the channels they engage with the most frequently.

Measuring account-based marketing success

The data you use to create target accounts lists and execute campaigns is only a fraction of the data you should care about. The final type of data you should be collecting is post-campaign data – to measure your ABM success.

Tracking your success by assessing certain metrics will help your team learn from any mistakes and take note of successes along the way. This data will also inform the planning process for your next campaign.

  • Compare your ABM campaign to past non-ABM campaigns. This data will help you see the new baseline for success compared to previous strategies. Pay attention to full-funnel metrics so you can clearly see successes and hiccups throughout the entire process.
  • Define your KPIs. Before you execute a campaign, you need to know what success looks like. Track your chosen KPIs throughout the campaign process.
  • Focus on metrics that directly impact business. While marketers are known for obsessing over vanity metrics, ABM is more concerned with successes that directly impact the success of the business. Track metrics like average deal size and funnel velocity, as opposed to awareness and impressions.

While incorporating data into an ABM launch can seem intimidating at first, understanding the types of data and how to use them will help you tackle each stage of the launch process with confidence. Do you have the different types of data you need to succeed with account-based marketing?

Accelerate your go-to-market motions with Intricately

Intricately's cloud product adoption and spend intelligence helps cloud revenue teams focus their go-to-market strategy on the prospects with the highest revenue potential. Here's what some of our enterprise customers are saying.
 
“We use Intricately’s data to help answer some of our biggest questions around analyzing and entering markets to gain a competitive advantage. With Intricately we were able to identify the best location to build a new data center to improve our customer’s experience based on their location.” Equinix
 
“Our sales team is able to prospect more efficiently by having access to insights like a company’s entire technology stack and how much they’re actually using and spending on cloud products. This allows us to have more informed conversations with everyone we talk to and gain a competitive edge.” — Fastly
 
“Our sales process would be impossible without Intricately’s enterprise Salesforce integration. It lets us access data we couldn’t get anywhere else, and allows our reps to spend more time talking to right prospects that become our best customers. With Intricately, we were able to increase our ACV by 15% and save every sales rep 1.5 hours every single day.” — Verizon
 
Schedule a Demo
arrow-left Previous Post Next Post carat-active