Behavioral Data is the Key to Nurturing, ABM and Sales Enablement Success – Paris Priority Engine User Group

After hosting a number of sessions in the US, London and Munich, TechTarget hosted its first Priority Engine user group in Paris this past month.

A panel of B2B technology marketers gathered to discuss how behavioral data is driving recent changes in their B2B marketing tactics, especially around areas like nurturing and sales enablement. Below are 3 key takeaways from the discussion.

Nurturing strategies are getting more and more complex

For most of the attendees, behavioral digitalization and the increased number of stakeholders making up enterprise technology buying teams are making nurturing campaigns more and more complex. Today, their goal is to:

• Target the right people: Contact acquisition is the starting point of any nurturing campaign. Many contact sources exist, but for optimized results, activity is a very important factor: you have to be able to target contacts that have had a recent activity on your topics, whether through your own website or through third party websites.
• Target them with the right content: IT people are not the only decision makers anymore. Line of business is more and more involved in IT projects. You have to create personas to make sure to target them with appropriate and relevant content. Content strategy is the key to address the right group of contacts with a targeted message:  high value content will naturally attract high quality contacts.
• Target them in a more intelligent way: Although they may be part of the same buying team, a contact who has downloaded an infographic and one who has downloaded a case study should not necessarily be treated the same way. Using third-party behavioral data and purchase intent insight from partners like TechTarget can help you understand what prospect interests and intent signals they are exhibiting beyond the content they are downloading from you – relative to other members of the buying team. This insight will better determine where prospects fit within your nurturing flow.

To ensure complex nurturing strategies are run effectively in marketing automation platforms, it is key to work with partners who are able to integrate with marketers’ current marketing tools.

Effective data integration is key to your marketing strategy

Marketing is changing at a robust rate and, today, the sole search for leads or BANT leads is a limiting focus. As mentioned above, you must understand behavioral data of accounts and prospects. This will help you build scoring and tactics accordingly in order to influence them earlier in the buy cycle:

• Prioritize the accounts on which to focus your sales and marketing efforts
• Focus on the contacts within those accounts who have shown an active interest on your topics
• Provide the sales team with smart insights to enable them to successfully address those target accounts

Furthermore, behavioral intent data will help fuel better Account Based Marketing tactics by allowing you to segment an active audience on various criteria including industry, company size, and target account lists.  By understanding their specific activity, it will enable you to differentiate accounts based on where they are in the buy cycle to develop specific nurture flow or pass directly to sales.

Fostering greater collaboration between marketing and sales

Demand generation marketers have traditionally been tasked with supporting sales [generate new leads, nurture them] but at the same time, sales are often sceptical towards marketing campaign efficiency.

One of the user group panelists noted that the inclusion of behavioural intent data passed with leads and prospects is helping to change the perception of sales regarding marketing effectiveness [who are now more and more asking for such data]. The insights supplement existing information on the accounts and lead to better conversations with the prospects. This data also saves sales time by enabling them to focus on accounts and contacts with real proven interest in their solutons.

Finally, the behavioral intent data integration within marketing automation and CRM tools enable marketing to develop personalized and automated campaigns, saving sales manual and time-consuming work. For example, one panelist explained that he developed automated emails from each sales representative based on contacts from their target account lists who had shown an interest in specific topics.

This greater collaboration between sales and marketing will result in higher prospect engagement and, thus, a better user experience to drive better results.

For more information on Priority Engine, TechTarget’s global purchase intent insight platform, please click here.

You can read this blog in its original French version here.