Account-based marketing (ABM) has enjoyed the B2B spotlight for a few years now and it seems as if everyone is jumping on board. Even if B2B companies have been prospecting and selling to focused lists of target accounts for years, ABM as we know it today requires more.
One critical piece of a successful ABM strategy is the ability to personalize content marketing efforts for specific accounts. But there’s one problem—most teams don’t have the resources to deeply personalize for every prospect.
With the help of purchase intent insights and data, you can find the right balance of personalization at scale to reap the benefits of ABM.
The 1:1 Challenge for Marketing
In a perfect world, marketing would be able to match the sales department step-for-step in terms of personalization. The sales team can always personalize outreach, but many marketing organizations face an uphill battle when it comes to maximizing 1:1 focus on accounts.
For most marketing teams, starting from scratch with a robust ABM implementation is not feasible. As such, marketers must implement ABM in a way that maximizes scalability while delivering appropriate personalization. This is especially true when it comes to content marketing and development.
If you don’t have the resources to create content that is 100% personalized according to individual personas within an account, there are varying degrees of personalization you can successfully achieve from the most generic, to heavily customized. This blog from Jon Miller at Engagio and accompanying image does a great job defining and breaking down the spectrum of content personalization for ABM:
The problem for overextended marketing teams is understanding which approach (or multiple approaches) to use when it comes to personalization. This is where purchase intent insight can help.
How Purchase Intent Insight Helps Balance ABM Personalization and Scalability
In a recent article, TechTarget CMO John Steinert explained how ABM can be implemented as an overlay to boost existing content marketing efforts.
Rather than trying to build ABM from the ground up, you latch onto successful demand gen capabilities and work to improve effectiveness. With personalization for specific prospects, you can succeed with ABM and drive greater overall conversions. But how do you prioritize this effort?
With the “ABM as overlay” strategy, you can use purchase intent insight to narrow your already-targeted account and prospect list. This helps you prioritize prospects and accounts that are showing the most purchase intent and go after them with persona- or account-level personalization. The rest can be targeted through more broad-based efforts. By focusing your ABM personalization processes more effectively, you can avoid wasting precious resources and start expanding your overall strategy in small steps.
When you ask yourself, “have we gone far enough with personalization?”, the answer is inevitably more complicated than we might like it to be. It’s easy to say that you haven’t gone far enough until you reach 100% personalization for every prospect—but you must keep goals realistic and manageable.
Instead, think of “going far enough” as the point where you can increase conversion rates through better personalization while also scaling ABM. And for all of the data you’ve collected about specific accounts, purchase intent data will prove most helpful as you strive for this balance.
TechTarget is helping companies take advantage of purchase intent insight within its Priority Engine platform to improve personalization and overall ABM execution. To understand best practices and lessons learned from TechTarget’s experience supporting 300+ ABM implementations, click here.
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