Account-based marketing helps you create more personalized, engaging messaging for prospects. Find out how event data can help maximize your ABM efforts.
Marketing principles, like most things in life, are ever-changing. While the marketing “funnel” that’s been so popular in recent years is still effective in many ways, account-based marketing (ABM) is gaining traction in the marketing world.
ABM turns the traditional lead generation funnel on its head, taking a more targeted approach to messaging to cultivate more engaged prospects. When coupled with the power of event data, ABM is a game-changer for marketers.
Why Event Data Matters to Your Account-Based Marketing Strategy
So, what does ABM have to do with events? The value of events as a marketing channel has been proven time and again.
Events allow for the collection of highly personalized attendee data. This data provides valuable insight into how your target audience is engaging with your brand and what most interests them on a granular level.
Not to mention the power of face-to-face interactions with prospects. “When you pair that potential with the opportunity to create deep engagement and capture first-party intent data in a condensed period, it makes events a must,” according to Myllisa Patterson, VP of Demand Generation at Cvent.
With this wealth of event data at your disposal, marketers can speed up the “awareness-to- purchase” journey by targeting specific accounts with personalized, data-driven messaging that’s characteristic of account-based marketing.
What Is Account-Based Marketing?
Account-based marketing is a strategy that puts your prospects first, taking a targeted approach to generating and nurturing leads. Marketers who successfully implement an ABM strategy begin by identifying accounts within a particular market that have a high potential for conversion.
From this point on, marketers concentrate their resources on these accounts, creating tailor- made content that meets prospects’ unique needs. This allows for more effective nurturing, engaging prospects in a personalized marketing experience that lends itself to higher conversion rates and increased revenue.
Tips to Build Your ABM Strategy
Not sure how to implement ABM into your existing marketing strategy? Let’s explore what it takes to craft an effective ABM strategy.
1. Identify and Research Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
When selecting accounts with high conversion potential, begin by identifying your ideal customer profile (ICP). This starts with analyzing your existing customers and identifying characteristics common to your greatest success stories. This can include industry, organization size, location, and more.
A great source of this information? Events. Your pool of attendees, including all the great event data you’ve collected about their industries, job roles, and interests, can be invaluable to crafting a picture of your ICP.
You should also expand your ICP search to include the types of prospects your competitors are targeting. From here, begin researching each company on your list to identify key decision- makers and buyer personas, unique pain points and value propositions, and any current solutions they use that you’ll need to compete against.
2. Align Your Marketing and Sales Teams
An effective ABM strategy requires collaboration between marketing and sales. Your sales team will likely have many answers to the questions you’re asking while identifying your ICP, including the needs and challenges of specific prospects and the effectiveness of previous marketing campaigns.
You should also take this opportunity to align with your sales team on your goals and KPIs, allowing you to work together to meet broader organizational goals, provide a more cohesive messaging experience for customers, and craft events that offer a high ROI.
3. Develop Personalized Messaging for Each Account
With your target accounts identified, you can begin developing personalized marketing journeys for each, creating content that speaks directly to each prospect’s unique needs and role in purchasing decisions.
Event data, once again, can be instrumental at this stage. Not only can it help inform your account selection, but it can and should inform your messaging. With the right event data, including resources like attendee surveys, you can use event feedback to inform your messaging and talk to your prospects about topics you know they care about.
With the right tech, you can collect and manage all this data in one place, allowing you to seamlessly move through the process of transforming data into messaging and messaging into conversions.
4. Take a Multi-Channel Approach
As with most marketing strategies, a multi-channel approach is a must for ABM. This can include all the usual suspects, from emails and social media to… you guessed it: events. Not only can you use event data to inform your marketing strategy, but events themselves have the power to nurture prospects and get them closer to the purchasing stage.
With each channel you leverage, your messaging should always be personalized to each account, which will likely mean creating unique content for each channel. This can be a hefty time commitment, so it’s important that you’re targeting the right accounts with the right messaging.
5. Design Your Events Around Your ABM Strategy
As noted, your messaging should be unique to each prospect. But when you’re creating event communications, how can you personalize content for every attendee? It comes down to the power of your event tech.
With the right tech by your side, you can craft event marketing materials with unique messaging for specific audience segments. This can include:
• Creating a personalized experience for different registration types
• Crafting promotional messaging for specific attendees based on their registration data
• Promoting event experiences and content that will interest particular attendees
• Ensuring post-event follow-up content is personalized to attendees’ experiences during the event
By adopting an ABM mindset while designing your events, you can ensure that you’re targeting attendees strategically, leading them closer to the buying stage. All the while, you’ll be mining that event data for use in future outreach.
Testing and Optimizing Your ABM Approach
As with any marketing strategy, you’ll need to measure your success with ABM and work on optimizing your approach. This can require pressure testing some of your messaging or marketing channels to see what’s working (or not).
Keep your marketing and sales KPIs in mind when evaluating your tactics. Conversion rates, revenue generated, event registrations, and more can be analyzed to determine how well your ABM strategy is performing.
Different messaging, channels, offers, or event types may resonate better with different accounts. It’s up to you to stay diligent in testing and optimizing your ABM strategy and ensuring you’re leveraging the right data – including event data – to inform your tactics.
Want to learn more about how you can leverage event data to maximize your account-based management strategy?
Check out this on-demand webinar, Your ABM Strategy & Event Data: A Match Made in Heaven, for insights from the event experts at Cvent.