Leveraging Technology to Create Enhanced Account-Based Marketing Initiatives

Critical to a comprehensive account-based marketing (ABM) strategy, is technology. With a myriad of tech options available to marketers though, it can be difficult to determine what is best for you.

A dynamic tech stack allows you to clearly see what potential accounts are interacting with your marketing, website, and other touchpoints. By analyzing this data, you can assign account scores to each account to pinpoint their position and continued movement through the sales funnel. With this data, you can determine which accounts you would like to target specifically with a 1:Few or 1:1 campaign.

What is a tech stack?

You may already have several programs, software, and subscriptions that organize, plan, and analyze data for you. If you employ an agency, they will plug into your existing tech stack and will set you up with any additional programs you need to fill any holes you may have.

By plugging into your stack, they are able to monitor and analyze the data for you and provide an overview on where your ABM strategy is going. If doing this in-house, the same applies. These updates tell you exactly what the response and interaction with your campaigns are and what the agency or your analyst believes is necessary for results - results you can report to your stakeholders. Essentially, the well-developed tech stack makes this part easy for you.

What is included in a tech stack?

In your tech stack, you are going to want to layer services that work together where needed and inform your overall strategy. Again, if hiring an agency, they will monitor and analyze a great deal of this themselves. However, if you are not using an agency, you will want to build a tech stack that makes your job easier and works intuitively for your team.

These are the things you will want your tech stack to address. Some programs can do many of these things and some do one or two. Platforms like Salesforce offer additional apps that can connect to your Salesforce platform to fill holes and optimize your existing program.

• Intent Data
• CRM
• Data Visualization & Business Intelligence
• Marketing Automation
• Analytics Platform
• Visitor Intelligence
• Audience Provider
• DSP - Demand Side Platform

Foundational tech stack components:

While each component has its own function, together they provide penetrating insights into your customers. The key to ABM success is analyzing the data and adjusting campaigns in response.

Company Match Software: While company match tools are common, they quickly become irrelevant if they can't be integrated with Google Analytics for a full view of your customer's every interaction across all channels. You need to be able to see data points from across the web in real-time and isolate actionable information. Without company match software, also known as the most critical piece of real account-based marketing, you can't move forward with a thorough understanding of - and confidence in - your outreach.

Content Management System: A content management system is the most efficient way to create, edit, and publish your marketing content. Find one that integrates WordPress, Magento, PHP, .Net, or any other CMS platform with your existing website. This is critical as you don't want to subscribe to a CMS you can't actually use with your other components. Speaking to a consulting company that will analyze your tech stack and suggest an optimized stack would be helpful to ensure you sign up for the right software.

Content Management System (CMS): ABM is about connecting and engaging with a specific target audience, regardless of where they are in the sales funnel. The aforementioned Salesforce fits here, but you can also use others such as Netsuite and Dynamics.

Marketing Automation: Marketing automation tools optimize and automate repetitive tasks within any marketing campaign. The idea is to streamline, automate, and measure each and every post across all channels from one convenient desktop. Popular options are Marketo, Act-On, or Hubspot, though there are many, many others. Choosing the one that is more intuitive for you and posts across all the platforms you want to post to critical.

Data Visualization: Informed decisions require all the facts. Data visualization seeks to do this by providing data from across all channels. Products such as Domo do this well, providing real-time information and metrics for your team to analyze, feeding your continued ABM strategy.

Access to In-Market Data: By using in-market data (or intent data), B2B marketers achieve the closest thing to being omniscient; it's the most powerful predictor of which target accounts are in-market or consuming information on third-party sites that's relevant to your (or your competitors') services. This data then indicates interest or purchase intent, and which accounts should be the priority.

Using your stack to score accounts

Account scoring, or engagement scoring, assigns a value to customer interactions and their level of engagement with your marketing. Scores can be adjusted to what you value most, or what proves to bring you the most sales. Regardless, the goal remains to aggregate all engagement info available to see what buyers have done across digital channels.

If you enlist an agency, they may do this for you. Otherwise, your team can develop a scoring system that works best for you and can continue to perfect it over time as you take clients from the top-to-bottom of your funnel. The key here is to analyze all your data to see where the buyer is within your funnel, how they are interacting with you, their intent (intent data), and how you can best interact with them going forward. Without this information, your ABM strategy goes out the window.

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