As the holiday season fast approaches and marketing and sales leaders look to closing the last quarter of the year with maximum ROI, it is also time to refocus efforts, plans and strategies for 2022. In the B2B marketplace, marketing strategies and concepts like Account-based marketing will continue to hold a high place in leadership minds because ABM is meant to drive better ROI where buying groups are larger, diverse and sometimes more distributed.
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What are some of the top hacks or trends that will drive ABM success in 2022?
Optimizing Lead Scoring Models
B2B marketing teams now have greater access to not just different kinds of data and insights but also different types of buying signals and intent. But if scoring models within marketing team processes and structures are not revamped to adopt to the changing and updated features new martech and data platforms have to offer, the full value of an ABM process will not be met.
ABM is meant to cater to B2B markets and is a strategy that allows B2B marketers to drive interactions that are personalized and focused at an account-level by adding relevance to every messaging no matter how many buying decision makers are present.
As marketers prepare to give their marketing strategies a rejig for the new year in 2022, scoring models will have to evolve to adjust and adapt to newer buying signals and intent buying patterns to drive greater ABM value and success. A stronger lead scoring system will also help ease handoffs between marketing and sales teams, allowing them to prioritize time and efforts better based on the buying stage of their target accounts.
Driving Contextual versus Click-based Engagement
With a greater need to drive marketing output using relevance and personalization, even ABM strategies have to be rebuilt to adapt better; it’s time for B2B marketing to move away from metrics that assess elements like click-based engagement.
As 2022 approaches, marketing leaders and marketing teams who have set in place better data collection and buying signal detection methods will need to drive their next-steps with contextual responses that are relevant to the buyer’s current buying journey, buying stage and mindset! All of this starts with setting formats and processes that can help marketing teams across the hierarchy understand who their main buyers at an account-level and what triggers them the most.
This will help reduce the typically long journey that marketing and sales teams have to undertake when trying to close a sale in the B2B market, while also allowing brands to develop better relationships that are based on value and understanding.
Using Data to Understand Future Revenue and Growth Opportunities
In a data-driven marketing environment, using data to understand your potential customers and enrich future marketing initiatives to drive interactions with them is one way of ensuring longevity and customer value. However, as data platforms sport better capabilities and as intuitive platforms collate multiple sources of truth to help breakdown different kinds of account-based behavior and analytics, it is time for marketers to use all these insights to not just deepen customer interactions with better personalization tactics but to also identify and differentiate revenue potential from an existing set of prospects and customers. Using data on acquisitions, funding, sudden team expansions and other relevant changes at an account-level can help marketers create subsets of their prospect universe and prioritize better between which accounts can potentially be targeted for higher revenue.
Differentiating this can allow marketers to address each subset with the right messaging given that all of these accounts will react and convert differently based on the current state of their business and industry.
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Identifying the Right Marketing Mix
If there’s one thing that is a growing challenge for B2B marketers today, it is the extent of noise in the market. With every marketer using the same set of online channels to drive customer engagement, prospects and customers are the ones who suffer by being inundated with marketing and sales messages that many times might not be relevant or timely for them.
One of the easiest ways to break away from the noise lies in using patterns to identify who your main buying decision makers are within your top target accounts, the other lies in identifying a set of limited channels that can be the key focus to deepen engagement with them. Relevant and personalized messaging that meets a need will always have a quicker impact on the mind of a top prospect.
Each type of account and prospect today needs to be nurtured in different ways, this is what drove the growth of ABM over the years, when leading marketers understood the need to move away from the typical spray and pray method.
2020-2021 was an Exciting time for Marketing, 2022 will be better!
With the Covid-19 pandemic forcing marketers to be more creative and relevant, in many ways, the years 2020-2021 could be considered exciting (or dynamic!) times for marketers, it depends on how you look at it! As the world adjusts to living and working with Covid-19 while moving into a post-pandemic model, it will be crucial for marketers to stay atop productive trends while constantly working on optimizing processes to improve business efficiencies and ROI. 2022 and beyond will be a time to focus on optimized growth models, better reputation and customer engagement that can build longevity for the long-term.
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