Wednesday 2 November 2016

Powering Account-Based Marketing with the Right Technology

Powering Account-Based Marketing with the Right Technology

Author: Charm Bianchini

It’s an exciting time for marketers as the MarTech landscape continues to expand. Technologies, engagement strategies, and tactics are changing and improving at a rapid pace. But with this rapid innovation comes its caveats.

When it comes to choosing the right solutions for your organization, the pathway may seem less bright. Due to the sheer number of choices, it can be overwhelming and difficult to determine where to begin. Specifically for account-based marketing (ABM), there are many vendors today that offer solutions to help you target key accounts.

With so much available technology, it’s important to invest in the right tools to power and scale your ABM efforts. A sophisticated ABM technology stack will enable you to execute your targeted programs at scale and across all channels.

Here are three key features that an ABM solution should have:

1. Unified Platform

At the core of your account-based marketing solution should be a single, unified platform that provides all of the essential components for ABM. Marketing automation is perfect for this, and a sophisticated platform should have capabilities for account targeting and management, personalizing cross-channel engagement, and revenue-based account analytics in the same platform as your other cross-channel marketing campaigns.

By using one platform for ABM coordination and collaboration, you can manage your accounts through a sophisticated selection process, such as account scoring or creating lists containing criteria important to your business. Once you have identified the right audience to target, you can then engage them with highly personalized, coordinated messages across all channels, including email, web, ads, mobile, and more. Most importantly, you can optimize your programs and measure success by tracking pipeline and revenue to ensure you’re getting the most out of every effort.

2. Integration with Other Solutions

Identifying gaps and adding missing tools as needed is critical to your ABM success, but just as important is having a solution that can easily integrate with your other core technologies.

Depending on your organizations, you may want to consider evaluating complementary solutions for account data, company insights, competitive intelligence, predictive software, content marketing, direct mail, and event management.

The right framework will help you evaluate your digital needs. By determining your business model (e.g. industry, in-house vs. partner), go-to-market strategy (e.g. customer vs. prospect, campaigns, etc.), organizational needs (e.g. scale, sophistication, etc.), and integration requirements (e.g. single vs. multiple vendors, IT support, etc.), you can discover the right solution(s) that will grow with your company.

Framework for Selecting Technology

3. Cross-Coordination Benefits

Whether you’re new to ABM or have been practicing it for many years, marketing should not embark on ABM alone. A successful strategy involves close collaboration with cross-functional departments including sales, professional services, customer success, etc. You’ll need the proper technology that will give these groups a real-time, account-level view to coordinate outreach and drive alignment across teams so they can go after key accounts in a coordinated and collaborative way.

What technologies are you using to power your ABM programs?  Let me know in the comments; I would love to hear from you!

 


Powering Account-Based Marketing with the Right Technology was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

The post Powering Account-Based Marketing with the Right Technology appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.



from Marketo Marketing Blog http://blog.marketo.com/2016/11/powering-account-based-marketing-with-the-right-technology.html

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