Empowering Your Account-Based Marketing Campaigns with Account Intelligence 

In account-based marketing (ABM), precision is the name of the game. It’s the opposite of a Sunday night football commercial — rather than promoting your brand in front of the broadest possible audience, ABM prioritizes quality over quantity. It’s a surgical approach that involves reaching a precise group of individuals at the right time with the right message.  

That’s exactly why ABM and account intelligence are a match made in B2B marketing heaven.

Account intelligence is the pinnacle of strategic B2B marketing data. It involves aggregating, verifying, and curating actionable information from multiple trusted sources to paint a full picture of your prospects’ identities, the organizations they work for, and their digital behaviors. Data enrichment, demographics, firmographics, technographics, intent data — all are vital components of account intelligence.  

With account intelligence, you will be equipped with informed decisions to enable your sales and marketing teams with a strategic ABM campaign. Think of it as a data-powered campaign where you can prioritize high-value leads and personalize outreach. A truly and incredibly precise approach to B2B marketing  

Account-based marketing: your gateway to targeting high-value accounts 

Rather than traditional lead generation, which focuses on creating a large volume of pipeline, account-based marketing (ABM) is all about targeting a curated list of accounts that your sales and marketing team have identified as your brand’s ideal customers. ABM strategies involve customizing messaging, content, and outreach to address the unique pain points and needs of specific organizations and individual roles.  

The precision of ABM drives significant results and adoption among B2B teams. It’s why 81% of marketers say it delivers a higher ROI than other initiatives, and why it’s widely recognized for shortening the sales cycle and increasing customer lifetime value. And it’s why according to a 2023 report, 67% of marketers relied on ABM strategies (and of those that didn’t, 81% planned to do so within a year). 

ABM allows marketing orgs to focus their time and efforts on researching, understanding, and personalizing messaging to companies that stand to greatly benefit from their products and services. Ideally, that drives more engagement and better conversion rates on ABM campaigns compared to broader demand gen efforts. 

But, in order to be successful, you need to know exactly who you’re talking to, what they care about, and when it’s the right time to reach them. There are no shortcuts with ABM. 

Telltale signs of a groundless ABM campaign 

When your ABM campaign isn’t deeply rooted in high-quality data and a clear understanding of your target accounts, telltale signs start to emerge:  

1) Lack of engagement from target accounts 

ABM campaigns should drive better engagement than a typical spray-and-pray marketing campaign — because your messaging and offers should be tailored to appeal to your target accounts.  

So, if you don’t see higher clickthrough rates on ads, email opens, content downloads, or webinar signups compared to a standard marketing campaign, something’s off. Your campaign messaging and your target accounts’ interests may not be aligned. Or your account list could include outdated or inaccurate information, preventing your content from reaching its intended audience in the first place. 

2) Inconsistent or low-quality leads 

Your ABM campaigns should result in high penetration across your target accounts. That means the entire buying committee — including C-suite approvers, senior decision-makers, procurement managers, and influential contributors — should all be included in and reached by your campaign. 

But if your leads don’t encompass that full range of roles, or result in ancillary leads that aren’t related to the target account in the first place, something’s likely amiss with your targeting. You may be overlooking key personas or missing accurate contact information. 

3) Lead nurturing doesn’t work 

Once you hook ABM leads with an initial content offering or ad placement, you’ll nurture them with additional marketing emails as they continue to move through the buying journey.  

But if your ABM leads aren’t responding to your subsequent nurture campaigns by clicking on email links or reading further content, this could demonstrate a mismatch between their interests and your lower-funnel messaging.  

4) Misalignment between sales and marketing 

ABM is a team sport — sales and marketing need to be working from the same account lists, with the same understanding of target accounts’ needs and messaging themes. 

Cracks in this alignment can start to show in a few ways. Maybe your sales team isn’t following up in a timely manner with one-to-one conversations, which could indicate integration issues between your marketing data and CRM records. Or maybe they aren’t prioritizing leads correctly, which could mean you need better lead scoring.  

5) No increase in revenue 

If your content is driving engagement across the full buying committee and your sales team is following up as expected — but leads aren’t converting — it’s time to revisit the earliest steps in your ABM strategy.  

Engagement with marketing content doesn’t always translate to a perfect product fit — maybe your target accounts aren’t actually the most ideal customers for your solution. Or, they could be hesitant to make a purchase due to economic concerns. And it’s possible they may be relevant and interested, but not in-market buyers in the first place.  

All of these issues tend to appear when a key element of ABM is missing: account intelligence.  

How account intelligence informs your marketing decisions 

Since ABM is all about targeting and personalization, it requires an incredibly deep and rich understanding of your target accounts. This means improving ABM outcomes usually starts with improving account intelligence.  

Let’s explore a few different ways that comprehensive insights into your target market and accounts make all the difference with ABM. 

More precise targeting — going after the right contacts at the right accounts 

Account intelligence provides the granular detail necessary to identify and prioritize the most relevant contacts within your target accounts. This means you can improve account penetration and surround the buying committee with your brand’s content and messaging.  

Imagine you’re building an ABM list of 50 large enterprise organizations that you believe are the best possible fit for your solution, an advanced email marketing platform. Using account intelligence, you can:  

• Verify that your product integrates with their existing CRM systems 
• Pinpoint when each account will be in-market, depending on their current solution’s contract renewal timeline 
• Zero in on the key members of the buying committee at each account — including approvers like CMOs and VPs of Marketing, decision-makers such as VPs of Digital Marketing, and influencers like Senior Marketing Managers and Email Marketing Specialists 

In this way, account intelligence helps your org prioritize the right accounts and target the right individuals, laying the foundation for successful outreach throughout your campaigns.   

Better strategic planning — mapping pain points to content  

Your detailed ABM list can be used to develop buyer personas and customer journey maps for each role at each company. Supplementing your research with account intelligence, you can create tailored content that maps precisely to your accounts’ specific pain points.  

For example, you can use technographic data to identify which companies on your ABM list currently use a competing email marketing solution with lackluster integrations. Then, you can build messaging around this pain point to target different personas.  

This can include: 

• Executive thought leadership, such as articles or blogs about the missed opportunities in email marketing due to poor integrations, targeting CMOs and VPs 
• Whitepapers that provide an in-depth analysis on the technical challenges surrounding marketing integrations (and how your platform overcomes them), aimed at marketing directors 
• Customer webinars that highlight your solution’s positive impact at similar companies, intended for senior managers and directors 
• Product evaluation worksheets that detail how your solution outperforms the competitor, designed for email marketing specialists and managers  

By promoting or syndicating this content to the right persona at each company using the poorly integrated competitor, you can ensure your content’s relevance throughout the buying journey. 

Improved campaign outcomes — driving engagement and conversions 

As your ABM campaigns continue, account intelligence can increase conversion rates through laser-targeted engagement. B2B intent data and behavioral signals make it possible to optimize your campaign’s personalization, reaching leads at precisely the right moment with the right message. 

Let’s say you’re using account intelligence to monitor intent signals for your email marketing platform ABM campaign. You can track specific behaviors and customize follow-up accordingly, such as:  

• When a Senior Manager currently using an underpowered solution clicks on an article about improving email targeting, you can follow up with a detailed guide about your solution’s robust and advanced approach to segmentation. 
• When a Director currently working with a legacy competitor engages with content about managing email program costs, you can provide a case study that highlights how your platform helped a similar company reduce the total cost of ownership after making the switch from the same competitor.  
• When an Email Specialist downloads a whitepaper on increasing email engagement rates, you can invite them to a webinar featuring experts discussing the same topic and showcasing your platform’s features. 

By customizing your content and outreach based on real-time account intelligence, you improve your campaigns’ relevance, engagement, and likelihood to convert.  

Build a better ABM list with DemandScience 

Building an effective account list and personalizing campaign messaging is crucial for ABM success, and DemandScience’s account intelligence platform makes it all possible.  

Accurate data enrichment 

DemandScience provides a wealth of first-party data and advanced research tools that supplement your existing data sets and improve your understanding of your target market and accounts. Enriching your CRM data helps improve segmentation and personalization, and provides your sales team with the most accurate and in-depth information to use when communicating with leads.  

Deep insights into target markets 

As you build your ABM list, you can use DemandScience’s account intelligence platform to explore, filter, and sort accounts by multiple data points. This helps you gain a clear understanding of your total addressable market (TAM) so you can build and refine key your ideal customer profile (ICP) and total account list (TAL). 

Research and prioritize accounts 

You can go deep into your account list, getting a full picture of their potential value and allowing you to rank and prioritize accounts. Use DemandScience to surface dimensions like how many contacts you have the potential to reach, or which accounts are approaching renewal dates — helping your sales team focus their efforts on the accounts most likely to convert.  

Drive better ABM outcomes with account intelligence 

Bottom line: If your ABM efforts haven’t been delivering the results you expect, it’s time to re-examine your account intelligence. With the right approach, you can gain a better understanding of your audience, develop and execute more relevant campaigns to reach them and improve the overall ROI of your ABM program.  

Learn more about account intelligence and ABM display at DemandScience, or check out this webinar on how ABM and content syndication can supercharge your B2B marketing.