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When you move into a new house, one of the first things you might do is befriend your neighbors. Why? Because a connection beyond a casual greeting benefits all of you. You might water Joe’s plants when he’s out of town; Ana might share some eggs and save you a trip to the store. Relationships like these provide meaningful support systems for individuals, and they strengthen the neighborhood as a whole.
When engaging large companies, business marketers face a similar task: connect with people as individuals and as a team. But it’s not as easy as knocking on someone’s door. Companies vet major purchases through an internal buying committee, and each member — often an executive — brings different concerns to the table. To win this business, you have to capture the heart and mind of everyone on the buying committee. Marketing isn’t the only area of your company interacting with these accounts, so you can’t do it alone. Success requires partnership with sales and service leaders and a shared approach to data so everyone has a full view into each account.
Account-Based Marketing (ABM) helps companies like yours support more complex organizations. It’s a strategy that joins data management with marketing automation to create personal campaigns for the B2B customers you most want to reach. The good news is that 92% of B2B marketers have an ABM program. The next step is having the right technology to meet customers where they are today, anticipate their future needs, and communicate with empathy across every channel. It’s especially important now, when constant change and the need to communicate from anywhere affect every business you work with.
Here are four ways that digital marketing technology can help you execute your ABM strategy:
Businesses that manage multiple segments, brands, or geographies need to tailor legal disclaimers, copyright information, branding standards, and other business content wherever they have a presence. Pardot Business Units and Snippets allows marketers to customize this content and maintain a global view of an account. Whether you’re emailing customers in Asia-Pacific, Europe, or anywhere else, it’s possible to deliver the right messages to the right customers at the right time without duplicating your efforts.
What if you could anticipate the level of account engagement on your next campaign — before it launches? Advanced AI capabilities can help evaluate past performance and use predictive data to guide your next steps. These data connectors allow marketing, sales, and service teams to quickly integrate data from various external sources and understand their audience on a more granular level.
“Thanks to AI, we now have a more complete view of our return on investment and can dive deeper on conversations at a micro level,” said Jaime Lopez, a 2020 Salesforce Marketing Champion and general manager for Wartsila in Finland. “Salesforce has taken our massive amounts of data across multiple systems and made it seamless and easy to use. As a result, there’s eight times more pipeline attributed to marketing that we can clearly understand and analyze.”
Platform administrators and developers can play in digital “sandboxes” to test, audit, and configure functionality. These environments give them a safe place to work out any tech snags and comply with IT governance requirements before releasing new features to the world. Inspired by features available in Sales Cloud, Pardot now offers developer sandboxes to help B2B marketers conduct similar tests of their own and launch successful features for different regions or products.
Once you’ve refined your ABM strategy and grown your capabilities with new technology, how can you keep using it to its full potential? Bring in a team of certified experts to provide guidance, support, and training long after implementation. Going this route can free your team from day-to-day administration tasks, such as setting up users or creating reports, and boost their productivity on more strategic projects. This could be particularly helpful for teams that are spread out across geographies and brands.
Watch a demo of Pardot Premium, the newest digital offering to help B2B marketers adopt all four of the ABM technologies described here.
