It’s no secret that a better-engaged buyer often becomes a repeat buyer, leading to improved retention and revenue. But engagement, especially when using account-based marketing (ABM) in the B2B world, can be a tough nut to crack. Not only are buying committees getting bigger by the day, but you’re working to reach sophisticated buyers who are surrounded by the noise of competing offerings.
It can seem overwhelming to craft the recipe to meaningful buyer engagement right, but it doesn’t have to be. In fact, your path should follow our recommended three-step framework. Here’s what that looks like, and how to make the most of it.
1. Use Quality Data as Your Springboard
The first question you’re trying to answer with an ABM approach is which accounts should buy from you. The way to answer that is with data, drawing from intent platforms like 6sense and other data sources like your customer relationship management software, to surface the best accounts to go after.
Similarly, an engaging buyer journey requires great data — full stop. So even though you could theoretically have any sort of tech stack powering your efforts, the right systems are critical in delivering the right data to boost engagement. What are these systems, you ask? Well, to start, I’m sure you can guess I’m going to recommend 6sense.
The beauty of 6sense is the holistic view of account engagement. 6sense’s B2B intent network monitors anonymous activity across millions of B2B sites, matches that activity back to specific contacts within the account, and to the account as a whole. So, remember when I said that you need intent data to figure out which accounts should buy from you? This is where you get it.
Then, 6sense utilizes Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and Predictive Analytics to place buyers into predictive buying stages. This combination of technology helps you more accurately scale and personalize your efforts throughout the entire buying journey, with confidence. Through it, you’ll gain insights like which key search terms an account has been researching and how many times they’ve been on your website (whether it was anonymous or known).
All of this data comes together within the platform, where you are enabled to create hyper-targeted dynamic lists of accounts, which we call segments. From there, the accounts move in and out based on criteria you set up. This might sound complicated or time-consuming, but setting these segments up takes two to three minutes — and will make all the difference in your engagement in the following steps. Seriously. So, keep the faith. Work on improving the quality of your data, and then move forward to the next step.
2. Grab Attention with the Right Channels
So you have your dynamic segments of accounts locked and loaded; now it’s time to get their attention. The cherry on top is that these segments are transferable across all partners. For instance, once you’ve created the segment in 6sense, it’s easy to pump them into Uberflip and other solutions as well, like your marketing automation platform, Drift, LinkedIn (for retargeting ad campaigns), SalesLoft cadences, and so forth, keeping your targeting parameters and messaging consistent across all channels. This means your overall time investment on the front end remains minimal, while your end result is scalable and high-yielding.
Once you use your segments to launch content across multiple channels, you can move on. No need to check back in, except once every quarter to evaluate performance and make adjustments. This saves a whole heck of a lot of time, as you can imagine.
3. Keep Engagement High with Tailored Content
This is the stage at which many companies stop, mistakenly thinking they have engagement figured out since they’ve gotten the attention of some of their segments. But you know better. Having your data and channels down isn’t enough; you also need the final destination to keep people engaged.
So here is where you answer the question of, “Where do I send the people who click on my ads?” and build the strategy around your content engagement platform, content management system, and your landing pages. In other words, this is where Uberflip comes in.
Knowing that irrelevant content is the number one reason for lost engagement between brands and buyers, this stage cannot be ignored. You need content that is regularly refreshed (we recommend doing so quarterly) so that it’s always up to date and relevant to buyers. Let’s consider how this might look when you apply your segments within Uberflip, as an example.
Maybe you find that someone in an earlier stage of your buying journey (e.g., “awareness”) is interested in predictive analytics. You’ll recommend a piece of content that’s been tagged as relevant to this subject matter and to this person’s buyer journey stage, then send them to a personalized Uberflip stream powered by the 6sense Personalizer app. They’ll get the same piece of content, regardless of how they get there, and it’s always going to be relevant.
Another way to ensure relevance is to make sure you’ve created segments that are related to audience size. This way, you can see if you have a lot of people researching a particular topic, like “lead gen”, in the later stages of their journey, thus prompting you to realize you don’t have enough content ready for those folks. This helps you prioritize what content needs to be created, identify new opportunities for creation, and ensure you’re fulfilling the journey someone is on.
Buyer engagement is the soul of customer retention and revenue, and it all starts with this framework. Get the right accounts in your sights based on solid data, attract them by using the right channels, and ultimately, guide them to a personalized destination where they’ll find tailored content, beaches, and strawberry daiquiris — or at least the tailored content part. And that’s what buyers’ dreams, and engagement, are made of.
