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Account-Based Experience
Guides

The Guide to Audience Building for B2B in 2024

Learn how to build an audience for your B2B sales and marketing efforts with our target audience building and research guide for 2024.
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The 6sense Team
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Audience Building

Chapters

Chapter 1

Introduction

Chapter 2

Understand Your Audience

Chapter 3

Reach and Influence Your Audiences

Chapter 4

Conclusion

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Introduction

Do you struggle with reaching your B2B buyers with the right message at the right time?

Do your deals bog down because it takes too long to identify and influence key members of your customers’ buying teams?

If the answers are yes, you’re not the only one. Many companies lack data-backed insights into potential buyers.

Audience building and research tools can help you identify the most promising accounts, and then target decision makers with the right messages.

This guide explains what they are and how you can use them to:

  • Uncover your target audience
  • Use data to understand buyer behaviors and characteristics, and
  • Reach out to buyers with relevant messaging using Audience Building and Research tools

Let’s dive in.

Chapter 2

Understand Your Audience

Start with the Basics: What is Audience Building?

Audience building is the process of identifying, targeting, and attracting potential business customers for a B2B company.

It involves strategies and tactics such as market research, lead generation, content marketing, and networking to build a relevant and engaged audience of businesses interested in the products or services offered by the B2B company.

It also often involves a lot of guesswork based on the types of companies that have bought in the past, and the individual experience and intuition of sales and marketing leaders.

Past experience is a great place to start. Our goal is to bolster your experience with more data and insights.

First, Define Your Ideal Customer Profile

Your Ideal Customer Profile, or ICP, represents potential customers that are likely to convert, be profitable, and be satisfied with a product or service. Companies in your ICP match a set of firmographic, technographic attributes and other characteristics.

Determine these attributes and characteristics by looking at your closed-won accounts and identifying common traits, such as:

  • Industry
  • Company size
  • Geographic location
  • Number of employees
  • Revenue

A good ICP will tell you how many potential customers are out there, but not which ones are ready to buy.

You can learn more about the importance and impact of a well-defined ICP in this article.

Spot Which Companies Are Ready to Buy

Intent data can help you identify which members of your ICP are actively seeking the solutions you offer. We call this group your In-market Ideal Customer Profile (IICP). These accounts are the most likely to buy. You should focus on them first.

Intent data is made up of buyer signals:

First-party data

Channels owned by your organization. This includes your website, email marketing, sales engagement, events, and other resources that you control. This data will generally be tracked through platforms like a CRM and MAP.

Second-party data

The sites that you don’t own, but which discuss your company and products. For example, TrustRadius and G2 allow users to compare and review services, and can provide rich information about which companies are comparison shopping.

Third-party data

Research elsewhere on the internet that signals a buyer’s interest in products or services like yours.

An intent data provider can track these signals and tie them back to company accounts.

Individually, these signals may not tell you much. But as the signals pile up, they begin to paint a picture. You’ll know which accounts are doing the most research into solutions. You’ll see which topics they are researching, which will help you understand their pain points. Some intent providers can even help you determine which buyer personas are engaged within a company — and which are not.

You can leverage these insights to target specific companies (aka accounts), and specific roles within those companies, with marketing and sales outreach.

Timing is Critical

It’s important to strike when the iron’s hot — or in the case of sales, when customers are ready to buy.

Reach out too soon, and you can annoy prospects while wasting their time and yours.

Reach out too late, and you’ll either miss the deal or be in a weak negotiating position. If you haven’t already lost the deal, you’ll probably have to offer deep discounts to win interest.

When you get the timing right, you maximize your influence and can speed up the buying process. You offer solutions right when your customers need them. You understand them from the very first conversation. The relationship becomes consultative.

6sense goes a step further by using AI to analyze intent data and predict which buying stage customers are in. This enables you to know which accounts are ready to buy right now — where your sales reps should focus their efforts — and which accounts need more outreach.

This empowers you to provide more precisely-tuned marketing communications to companies at specific stages in their journeys, such as:

  • Awareness: Unbiased blog posts, checklists, and third-party analytics that help prospects diagnose their problems and identify solutions
  • Consideration: How-tos and product comparison guides that help prospects weigh their options, and messaging that differentiates you from the competition
  • Decision: Case studies and customer interviews that validate your prospects’ decision to move forward, and offers for demos and free trials that encourage prospects to raise their hand
  • Purchase: User guides, best practices, product updates, and event announcements that keep customers informed and engaged

Segment Audiences Based on Incoming Data

When you know what buyers are researching, you can craft messages that are highly specific to their needs and interests. This is powerful. According to Salesforce, 65% of buyers are likely to switch brands if a vendor doesn’t personalize their communications.

But when you are working with hundreds or thousands of accounts, it’s difficult to craft personalized messaging for each account.

The solution is audience segmentation.

With 6sense Audience Intelligence, you can categorize prospects and customers into different lists based on their interests and known characteristics, such as job role, industry, and others. Segmentation helps revenue teams quickly assign accounts and personas to specific campaigns based on their firmographic traits.

But buyers aren’t static and B2B buying journeys aren’t always linear. Buyers move forward in their journeys (and even sometimes go backwards) in unpredictable ways, making it tough to reach them at the right time with the right message.

6sense solves this problem with dynamic segmentation, which uses AI to automatically move prospects and customers to different lists when buying behavior changes. This might include:

  • Changes in keywords being researched, which indicates shifts in buying intent
  • Research into competitors, which should be met head-on with competitive plays that position your solution as the ideal option
  • Changes in buying stage, which impacts the type of content buyers are likely to want and be influenced by

Getting granular with your audience ensures your outreach ends up in front of the people that matter most in the decision-making process and have the power to decide that the product or service you offer is the best choice for their specific needs.

How Segments Power Personalization

Measure and Test Audience Potential

Start with determining your objective. Once you know what you’re trying to achieve with your outreach or campaign, you can home in on your ideal audience.

Are you trying to reach decision-makers who have a specific role? Accounts that have engaged with website content that reflects interest in a certain solution? Companies that have been customers of your competitors?

If you’re not sure at first, you can test the efficacy of different audiences and measure their success.

For example, you may need to run tests to determine the right audience size if you discover that a campaign is reaching too broad of an audience and you need to finetune your segmentation. Likewise, you might also discover that there is not enough demand within a single audience, and you might need to broaden your audience.

By analyzing the intent data generated by your target audience, you may also discover that they have different needs that you hadn’t even thought of, but could meet by tweaking your go-to-market plans.

Chapter 3

Reach and Influence Your Audiences

Leveraging intent data and audience segments enables you to set up campaigns that deliver different messaging based on buyer characteristics, buying stages, and other ways you can segment your audience.

Here’s a look at some common audience types and ways you can increase your influence and odds of landing these target audiences as customers.

Build Brand Awareness

Intent data and predictive analytics can be used to identify what stage of the buying journey each account falls into. For accounts in the awareness stage, potential customers are researching their needs and possible solutions, meaning they’re likely learning about your solutions, as well as those offered by your competitors.

Segmenting your audience by buying stage gets top of funnel content in front of potential customers, increasing their awareness of your brand before they start considering their options.

Boost Engagement

Campaigns are most effective when they engage the right people, which means the decision-makers. Contacting the wrong people isn’t just a way to get low engagement, it’s also a poor use of marketing and advertising resources.

Identify the decision-makers that make up an account’s buying team and use audience segmentation to enroll them in campaigns specific to the needs, goals, and challenges of their individual roles. Specialized learning tracks provide higher educational value than generic messaging, which leads to higher engagement, shorter sales cycles, and boosts in ROI.

Reach High-Intent Accounts

Audience building and segmentation can help your revenue team get easy wins. Accounts that are in your IICP, meaning they’re likely to buy, and likely to buy now, as well as other accounts engaged in high-intent behavior can be placed into outreach tracks that help them feel confident in their interest in your solution. By offering educational content that answers any questions or doubts they may have or highlighting features that serve their specific needs, you can bring them closer to making a purchase decision.

Recover Missed Opportunities

Sometimes deals don’t pan out because the timing isn’t right, or the budget isn’t there, or for whatever reason, a potential customer that fits your ICP isn’t about to convert any time soon. Keep these prospect relationships warm by putting them in a campaign that keeps your solution on their minds.

And if the opportunity becomes viable again? The 6sense platform has a feature called dynamic segmentation, which can automatically detect when accounts engage with your website, research keywords, or show other behaviors that indicate renewed interest in your brand. These accounts showing renewed interest can be moved into new audiences and receive more strategic outreach from your revenue team

Chapter 4

Conclusion

Researching and building your audience is critical for making sure you target the right accounts and the right decision makers at the right time with relevant messaging.

Audience Building and Research helps revenue teams:

  • Uncover ideal in-market customers
  • Identify decision-makers for each account
  • Understand customer behavior and intent
  • Segment audiences based on campaign objectives
  • Reduce resources needed to reach out to high-intent accounts

 

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The 6sense Team

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The 6sense Team
6sense helps B2B organizations achieve predictable revenue growth by putting the power of AI, big data, and machine learning behind every member of the revenue team.