Intent to Impact: Marketing

While Intent data can impact the entire sales cycle and beyond, it is almost exclusively known within the TOFU (Top of Funnel), so this felt like the natural place to start exploring the positive impacts of intent data.

If you wanted to explore the impacts further down the funnel click here.

Content Strategy

The goal for content marketers is to create content that is going to speak to prospects, that is going to uncover truths, and answer the questions that keep prospective buyers up at night but with such an array of businesses within the ICP or on the named account list, how do you identify what is top of mind for each of them, to ensure that your content is not just relevant, but in fact resonant to the pain in which they are feeling, which will ultimately drive action!

Marketing Royalty: Content is King?

Traditionally, Content has been seen as a key differentiator in the marketing landscape. Allowing you to stand out from competitors and build trust with your audience by showing them that you understand their needs, wants and questions.

However, the widespread holler “Content is King” has led to a saturated marketing landscape, to the extent in which even the best piece of content becomes buried within search results in an overcrowded niche.?

The Age of Content Saturation

In 2014, professional marketing blogger Mark Schaefer coined the term “content shock” to describe the massive distribution of content across digital marketing channels.?At the time, Schaefer predicted that content consumers would eventually feel overwhelmed and saturated with the amount of material online. As a result, there could be a decrease in engagement levels among audiences, which means that your target market might not end up reading or sharing your content.

Still today, the phenomenon of content shock seems to be more pronounced.

We live in an unapologetically noisy and busy world. It’s fast-paced, increasingly digital-first, and led by those who embrace change, are willing to innovate, and are progressive in their approaches and attitudes. But it’s also a world clogged by content that often looks and sounds the same, by poorly-disguised sales pitches, and by marketing that’s irrelevant, poorly personalised, and terribly targeted.

Cutting through in a saturated?marketing?landscape?

The upcoming generation of business buyers are tired of old-fashioned, poorly designed, or overly salesy marketing messages. They prefer to do their own research on purchasing options, relying on networks, trusted sources of reviews, or their own reviews of online content.

People are savvier and smarter in terms of making purchasing power decisions. It’s our job to ensure they’re empowered to make those decisions. On top of this we’re seeing signs that commonplace marketing strategies are becoming more expensive and less effective at reaching time-poor decision-makers. Combine this with longer buying cycles and it’s becoming more difficult and costly to acquire new clients.

But what if you were fed a weekly list of the topics that are top of mind at your target accounts that you can leverage to influence the content you create, ensuring that it talks directly to the pain that they are experiencing; at that moment*.

* Have you ever bought something new or learned about a new topic and then all of a sudden it’s everywhere you look? … This is the Baader Meinhof principle (The Frequency Illusion) - It takes a similar effect, when the stakeholders at these accounts receive these timely pieces of content it will appear as a lightbulb moment. Does a particular phrase come to mind… sending the right message, to the right person, at the right time?

• 54% of decision-makers say they spend more than one hour per week reading and reviewing thought-leadership content. (Edelman/LinkedIn 2021)
• The roughly one-third (31.8%) of organizations that had a content strategy in a CSO Insights study achieved 27.1% higher win rates and 18.1% higher quota attainment than those without a content strategy. (CSO Insights, 2020)
• According to ABM: State Of The Market?report?from TOPO, companies have recorded a lift in annual contract value of 171% after deploying ABM.

Inbound

If you’ve done the above successfully, with the help of some website wizardry (I am of course speaking of SEO), then you should be finding increased levels of traffic being driven to your site.?

Now here, there is some debate over whether or not you gate your content. By gating content, you are limiting the reach, in order to capture the unique identifier of the person that is looking at the content. After all, this person that is looking at your valuable content is an MQL, right?

So why would you run the risk of not knowing whom to qualify as an MQL? … It creates a barrier that may drive leads away and reduces brand visibility. If only there was a way to decipher potential MQLs without having to gate content.* (more detail below)

I think the key thing to take into consideration here is that not all content is created equally,?and not all of your content should be gated.

Ungated content has a ton of value and should typically be readily available for website visitors that are in the discovery or research phase (toward the?top of the conversion funnel). Ungated content is your chance to showcase your expertise, give product or service overviews, and generate in-demand content for reaching new potential customers through SEO efforts.

I recently spoke with a business that had mastered the dark art of SEO and we’re producing top-quality content, in Layman’s terms they were successfully driving traffic to the site and because they had gated their high-value content (but included a keyword-filled blurb), they were generating large numbers of inbound opportunities; far outweighing their outbound opportunities, in fact.?

The issue was that while having heaps of inbound leads they were unqualified and the BizDev teams that were tasked with Qualifying them, only had a certain amount of hours in the day. By leveraging on-site intent and lead scoring aligned to best-returning buying criteria, they were able to efficiently prioritise whom they should speak to first. This data can be fed directly into CRM to enrich the data on existing accounts or create an opportunity.

• 61% of B2B marketers send all leads directly to Sales; however, only 27% of those leads will be qualified. (Source: MarketingSherpa)
• Just 44% of companies use lead scoring systems. (DecisionTree)
• A joint Marketo and Reachforce?research?has shown that businesses can improve their deal closing rate up to 67% by streamlining their sales and marketing teams.
• Companies excelling at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lower cost. (Source: Forrester Research)

*Better still, those visitors that didn’t convert (from anonymous to known) by submitting their email to un-gate the content weren’t wasted, as on-site intent can reveal those businesses that have visited your site; meaning you can retarget them with perhaps more relevant content or task your BizDev/Sales team with reaching out.

• 79% of marketing leads never convert into sales. Lack of lead nurturing is the common cause of this poor performance. (Source: MarketingSherpa)

Account Based Marketing?

This is the point at which we really start to bridge the gap between Marketing and Sales. As I’m sure you’re aware, Account-based marketing (ABM) is a focused growth strategy in which Marketing and Sales collaborate to create personalized buying experiences for a mutually-identified set of high-value accounts.

While the above two points (content strategy and inbound) are crucial to implementing an ABM programme, they will inevitably be influenced by the outputs of the ABM approach further down the line. It’s key to remember that a good ABM program is dynamic and cyclical. Content, Inbound and ABM are almost intrinsically linked.

Inbound Marketing has driven the growth of Content Marketing over the past decade. However, as more B2B marketers adopt Content Marketing approaches, achieving cut-through is proving more challenging. As a result, marketers are investing in higher value content and greater reach to combat the reduced performance. Over the past decade or so, the rise of Inbound Marketing has fuelled – and been fuelled by – a significant shift in how the B2B “Buyer’s Journey” operates, shifting from reliance on information from vendors, to an increased reliance on (often internet-based) research before getting in touch with sales people.?

• Between 57% (Gartner & CEB) & 90% (Forrester) of the B2B buying cycle is complete before the buyer contacts a seller.

These Inbound Marketing techniques are not set to disappear: the way B2B buyers make decisions has not changed again. These approaches mop up the wider market beyond the scope of Account Based Marketing - and may even serve as a way to identify new account targets in the future, as new patterns of clients emerge through inbound marketing techniques.?

In a similar way to Inbound Marketing, Account Based Marketing strategies also rely heavily on content use. So we are likely to continue to see increasing investment in Content Marketing. The type of content created for Account Based Marketing is different, however. Rather than deeper pieces of content that appeal across your customer set, content can be shorter but more highly personalised. Each piece of content should identify the pain points for either the account or group of accounts; which can be revealed by Off-site intent data.

This does not mean that an entirely new content strategy needs to be defined and implemented. A large amount of existing content created for your Inbound Marketing can be repurposed by adjusting the focus of the content towards being more personalised to the account. This in turn makes your content stand out when viewed by the prospect.

Account-Based Advertising

Of course the goal of all of the above is to increase your brand visibility and influence, to you your target accounts. There is a stone that we have left unturned and that’s Account based advertising. Research by LinkedIn (see here) found that there is a correlation between a brand’s share of voice and its rate of growth. With account based advertising it is possible to do this with specific companies, allowing you to be the largest share at a much lower overall cost.

Account Based Advertising, leverages the list of target accounts that you have included in your ABM program and allows you to place advertising across the Internet in front of only the companies you wish to target. The advertising (at least with the Radiate B2B platform) can be personalised to an individual or group of accounts allowing you to incorporate it into one-to-one, one-to-few or one-to-many account-based marketing strategies. The nature of the channel means that you are also able to tailor the messaging based on where the target company sits within your sales and marketing pipeline. This allows you to reach an account before you have any contact with them and then can adjust once there is contact, as they move through the sales funnel and after close.

When combined with campaigns which are increasingly tailored based on position in the entire pipeline (including the nurture phase) and potential average contract values, account based advertising drives engagement and accelerates opportunities through the pipeline.

Conclusion

Account Based Marketing and Inbound Marketing are naturally complimentary. As we’ve shown, Account Based Marketing will deliver terrific value (and return on investment) from your handpicked list of target accounts, while Inbound Marketing will provide the underlying volume of prospects, often from unexpected sources: Inbound’s strength in attracting people within the research phase of the buying cycle mops up accounts not targeted by ABM, as well as identifying new potential segments to be targeted for future ABM programmes. Both strategies depend on a breadth of high-quality content.?

Where Inbound relies on reach and high-value content, ABM focuses on personalisation, relevance and in turn resonance. Both can build from the same underlying content strategy. So working together, a strong Inbound Marketing programme will underpin a successful ABM strategy, combining to empower stronger growth for your business.