Optimize ABM Initiatives with Predictive Analytics

The business landscape is fiercely competitive. To forge ahead, businesses have moved from traditional marketing to Account-Based Marketing (ABM).

With ABM, you focus on specific leads by personalized messaging to specific accounts. And predictive analytics makes it even better.

It gives you insights into the future and enables you to enhance your ABM initiatives.

In this blog post, you’ll learn how you can scale ABM with predictive analytics, as well as its application in ABM.

Let’s begin!

Predictive Analytics to Predict Future Outcomes

When you know what the future has in store, you strategize better.

Predictive analytics enables you to do just that by giving you insights into what to expect in future.

It requires leveraging historical data, data mining, machine learning, and statistical modeling. Using predictive analytics reduces risk and increases operational efficiency.

It also helps in collecting data from multiple sources and using statistical algorithms and machine learning techniques to predict the probability of future outcomes.

Predictive analytics can be implemented in three steps:

Collect Data and Define Projects

The first step towards predictive analytics is to define project objectives, scope, and data.

Then you need to collect data from multiple sources, which include questionnaires, online forms, and web traffic.

Analyze Data with Statistics and Predictive Modelling

After you’ve collected data, you need to leverage standard statistical and predictive tools such as hypothesis testing to analyze it.

This enables you to draw conclusions and predict future outcomes based on multilevel model evaluations.

Operate and Observe the Models

The final step requires you to deploy validated outcomes in operations to build strategies that will drive optimal performance.

Predictive Analytics in ABM

Contrary to traditional lead generation, account-based marketing focuses on specific accounts you want to convert.

In fact, 97% of marketers believe that ABM generates a higher Return-On-Investment (ROI) than other marketing strategies.^[1]

Predictive analytics makes ABM execution effective by providing the data and insights required to execute sophisticated segmentation and personalization.

Benefits of Predictive Analytics for Account-Based Marketing

Predictive analytics in account-based marketing empowers you with:

A Holistic View of Prospects and Customers

Predictive analytics gives you insights into prospects and customers. This data includes sales interactions, support tickets, transactions, as well as product usage.

Apart from internal data, it also provides you external data such as growth rates, funding information, technographic, and credit risk data.

Personalized Content

By leveraging predictive analytics for ABM, you can forecast buyer behavior and personalize content according to the needs of your prospects.

Predictive Models for Scoring

You can utilize machine learning and big data processing for creating predictive models to score prospects and customers.

This helps you determine how likely they are to buy your products and services and gives you information about the attributes of ideal customers to enhance personas.

Application of Predictive Analytics in Account-Based Marketing

With account-based marketing, you can target a number of accounts. Adding predictive analytics to the mix makes it even better.

Here are key factors to remember when applying predictive analytics to your ABM strategy:

• Your CRM org must be ABM-centric and marketers must have already initiated an account-based marketing strategy
• Marketing and sales representatives must be prepared to leverage predictive analytics
• Marketing and sales teams must be aligned with processes
• Directors must have a strong understanding of this marketing model, as well as predictive analytics, and enable implementation on ground

Let’s now look at how you can scale ABM initiatives with predictive analytics:

Target High-Value Accounts

Having a segmented list of accounts to target is the crux of ABM.

Earlier, the process of identifying prospects was based largely on guesses, and this yielded a substantial quantity of leads but did not generate much revenue.

With the inclusion of predictive analytics, you can now target your highest-value accounts. In order to do this, predictive analytics enables you to:

Prioritize Accounts

Predictive analytics enables you to score and prioritize accounts depending on how closely they resemble your customers.

Identify Accounts Looking for Your Solution

With predictive analytics in ABM, you can target accounts that are specifically looking for the solution you provide.

For this, you need to leverage third-party intent data and combine it with data you already possess in your marketing automation software.

Build an Account Database

Once you’ve scored and prioritized accounts, you can add their information to your database.

Create Personalized Content

Account-based marketing is done best when content sent to specific accounts is relevant and personalized.

Predictive analytics enables you to build a strong understanding of customers and deliver content as per requirements.

Implement Conversion Tactics

Account-based marketing enables you to focus more on quality rather than quantity.

With predictive analytics, you can segment accounts in a sophisticated manner and implement conversion tactics better.

Measure the Impact of Sales and Marketing

Contrary to traditional lead generation, account-based marketing enables you to keep marketing and sales teams on the same wavelength.

Leveraging predictive analytics helps you measure the impact of sales and marketing in three ways:

• Measuring progress in real-time
• Evaluating program performance
• Frontlining sales performance management

A Brief Roundoff

In this blog post, we learned how leveraging predictive analytics in ABM initiatives can make them even more fruitful for your business.

Gone are the days when lead generation involved guessing. As time has progressed, so have marketing and sales.

With ABM, you can send messages to a specific group of valuable accounts. And predictive analytics is the perfect way to scale your ABM initiatives.

Leverage Predictive Analytics in Account-Based Marketing

References

^[1] Why B2B Marketers Are Moving to ABM