The Role of Account-based Marketing in Financial Tech
Account-based marketing (ABM) has gained traction in recent years, and according to LinkedIn, 84% of marketers say ABM helps maintain and grow existing relationships significantly. Ultimately, an organization implementing an ABM strategy must be able to understand each person behind an account, because that individual-level understanding is critical to executing with the surgical precision that ABM can provide. request.
Today’s post-pandemic business world has made the buying process more complicated for brands with the explosion of new channels and massive changes in customer behavior. Before the outbreak of the pandemic, consumers were accustomed to fully digital experiences and financial services were no exception, leading to a boom in fintech adoption and new opportunities for entities traditional.
These all-digital experiences provide a wealth of data that can benefit account-based marketing. However, organizations must have strong identity resolution capabilities to fully exploit this data. Identity (PII, device identifier, first-party cookie) serves as the connective tissue between the consumer behavioral data generated during the digital experience and the organization’s capabilities in creating a distinctive consumer view of the ecosystem’s marketing and sales activities and activities.
If your organization can’t get a full view of the fintech buyers you’re trying to reach, you won’t be able to provide the best content and context on how your solution can help them.
Therefore, having a single view of the customer or prospect within your marketing and operational systems is crucial for any marketer looking to implement ABM. There are three essential steps you and your team must take in order to enable identity resolution for your ABM strategy:
- Set a strategy and be disciplined in your identity data capture
- Organize your identity data
- Operationalize your identity data
Strategy and discipline for identity data
Determining what data you need to collect from customers and prospects and how you will use that data will help form the basis of your entire strategy. Accurate targeting and effective personalization are not possible when email addresses are invalid, lead names are not formatted consistently, or important attributes like industry, job level, or title are missing. empty. For example, if you want to set up birthday promotions for your customers and prospects but you don’t have this information, then you need to find a way to collect that information from your audience.
Keeping your ABM goals in mind, be sure to consider the variety of customer and lead contact types, attributes, and account relationship data points needed to support your ABM execution. Next, make sure your sales and service team processes, as well as web forms and other data collection touchpoints, are set up to collect customer and lead data consistently. overview.
Organize your data
You will need to organize and structure your data to enable your ABM strategy. This includes making sure your marketing systems are registered. Ideally, the native cloud infrastructure can update itself in real-time and give the organization access to the same data that can support the necessary links, relationships, and hierarchies between individuals, different identities of an individual’s channel and their associated entities.
For example, your data should be organized to help answer questions like:
- If an account has multiple contacts, who is the primary contact?
- Who are the key decision-makers on an account?
- If a decisionmaker has multiple email addresses, which one is best suited for ABM messaging?
- Which account contact should mailing statements be addressed to?
Operationalize Your Data
With your identity data strategy set, data capture practice locked down, and identities linked, organized, and ready to go, it’s time to put it to work! For the last critical step, ensure your key marketing and communications tools are configured to leverage your identity resolution data. Your marketing automation and campaign management tools should integrate with your identity data to receive not only the target contact information but also any additional linked information, such as the target’s relationship to the organization, that may be critical to enabling the personalization that ABM requires.
Similarly, giving sales and service teams a view into this identity resolution data set through their CRM enables them to see who the key contacts or influencers are on an account and thereby better tailor their interactions according to the ABM strategy. Finally, ensuring that all the interaction data is captured from the end-point systems like marketing automation and CRM platforms, flow-back at the individual level is a must if you want to measure the effectiveness and optimize your ABM tactics over time.
For fintech companies, this could be in the form of using a fully populated customer profile and leveraging distinct attributes like the contact’s industry or job title to intelligently segment and personalize communications across paid media, email marketing, and even sales interactions.
As ABM continues to gain traction in the fintech industry, identity resolution will continue to become a must to achieve incremental growth and develop better relationships with customers and clients’ potential. Get ahead of the competition now by defining identity resolution strategy, data collection principles, identity data organization, and operations. Ultimately, capturing and maintaining consumer identities at the individual level and linking those identities to organizational structure is imperative to driving effective account-based marketing.