How Can a Customer Data Platform Enhance Your Account-Based Marketing Strategy

An account-based marketing strategy can leverage customer data from multiple sources across multiple channels available on a customer data platform for better ROI. This article explores how marketers can do that successfully.

Account-based marketing (ABM) is about understanding your buyer better. For ABM to succeed, B2B marketers should shift from ad-hoc customer data management to more focused and unified customer data management. Customer data platforms (CDP) offer a comprehensive customer profile, multi-touch attribution, and granular details about the customer journey. This makes it easier to make decisions and deliver a more personalized experience for your customers.

CUSTOMER DATA PLATFORM (CDP) BUYERS’ GUIDE 2019

Welcome to the 2019 edition of CDP Buyers’ Guide. As customer data platforms are becoming increasingly necessary for enterprise marketers, it is also becoming more complex to choose the best fit CDP platform amongst the pool of new and old vendors.

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When Lattice Engines, launched their next-gen ABM solution Lattice Atlas in April 2018, they staked a claim for introducing the first CDP for ABM. While other CDPs will follow suit, we discuss the features that will empower your ABM programs.

Let us first understand both ABM and CDP.

Account Based Marketing is a 1-to-1 strategy, where marketers target ideal customers (key decision makers or influencers) in an organization by:

• Addressing their specific challenges
• Focusing on building better relationships with their clients (existing customers)
• Sending them relevant messages depending on their stage in the sales funnel
   

It is typically a B2B marketing strategy which begins by segmenting the customer base, identifying target accounts, and combining account profiles to understand the buyer’s journey to develop highly personalized and relevant messages. Learn all about when account-based marketing is needed.

Customer Data Platform is an intelligent system (marketing technology) which pulls data from various channels, supports attribution, and unifies this data to develop a 360-degree customer view and track the buyer’s journey. CDP systems facilitate the use of data in the entire customer lifecycle, from multiple sources and channels to serve both B2B and B2C marketing strategies. These are some of the best practices for customer data management.

How can a CDP empower an ABM program?

1. Data collection

To understand, segment, target, and prioritize your accounts you will need truckloads of data. You will need information about:

• How prospects and customers interact with your organization
• What are their specific needs
• What is the best time to reach them
• What channels they use for interaction
• Which are the closed, won, and lost deals
• What information is available on website visits, email clicks, opens, or responses, etc.
   

CDP offers ways to collect, store, organize, and cleanse this data to make it available for your marketing activities.

2. Unify Customer Data

A great customer data platform ingests data from various sources and channels to create unified customer profiles (accounts). You can capture both online/offline data to integrate data with unique personal IDs to develop a complete customer view. It will help you tag even non-customer data, like sales reps working on this account, interactions of this customer with your organization, and support first/last/multi-touch attribution.

Also Read: What is a Customer Data Platform and What are the Benefits?

3. Segment and Target

With a little help from AI, a CDP can help you segment your customers. An AI-empowered CDP can help marketers to segment data by keywords, intent, interactions, etc. You probably have ‘best-fit' accounts in your pool, but a CDP can help you target your prospects by company size, tech stack, or industry, and then devise a highly personalized strategy for each.

4. Customer Touchpoints

A CDP can map out the complete customer journey. For example, if the prospect learned about your product through an email, researched your website to determine more about it, and finally contacted a sales rep, a CDP can help you capture all this.

If CDP can align this data, you can identify and communicate with the right contacts at the right time with an appropriate message. The key is to program your CDP to identify an account in a unique way, even if there are multiple (different) transactions via mobile, web, email, etc. This can be achieved by merging records, removing duplicates, and forming account-event associations.

Also Read: Investing in Customer Data Platform: Choosing the Right Vendor

5. Data Mining for Insights

With unified data, segmentation, and account(s) tracking in one place, a CDP becomes a goldmine of information to glean insights. Marketers then gain a multi-dimensional view of their prospects (customers) to carve out personalized messages for them. It can also predict the best-fit solution and the next best time for interaction.

The data available for mining includes:

• Number of accounts and contacts
• Segment accounts based on common characteristics
• Contact engagement
• Campaign performance
• Social media interests/preferences
• Third-party data to learn more about target accounts
• Customer profiling to probe their business requirements
   

Data mining can help you better understand buyer personas, motivations, and triggers for purchase.

6. Build an Ideal Customer Profile

Enriched and mined data can help you build an ideal customer profile (ICP). This can help you understand your ideal customer characteristics – behavior, expectations, preferences, etc. – based on their interactions throughout the sales and customer lifecycle. ICP can help you prioritize your target accounts and streamline processes to approach them.

Also Read: 4 Trends that Signal the Future of Account-Based Marketing

AI-Powered CDP

AI is emerging as ‘the technology’ that will empower CDP to augment its functionality. AI has an important role to play in future CDPs as it can enable:

• Predictive analytics to aid decision makers
• Automation to sift through piles of data
• Recommendation systems to help deliver a personalized experience for each account
• Determination of fit and intent
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Account-based marketing focuses on understanding your buyers inside-out and pitching to them in a targeted, intelligent way. The CDPs of the future can turn customer data into a well-researched account and help marketers better manage and deliver highly personalized campaigns to their target accounts.

Does your customer data platform feature in your account-based marketing strategy? Tell us about it in the comments below. Help spread the word through social media, and don’t forget to tag us.