As inflation and declining financial markets affect the world, manufacturers face an uncertain future. Supply chains are unlikely to stabilize until the first half of 2024, a study has found.
While global factors are beyond your control as a manufacturer, you can utilize specific Account-Based Marketing (ABM) tactics to bolster your business and reduce the impact of external threats. ABM is designed to reduce time, effort, and costs generated when your revenue team chases uninterested buyers. Instead, ABM optimizes your resources toward accounts that are most likely to purchase from you.
Here are some strategies from the ABM playbook that can help manufacturers.
Focus Only on the Buyers Most Likely to Buy
Having a laser focus on buyer demand helps you maximize profits, whether you’re trying to move existing inventory or deciding whether to ramp up production. Generating maximum return on existing inventory is key when your supply chain is facing disruption.
In either scenario, it pays handsomely to focus your sales and marketing efforts on the accounts and buyers you know are interested in your products.
ABM that leverages intent data can point you toward the accounts with the highest probability of success.
How? By utilizing the activities your key accounts and buyers are performing on the internet, indicating that they’re in-market.
When manufacturing customers are on the hunt for a new product, or thinking about increasing their business with you, they perform research across a number of channels including:
- Keyword searches
- Visiting websites of companies that provide the products they’re interested in
- Reading third-party review sites of different vendors
All of that activity indicates an account that’s seriously interested in what you’re selling. But nearly 70% of that activity happens anonymously — meaning buyers aren’t filling out forms, giving you their contact information, or otherwise revealing who they are.
Leveraging an ABM platform with intent data capabilities empowers your organization to capture those signals — and reveal the accounts that are in-market.
With this information at your fingertips, you can:
- Identify the top accounts in your buying audience
- Craft campaigns specific to your buyers and their exact needs
- Optimize your marketing and sales resources to make the highest impact
- Keep costs low and increase success rates
Whether you’re identifying an opportunity for an upsell at a current client or uncovering a completely new account you didn’t realize was in-market, this crucial ABM tactic ensures you’re engaging with the highest intent buyers at the right time.
‘Always On’ Campaigns Keep You Top of Mind with Buyers
Knowing the best accounts is only half the equation. To woo the most prospects, you must also deliver an incredible customer experience. In marketing and sales, that means showing buyers that you understand their companies’ needs and can deliver on them.
Intent data provides the insights you need to craft personalized campaigns that deliver this kind of helpful, relevant information and messaging. Of course, running many highly-personalized campaigns for specific buyers and accounts is a costly and time-consuming process. Your revenue team may not have time to engage 1-on-1 with every account that’s showing signs of interest.
In these instances, the ABM best practice is to combine “always on” campaigns with dynamically segmented audiences so your business can constantly engage accounts at their current buying stage and with messaging relevant to their specific needs.
An “always on” campaign is one that is constantly running, observing the interest and activity of your target accounts. A “dynamic segment” taps into intent data in order to assign accounts to different campaigns based on their buying behavior. Combined, this allows you to quickly shift the messaging to buyers so they’re always seeing relevant information that’s likely to spur action.
With an ABM platform, you can create campaigns that:
- Target accounts that visit specific product pages on your website
- Advertise to your buyers on the most relevant websites they visit
- Respond to buyers as they perform more research and move further along their journey
The best part? All of this can be done automatically without having to dramatically increase budgets or headcount. You can watch how we use our platform to automate our “always on” campaigns, or book a personalized demo.
Learn more about how 6sense helps manufacturers
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