TL;DR
– First target IPAs then refine with ICPs for ultra-personalized prospecting
– Use Sales Navigator with boolean search to segment lists under 100 contacts
– Automate data extraction with Captain Data integrated with LaGrowthMachine
– Precisely map demographics, psychographics, technographics, and account maturity
– Create personalized workflows per segment to maximize measurable conversion rates
Account Based Marketing (ABM) is the essential pillar of prospecting strategies. 85% of industry professionals believe this type of marketing offers much higher returns than any other approach (Source: Junto, 2021).
Like any winning sales strategy, its application is complex and requires equipping yourself with the right tools. By integrating Captain Data with LaGrowthMachine, you can easily implement, develop, and scale successful account-based marketing tools.
How to implement a good ABM strategy? How to target the right prospects by integrating Captain Data with LaGrowthMachine? How to optimize your workflows effectively?
By the end of our guide, you will have discovered all the secrets to mastering the art of strategic account marketing.
What is Account Based Marketing?
Before diving into the subject, let’s recall the basics.
Account Based Marketing (or strategic account marketing) concerns all personalized prospecting steps developed to approach accounts – including LinkedIn Automation – for your business development.
The idea is to target high-potential accounts, segment your contacts, before sending them targeted messages using good copywriting.
Why do Account Based Marketing?
By enriching your company-to-individual prospecting funnel, your Growth Marketing campaigns will be infinitely more relevant. Let us explain.
In concrete terms, it is much easier to retrieve data about companies. They communicate publicly about their evolution and their business.
For any company looking to sell its services, this is a crucial source of data to estimate its propensity to generate interest.
- What was the company’s revenue last year?
- Is it in a fundraising period?
- Is it in a phase of intensive recruitment?
- Which positions are already filled?
- What is its marketing tools budget?
All these indicators allow you to score the relevance of the targeted companies based on your business and the solutions you can offer them.
Typically, a Series B company is more likely to dedicate part of its marketing budget to acquiring tools than a startup positioning its business model.
Therefore, if your upstream company targeting is well-crafted, you will only need to engage in conversation with the right decision-makers, using a hyper-personalized campaign, which will bring you a better ROI!
In practice, to succeed in your ABM strategy, here are the 3 major steps to follow:
- Target
- Engage
- Measure
Let’s go through these points and their relevance in implementing an ABM strategy using Captain Data and LaGrowthMachine.
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How to effectively target your prospects with Captain Data?
No ABM strategy without first identifying your Ideal Account Profiles (IAP) and Ideal Customer Profiles (ICP), in that precise order.
Gathering data on your Ideal Account Profiles (IAP):
Let’s first look at what information will be useful for IAPs:
- Demographics: geographic location, number of employees, industry sector…
- Psychographics: values, purchase intentions, consumption habits, goals
- Technographics: technologies and resources currently used by the company
- Maturity: development stage, potential funding rounds…
All these indicators will be useful for identifying key growth signals to assess the relevance of the targeted company for your business.
Once you have successfully collected all this information, you can move on to the next phase. That is, refining your search for entry points through individual profiles.
Identify the roles that seem most suitable for your services. Identify their pain points, propose a concrete solution.
Gathering data on your Ideal Customer Profiles (ICP):
As with IAPs, identify the data that will be most useful for segmenting your contact lists. The more you refine your search criteria, the more customizable and therefore impactful your campaigns will be. You can choose to target them by:
- Job title
- Hierarchical level
- Seniority in the company
- Frequently used keywords
- Channels they use (email, social media…)
- Intent data, based on their online content consumption
💡 Good to know:
Captain Data has created IAP and ICP targeting templates that you can download for free by following this link.
How to find the necessary data to implement an ABM strategy?
There is no secret sauce; all marketers and growth hackers agree on one point: Sales Navigator and LinkedIn are the best entry points available.
On LinkedIn, profiles are updated in real-time. LinkedIn – especially in its Recruiter Lite version – guarantees the employability of its registered users. Therefore, they have every interest in regularly updating their information.
To learn more about LinkedIn prospecting, consult our ultimate guide to LinkedIn prospecting in 2022.
As for Sales Navigator, Sales Nav’ to its friends, it is simply the tool that concentrates the most useful data for creating B2B prospecting workflows.
Automate data extraction with Captain Data
Captain Data provides you with a workflow that allows you to automate all the manual searches previously performed. You can then add your data to an audience to be exploited via LaGrowthMachine.
Here are the steps to configure all stages of your workflow:
- Start by naming your workflow, a crucial step to help you find your way later among the different configurations and campaigns you will create
- Select your Sales Navigator account, enter the company search URL previously generated using boolean search, then choose the number of expected results
- You can now enter all the desired information to reach your ICPs via Sales Navigator (keywords, job description, location, seniority…). Don’t forget to use your previously designed boolean search thanks to the resources retrieved by Captain Data.
Specify the number of expected results (3 maximum) for Captain Data to extract your ICPs
Enter the name of your audience (copied from LGM or entered on Captain Data) before mapping your data. Your leads are automatically created in LGM
- In the last step, you can launch your campaign on autopilot to regularly retrieve new decision-makers in your prospect list
💡 Good to know:
Duplicate management is handled by LaGrowthMachine. If a lead already exists in your LaGrowthMachine contact databases, their data can be overwritten or kept to only complete empty fields.
Now that your workflow is set up, it’s time to know how to engage your audience.
How to effectively engage your prospects with LaGrowthMachine?
If you have carefully followed our article, you are probably asking yourself the following question: “but why do they never mention email addresses?”
How to find an email with LaGrowthMachine?
Simply because retrieving emails only happens at this stage. Although professional email addresses can be retrieved via Captain Data, the process is natively integrated into LaGrowthMachine as part of implementing an Account Based Marketing strategy.
To achieve this, LGM uses a third-party service. Simply check the “Enrich Leads” box when creating your campaigns to activate the search for emails (and phone numbers, lead info, their Twitter, etc.)
Then, simply associate an audience with each campaign. That is, the one created in the previous step in Captain Data.
This latter is automatically enriched with the professional email address… or the personal email address, in some cases (to be avoided in Europe, to comply with GDPR).
💡 Note:
the matching rate depends on the structure in which your ICP operates. It is around 60% on average.
Once the audiences are built on Captain Data and then segmented, it is now time to build your prospecting sequence.
How to build your prospecting sequence with LaGrowthMachine?
There are two ways to prepare your campaigns. The first is to choose a workflow from the 25+ pre-designed scenarios by the LaGrowthMachine teams:
The other is to create your prospecting sequences from scratch:
- Choose the channel on which you will operate (LinkedIn and email are effective in Europe (Twitter in the USA). The more advanced your decision tree, the more responses you will get (“if they don’t reply here, contact them here… if they clicked here, if they did that…”).
LaGrowthMachine allows you to send messages on LinkedIn, Twitter, or by email.
- Specify your campaign objectives (generate newsletter subscriptions, tool downloads, event registrations, purchases…)
- Map your prospecting actions, at each stage of your prospect’s journey in the sales pipeline
- Write good content to push, adapted to each target
- Automate the updating of your CRM in real-time
- Launch your campaign
All the upstream work on ICPs allows you to initiate the beginning of your copywriting strategy. This is the aspect that will largely define the effectiveness of your campaigns.
The importance of copywriting for personalizing B2B campaigns
A campaign run without dedicated copywriting is a lost cause from the start. Here are the steps to follow to deliver the right content to the right person:
- Build rapport with your lead: find common ground to break the ice. This could be a shared professional experience, a common challenge, an event you attended, a social media post…
- Put yourself in your recipient’s shoes: stop talking about yourself, talk about them.
- Keep it brief: you must be able to deliver all crucial information in a few lines. No one has time to clutter themselves with unnecessary sentences anymore.
- Craft your follow-ups carefully: this is often the message that tips the scales. With a good follow-up, you will easily triple your response rate.
💡 Good to know:
For even greater effectiveness in the content of your messages, set up “custom attributes” dedicated to each ICP in Captain Data. These customizable variables can automatically define the company name, industry sector, seniority duration… but also industry-specific challenges. In practice, for each batch of companies, you can add a dedicated introductory sentence.
How to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns by combining LaGrowthMachine & Captain Data?
As with all marketing campaigns, the secret to the success of an Account Based Marketing strategy lies in testing, adjusting, and iterating.
It is essential not to limit yourself to copywriting scalability, but to the scalability of the entire chain. This is your best way to reach a cruising speed that will allow you to generate long-term revenue.
The effectiveness of your campaign depends on your response rate. The more you have refined your ICPs, your campaign entry points, your copywriting, and the scalability of your actions, the higher it will be.
As a reminder, we advise you to work on ultra-segmented audiences (a hundred contacts maximum). This is what will allow you to precisely configure your campaigns and refine the results.
The small size of the audiences naturally leads to tailor-made configuration. To avoid unnecessary confusion, change only one parameter at a time. This is the most direct way to identify performing actions.
Thanks to the LaGrowthMachine dashboard, you can view your campaign statistics at a glance. And this, by channel:
Aim for a response rate above 3%. Below that, consider your campaign parameters ineffective.
TO REMEMBER:
To maximize the effectiveness of your prospecting campaigns within an Account Based Marketing strategy, combine volume with velocity and precision.
Captain Data allows you to set up hyper-segmented audiences, which you can then activate on LaGrowthMachine.
Focus on:
- Precise targeting of your ICPs via Sales Navigator and Captain Data, derived from your IPAs
- Micro-copywriting, adapted to each ICP
- Rapid and effective iteration thanks to LaGrowthMachine metrics