Account-based marketing (ABM) is almost on every B2B marketer’s mind today. And why not? ABM is more tailored, targeted, and precise compared to other marketing methods. Furthermore, it is known to yield better results in terms of business and revenue growth. Statistically, it can increase the average annual contract value by 171%, revenue by 208%, and the number of opportunities by 70%.
Having said that, there’s one factor that can hinder your business from reaping the benefits of ABM. Yes, you guessed it right. It’s low-quality B2B data. Bad data is a silent killer of ABM. You may have the best ABM plan ready to implement. But if you don’t use high-quality data, your ABM plan is going to fall apart.
Maintaining high data quality is essential to attain ABM success. Here are five ways bad data can make a mess of your ABM program.
1. Poor Account Mapping
Account mapping is critical to conduct accurate account profiling and account targeting in ABM. It lets you know who you need to target, who the decision-makers are at a particular account, and how to best approach them. With poor-quality B2B data, the very basic requirement of ABM will become a mighty challenge for you, setting your campaign up for failure.
Failure to accurately map accounts in ABM also means you’ll not be able to run your campaigns at the right time. Bad data ruins your ABM campaign timing by not allowing you to target accounts when they’re most likely to buy or have the budget to invest in new solutions. It basically hinders your ABM team to understand the budget cycle or decision flow of accounts.
Additionally, low-quality B2B data restricts your ability to target or nurture individual stakeholders within a target account. Contrastingly, high-quality data provides a deeper and clearer view of accounts, even at the contact level. This enables you to map them precisely and create high-conversion ABM programs targeted specifically at them.
2. Incorrect Understanding About Prospects
Having wrong insights or outdated data about your target audience is a formula for ABM disaster. What’s worse? Bad data will hinder you from identifying high-value accounts in the first place. If you are to find and gain a sound understanding of valuable and best-fit accounts, it’s essential to have access to reliable B2B data.
88% of B2B marketers believe data quality is important to executing an ABM strategy. Decayed, unverified, and incomplete data will never provide the kind of B2B insights you need to intimately understand your target accounts in ABM. Poor-quality data creates a wrong perception of prospects and keeps you in the dark by not allowing you to know their exact needs, pain points, and interests.
Furthermore, incorrect understanding of target accounts leads to a serious wastage of your ABM budget, time, and resources. Almost all your ABM efforts, including content, messaging, ad targeting, social media, and nurturing, will take a hit due to bad data leading to a poor or incomplete understanding of prospects.
3. Lack of Personalization and Ineffective Content Marketing
Did you know delivering a personalized experience is the most common challenge with ABM? Furthermore, 56% of marketers strongly agree personalized content is a key to the success of ABM. Feeding low-quality B2B data to your go-to-market team will make it even more difficult for them to personalize ABM campaigns.
Bad data is filled with typos, misspellings, wrong entries, outdated business information, and inaccurate contact information. Whether you’re writing an email, ad copy, social message or post, or sending direct mail, it’s important to have accurate, up-to-date, and verified B2B data to apply personalization in ABM.
Using poor-quality B2B data can also prove detrimental to your ABM team’s content marketing strategy. ABM requires you to create content that is tailored to target accounts and addresses their specific needs, problems, and the solutions they need. With bad data, you can’t really achieve this goal.
As a matter of fact, you’ll be shooting yourself in the foot. This is because low-quality B2B data leads to:
- Targeting accounts with mismatched content
- Distributing content through the wrong channels
- Delivering content that doesn’t align with the specific buying journey stage of target accounts
- Not being able to show prospects how your product is the best solution they need
4. Sales and Marketing Misalignment
As per statistics, companies deploying ABM are 67% better at closing deals when they sync their sales and marketing teams. But what helps keep sales and marketing on the same page? Well, top-quality B2B data is one of the factors that are highly important to implementing “smarketing”.
To ensure strong alignment between sales and marketing for the sake of your ABM success, it’s indispensable to share accurate and verified B2B data amongst themselves. Sadly, the opposite is also true. Sharing inaccurate, unreliable data could result in sales and marketing misalignment.
Bad data builds a gap between sales and marketing by:
- Creating challenges in the task of sharing goals with each other
- Reducing the visibility into each other’s work and goals
- Not allowing them to work in lockstep with each other
- Not allowing them to agree on MQL and SQL definitions, ideal client profiles, “fit factors,” messaging, campaign timing, and the number of follow-ups and touchpoints required
- Creating a lack of trust and confidence in each other
- Resulting in missed opportunities, miscommunication, and poor reporting/performance analysis
All of these consequences of sales and marketing misalignment due to bad data can take a serious toll on your ABM results. Here are some examples to consider. Using inaccurate contact data will result in your sales team following up with the wrong account that never responded to your marketing efforts.
Outdated contact information will also cause your expensive direct mail to reach the wrong people or the wrong address. Moreover, bad data could result in your marketing team providing air cover for your sales team at the wrong time or targeting the wrong prospects in their air cover activities.
5. Poor Brand Experience and Increased Churn
A significant part of ABM is maintaining lasting relationships with top-value prospects and customers. Your job in ABM is not only to nurture and convert best-fit prospects but to also continue to offer them great brand experience after they become your customers.
ABM is also used to reduce customer churn, keep existing customers engaged, and improve customer lifetime value (LTV). 80% of marketers agree ABM improves customer LTV. With low-quality B2B data, you can’t achieve any of these vital ABM goals. Bad data hampers your ABM team’s ability to:
- Personalize a prospect or customer’s experience with your brand
- Customize web experiences and tailor value propositions for your target audiences
- Create meaningful and relevant conversations with prospects and customers
- Identify upselling and cross-selling opportunities with new and existing customers
- Offer the “white-glove” treatment or concierge-style customer service to target accounts
Unclean and inaccurate B2B contact data also puts your brand reputation at risk. For example, using an unverified email list or sending emails to incorrect email addresses can negatively impact your domain reputation and increase bounce rates and email churn.
Wrapping Up
Using top-quality B2B data is extremely important to gain a high ABM ROI and improve the success rate of your ABM programs. Apart from the ones explained here, there are more ways in which bad data affects your ABM outcome. Therefore, before you plan your next ABM campaign, be sure to partner with a leading B2B data provider.
This will help you have access to accurate and enriched data and maintain top-notch data hygiene. Here are some key factors to consider when selecting a B2B data partner: data coverage, quality, and sources, data privacy and protection compliance, features, add-ons, pricing, customer support, and onboarding.