Propensity has two essential parts that help make your ABM strategy successful. The first is using the Website Tracker to build an ABM Connected Website.
The ABM Connected Website will help uncover which accounts are already visiting your website and provide leads that sales can immediately act on. It's a great starting point that gives you almost immediate ROI while providing data-driven insights into who's visiting your website (and from where). Best practices for leveraging your ABM Connected Website can be found here.
However, the other important part of a successful ABM strategy involves building an ABM campaign with five essential best practices that, when actioned together, help you build a solid sales pipeline that converts prospects into loyal, paying customers.
These five best practices include:
- Audience Building
- Personalized Value Add Content
- Omnichannel Playbooks
- Lead Distribution/Sales Workflow
- Social Selling
In this document, we'll focus on the first of the five best practices: Audience Building and, as an extension, Buying Circles.
Successful ABM campaigns involve building relationships with prospects and providing them with personalized, value-added content. However, if your campaigns are too broad, you may miss making an impression on the people most integral to the decision-making process. Therefore, taking some time at the outset of your ABM campaign and honing in on who your audience is will help you better target them with meaningful, value-rich outreach that will drive more engagement- leading to higher conversions.
What is Audience Building?
Audience building is precisely what it sounds like purposefully building an audience by selecting target accounts that align with your company's ideal customer profile (ICP). In an ABM campaign, the more specific you can get in your messaging, the more effective you'll be in converting your audience, so the most important part of audience building is finding an audience comprised of "ideal customers" that you can build a campaign around.
To find your ICP and build your audience, you'll start by seeking specific criteria, such as industry, company size, or geographic location, and then further refine that into specific audiences. The goal is to create a focused list of accounts most likely to become valuable customers.
What is a Buying Circle?
A buying circle differs slightly from an audience. Buying circles are groups of people from within a target account that would be directly involved in the decision-making process or purchasing. A buying circle may include key stakeholders from different departments.
Understanding the buying circle is crucial in ABM because it allows marketers to tailor their messaging and content to resonate with the specific needs and concerns of each individual involved in the decision-making process. It recognizes that B2B purchasing decisions are often made by a group rather than a single decision-maker, and targeting a buying circle using Propensity allows you to laser-focus your messaging instead of trying to appeal to a broader, less focused audience.
Finding Audience Buiding and Buying Circle Features on Propensity's Dashboard
You can build an audience by creating a new account list in the Propensity Audience Builder. You'll find the Audience Builder tab at the very top of your Propensity screen. Once you click on Audience Builder, you'll see a "New Account List" button on the screen's right-hand side. Click on it to start building your list. You can also upload your existing account list via the Account Upload feature in ABM Tools.
Buying Circles are based on the audiences you’ve built. Once you have built your first audience in the Audience Builder, a Buying Circle button will be under the Audience Tab on the left-hand side of your screen. Click on that to begin building your circles. Alternatively, you can also create a Buying Circle by creating a persona with the Persona Finder and then applying the created persona to an existing account list.
See our how-to guide on building an intent-driven audience with Propensity for more details.
Audience Building: Best Practices to Find Ideal Prospects
ABM Campaigns are not transactional in nature! They are relationship-driven. The strategy is to warm up buyers with targeted marketing over several weeks (4-6) and then follow up with a sales approach.
Due to the fact that campaigns are all about starting conversations and building relationships with potential customers, segmenting audiences effectively becomes an integral part of an ABM campaign's success. To help ensure your team gets the most out of your ABM campaign, we've compiled a few best practices to ease you into the process:
Make Finding Your Audience Easier With Propensity's ICP Finder
The ICP Finder acts as a shortcut to finding your ideal audience. Simply take a list of websites (10-30) and put the URLs in the ICP Finder. Within seconds, Propensity's platform will return a list of industries they are a part of, keywords from their website, and more data points that showcase how these sites are similar. That way, you can begin to see patterns across industries and keywords that you can use to build out and segment your own audiences within the system.
Get Your Audience Right
The number one priority when building your ABM campaign is getting the audience right. You don't want it to be too broad or too narrow - at least not at the outset. Refine your audience by filling in firmographic details, such as company size/revenue, industries, location, etc. Then, narrow the list by including keywords or phrases matching your audience's description.
Add intent data topics as well. B2B intent data provides insights into what buyers are researching online to help you locate in-market accounts. Propensity will stack-rank companies according to the intent signals they are trending on. If your list has low to zero intent signals, you may be going after the wrong market.
Enterprise vs Mid-Market Audiences
Enterprise
- For 1:1 ABM, an audience size of 1 is acceptable for enterprises with 100+ contacts per account in the campaign.
- When targeting enterprise more broadly (1:few) 100-500 accounts with 10+ contacts per account in the campaign works also.
Mid-Market
- We recommend 100 to 1000 accounts when targeting Mid-Market, with 4 to 8 contacts per account in the campaign.
- When targeting SMBs you can have 2,000 or more accounts because the contact list per account is only 1 or 2 people, so you need more accounts to build out a full audience.
Filter Your Account List Effectively
If you know the audience you're going after, how do you take a relatively broad industry and focus on the companies that fit your niche?
Start by entering the main firmographic details (industry, company size, location, etc.). Then, quickly refine your list by adding Industry Keywords and Industry Keyword Exclusions.
For example, if you were targeting construction companies, your account list would be far too broad. You could narrow your search by choosing companies that offer specific services (HVAC, heating, air conditioning). You can take it a step further if it's still too broad by using Exclusion Keywords. If you knew, for example, that you didn't want to target commercial or industrial construction companies, you could add "commercial" and "industrial" as Keyword Exclusions.
Differentiate Between Mid-Market and Enterprise Intent Signals
At first glance, smaller, mid-market companies tend to show more accurate intent signals. Why? Bigger companies tend to have more than one location across the country. With mid-market companies having one/fewer offices and more consolidated geographic locations, it's easier to focus in on the entire buying picture. However, that doesn't mean you won't get results if you want to target bigger companies. It just means that you need to do a bit more work for enterprises with multiple locations. Drill down on location to better understand where intent comes from so you know you're spending your energy in the right place.
Clean Your List and Opt-Out Certain Companies
Once you've built an audience list in Propensity, you may be scrolling through and realize some companies:
- Are already customers/existing prospects
- Are competitors
- Not applicable for a variety of reasons (maybe you've reached out before and know they aren't the right fit, for example)
Whatever the case, you may want to exclude certain companies from the list to save you from marketing to firms that won't be the right fit. You can do this in two ways:
- Upload a .csv or .xlxs file containing accounts/contacts you would like to exclude from your current (and future) campaigns by going to your Workspace Settings > Exclusions > Upload List.
- Checking off which accounts from your account list you'd like to remove and delete them right from the list.
Similarly, if you go through the list and notice some missing companies, you can add them just as easily by clicking the Add Account button on the top right-hand side of your editable Account List. This will open up a side window that will prompt you to enter the company's URL, and from there, Propensity will pull in all relevant information and add the company to your existing list.
Buying Circle Best Practices: Further Segmenting Your Audience
Once you've built your audience and know which accounts to target, you'll likely want to drill down into even more segmented buying circles. We make this process super simple right from your Audience dashboard.
Filter By Skills to Speak Your Buying Circle's Language
A great way to use the Buying Circle is to segment by skills and interests. Segmenting by skills, for example, ensures you don't have to water down your language to appeal to a broader audience; instead, you can lean into specific language that will pique their interest. The Buying Circle functionality doesn't just give you names and contact details. It also shares competitive signals, intent signals, and skills and interests. If you are seeking out people with skills in branding and find out that 80% of your audience has skills in Brand Development, you can segment those contacts out and create an entire campaign that will speak directly to those individuals.
To do this, go to your Buying Circle page and create a new Buying Circle. Name it according to the niche segment/skill (ex: Corporate Brand Development), and type your desired keyword (ex: "Corporate Branding") into the Skills section. Once you hit "Submit," within seconds, you'll have a list of every contact in your account list with that keyword ("Corporate Branding") listed as a skill. You can refine further according to department or seniority level as well. And there you go! In just a few minutes, you've built out a list of contacts with a shared skillset or interest you can market directly to.
Refine Your Buying Circles
Propensity will take all of the accounts you uncovered with the Audience Builder and find, within those accounts, the buying circle related to "who" you are looking for. However, if you find your list is too broad, it's a good idea to go back and refine it. It's better to have multiple buying circles to target specific people with hyper-relevant messaging than to be too broad and general. Work to get your account list down to between 100 and 1000 accounts, with a minimum of 100 contacts within each buying circle.
Leverage Propensity's Persona Finder
Is your Buying Circle still too big? Narrow your focus using Propensity's Persona Finder. You can find it under the ABM Tools drop-down menu at the top right of your screen.
The Persona Finder is much like the ICP Finder but is for people instead of companies. Instead of entering company websites, you can feed Propensity up to 50 LinkedIn URLs (ex. linkedin.com/in/john-doe) comprised of people you think may be your ideal customers. Propensity will take those URLs and break each person down by skills, interests, job titles, and more to help reveal what details your audience or network shares. This will influence both the campaign and the content you create and will help you better focus your messaging and outreach.
Conclusion
Audience building is an essential first step when building out your ABM campaign, so take the time to really play around with Propensity’s tools. With 80,000+ intent signals on offer, you can narrow down your audience across a variety of parameters - from skills and interests to job titles and geographical locations. Use the information you uncover and the Buying Circles you build to help guide the content you will ultimately create for each ABM campaign.