There are two essential elements that will ensure your ABM success: leveraging the Propensity ABM-Connected Website and following our 5 ABM Best Practices, which 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 give you some insights into leveraging our platform (including the ABM Connected Website functionality) to build out your Primary Audience.
What is an ABM-Conencted Website?
Propensity's ABM Connected Website is one of our secret weapons in getting near-immediate ROI from your ABM journey. This feature will help you see which accounts are already visiting your website so that you can provide leads to sales that they can immediately act on. However, since it uncovers data-driven insights into who's visiting your website (and from where), it’s also an essential tool for audience building.
Best practices for leveraging your ABM Connected Website can be found here.
What is a Primary Audience?
A primary audience is comprised of all the accounts that have the potential to be ideal customers for your product or service. This isn't a specific segment of your audience (you can find more about how to audience build and develop buying circles for more precise audience segments here). Rather, it's your primary audience, comprised of various prospects that are showing intent signals indicating interest in your solution.
It's essential to start your ABM journey by building out a primary audience at the outset to focus on a core constituency to reach out to. From there, you can hone your audience lists and discover, within your primary audience, those opportunities for building buying circles and creating targeted campaigns that help you convert effectively.
Where to Build Your Primary Audience on Propensity's Dashboard
You can build your Primary Audience by creating a new account list in the Propensity Audience Builder. You'll find the Audience Builder tab at the 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.
Best Practices When Building Your Primary Audience
Size Matters
You do not want your primary audience to be too big or too small. When you've built out your primary audience, you can refine it into smaller audience groups that are more specific so that you can run ever more targeted campaigns.
Use Your Existing CRM List
You don't have to completely start with a blank slate if you already have lists or an existing CRM! Simply upload your existing lists into Propensity via the Account Upload feature in ABM Tools. You can then integrate them into your Primary Audience for your ABM Campaigns.
Use Propensity’s ICP Builder to Help Find Your Audience
If you are starting from scratch and don't have existing account lists, an excellent place to start is with the ICP Finder. This feature allows users to cut and paste a list of URLs (10-30) of "ideal clients" and find similarities between them to help you better understand your primary audience. This first step will help you uncover patterns across industries and find specific keywords you can use to build out your primary audience.
Get Your Audience Right
The first priority when building your ABM campaign is getting the audience right. To help uncover your primary audience, define it with various parameters chosen from Propensity's firmographic details list (company size/revenue, industry, location, etc.). Narrow the list by including keywords or phrases matching your primary audience's description. You can also add intent data topics to help build your audience. Propensity will stack-rank companies according to the intent signals they are trending on. However, if your list has low to zero intent signals, you may be going after the wrong market.
Use The ABM-Connected Website to Find Intent Signals
When you connect your website to Propensity, you'll quickly be able to see which accounts are visiting your website. Even better, you'll be able to uncover the intent signals they have in common, which will help you build out that primary audience. By looking at intent signals revealed via the ABM-Connected website, you may uncover hidden opportunities (such as different accounts to target) and new ways to market your offering. It will also help you consider messaging strategies that will help you when you begin to build out your ABM campaigns.
Refine Your List Effectively
Once you have a list, it's time to perfect it. Here are a few ways to do that:
- If you are scrolling through your list and seeing existing customers, competitors, or accounts that aren't a good audience fit, you can check off those accounts and delete them. If you already have a list of excluded contacts, you can upload it as a .csv or .xlxs right to Propensity for quick removal.
- If the opposite happens, and you notice some companies are missing, add their URLs via the Add Account button on the top right-hand side of your editable Account List. Propensity will place them on the list with all of the relevant details included.
- If your list is too broad-based on firmographic information alone, you can narrow the search by choosing companies that offer specific services and/or using Exclusion Keywords. This helps you better uncover accounts that fit into your ideal primary audience.
Conclusion
Creating your primary audience is essential to building your ABM campaigns as it provides you with a solid foundation of target accounts. Once you know who you are going after, you can create smaller, more focused audiences around which you can build personalized campaigns. Propensity has built out many tools you can use to find that audience. Segment by firmographic and intent signals, or use the ICP Finder to reveal similarities between prospective companies that can help you find new opportunities!
Have more questions about how to best build out your primary audience? Our live support team is ready to help.