How to Boost Account-Based Marketing With AI

Kaplan and Haenlein, define Artificial Intelligence ( AI) as “a system’s ability to correctly interpret external data, learn from such data, and use those learnings to achieve specific goals and tasks through flexible adaptation.” Account-based marketing (ABM) on the other hand completely depends on data and its interpretation.

On a daily basis, people are churning out very large volumes of data and according to sources, about 1.7 megabytes of new information will be created every second for every human being on the planet by the year 2020. Since technology has conferred the status of a global village to the world, trails you leave anywhere in the world can easily be located, collated, analyzed, and stored in a database for future use.

Some few years back, it wouldn’t have been easy to get this information and even where you do it would take much time and effort. But now, algorithms, tracking codes, and advancements in technology such as machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) mean that this process can be almost entirely automated, sparking insights throughout the sales lifecycle that humans otherwise would not see.

This is where AI comes in to complement ABM which usually allows for a much more focused approach. With ABM as your strategy, you are armed with the data and insights you need to target prospects that you have identified as a good fit, thereby concentrating efforts on those would-be customers that are more likely to be interested, using personalized messages that speak to their specific needs.

As the Information Technology Services Marketing Association (ITSMA) defines it, ABM involves treating individual accounts “as markets in their own right.” This is definitely a more effective and efficient way of utilizing your resources, by concentrating and focusing only on targets that are relevant to you, there is an amazingly higher rate of conversion and the ultimate much sought after return on investment (ROI).

When AI is applied into ABM, you ensure the performance of tasks that ordinarily are strenuous for humans which involve visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages. Apart from these it also eliminates redundancy and picks up any of those tasks that have consistent workflows built within them.

How can this be done?

1. Prioritization of accounts

Before any interaction with an account, it’s absolutely necessary that you must know the details and define the customer. AI comes in here to enhance crawling the data across the database and internet to identify the most appropriate accounts that need to be prioritized. Through such prioritization, resources are allocated to nurture and convert the prospect, wrap up a sale, and possibly build a long-lasting relationship with the account.

AI can also spontaneously, quite unlike humans build fields that are relevant to an account instead of using generalized fields across lead gen or CRM platform. It can suggest missing fields that would help a salesperson close a high priority deal faster.

2. Customized and Personalized content

The ultimate essence of ABM is to pass on customized and personalized content to a prospect. What the customer is looking for is ensured as well as when, how, and where. The whole process may seem complex but the end justifies the means.

With AI, email draft, ad copy, content published on media channels, as well as on-site content can be personalized.

3. Ability to scale

Jim Sterne in his book “Artificial Intelligence for Marketing: Practical Applications,” says, “AI can discover which elements or attributes in a subject matter domain are the most predictive. Even with a great deal of noisy data and a large variety of data types, it can identify the most revealing characteristics, figuring out which to heed to and which to ignore.”

AI is well positioned to help you discover entirely unique prospects that ordinarily would seem not to fit your profile. Where a human analyzing the data of the prospect using ABM may accidentally overlook such opportunity, AI will be able to predict that prospect’s viability based on other behaviors and predictive learning.

AI can then communicate the right deliverables to the potential customer to create an experience that is inviting, informative, and personal.

4. Deliver on a promise

One quality that stands you out among the group is your ability to deliver on a promise. Customers crave to have their products or required services as and at when due, once you are able to do this, you have crossed the first hurdle of your reputation test.

Interacting with prospects immediately, when they are most interested, is critical to closing the deal. When you are not on the ground as can happen in some certain instances, those prospects may lose interest and never seek out your company again.

With 82% of Americans saying they look for recommendations from friends and family when they’re considering a purchase, a lot of useless traffic occur on your website and therefore, you can’t afford to lose any hot leads that may present themselves. With AI and ABM, leads can be nurtured, even overnight, and being on the ground is something automation was designed for.

The ability to infuse intelligence into your automated processes, predicate your coming through for your prospects and clients in every other way.

AI without any doubt is the perfect complement to ABM. ABM is based on the belief that there is no one definitive customer path. Instead, every prospect can be different, want different things, and possess separate goals.

Multi-tasking is not really in the purview of humans and engaging bigger teams to handle big data can be resource-heavy.  AI invariably comes in handy here to help with ABM scale and immediacy in a world where delivering the goods now, not later, is of the utmost importance.