Account-Based Marketing: The Shiny New Object

One-to-One Account-Based Marketing at Scale

Account-Based Marketing is the shiny new object in digital business targeting. This is a good thing. In many ways, it brings structure to an inherently chaotic B2B online process.

The theory behind Account-Based Marketing (ABM) has been widely embraced; a transparent, unified methodology will produce more effective engagement and more informed reporting. However, implementing ABM strategies is not simple. ABM success is crucially dependent on reach and transparency to your prospective targeting pool.

With or without ABM, there has been no easy way for a marketer to efficiently connect all of a prospect’s touchpoints across channels and silos. Data onboarding that relies on connecting cookies to accounts — based on CRM prospect names, roles, and other firmographic intelligence such as trade areas or industry categories — typically nets an average 30% match rate to intended targets.

When connecting accounts across multiple devices, match integrity degrades further. Cookies are generally useless in identifying and delivering to mobile devices. This makes device targeting dependent on matching cookies to digital and social IDs that are only sporadically linked to a business. At a time when eMarketer is ready to declare that mobile can no longer be a secondary B2B consideration, this alone would cripple an Account-Based campaign.

Lack of reach to the entire universe of prospect targets, coupled with a lack of transparency across devices, challenges the effectiveness of Account-Based Marketing. Unfortunately, ABM is too often implemented as a simple overlay to an advertising infrastructure that’s been in use for over a decade — which was simply not designed to support the reach or transparency that ABM requires.

Semcasting Account-Based Marketing tools are designed around a single purpose: keep an account transparent across any location or device, offline or online, at scale. Mapping an audience across channels and devices requires a different technology — one that could guarantee a high level of uniform coverage and allow marketers to tailor outreach to the specific initiatives necessary for sales success.

Our patented Semcasting Smart Zones® IP targeting technology connects digital activity to specific devices and precise physical locations, with bi-directional onboarding capabilities. Any account known by one touchpoint — whether it’s a building, lot, home, email address, or a website visit — can be linked to every other channel and identified to a network and mobile device for targeting. Once impressions are served, they can be matched back to CRM data, channel, device, location, and outcome for deterministic measurement and attribution.

Semcasting IP and mobile targeting avoid the cookie matching and delivery challenges currently faced by many B2B marketers. Learn more about Semcasting’s Account-Based Marketing capabilities.