How to prepare data for account-based marketing

If you're a B2B company, account-based marketing (ABM) should be one of the tools at the forefront of your marketing operation.

ABM works by targeting a defined set of accounts that are an excellent fit for your company's offering, and engaging them with personalised outreach campaigns and other initiatives. ABM efforts often target multiple contacts inside an organisation, and usually involve engagement via email, social media, events, outbound calls and targeted ads.

Because ABM involves a high level of personalisation, you need to make sure you have the right quantity and quality of information on your contacts. So preparing your database is a vital first step for executing ABM effectively. In this article, I'll show you why and how you should prepare your contact database.

How to prepare data for ABM

Launching an ABM program requires an enriched and healthy database that includes relevant data about the contacts and target accounts you try to reach.

Why is data preparation essential?

If you want to effectively target the prioritised accounts and their decision-makers, you must have the contact and target account data at your disposal to conduct effective multi-channel outreach.

There is a substantial amount of work you need to devote to your database before it is ready for ABM. Your database needs to be filled with the right contacts that need outreach at your target accounts, and you must know what data you need when adding new target accounts and contacts to your database. You should always at least include:

• Company name
• Company website URL
• Company address
• Company industry
• Company size
• Company revenue

The more data of this kind you have organised in your database, the better. The more data you have inside your database, the easier it will be to filter, search, and organise accounts for your outreach tactics.

You should also have the details of two or three critical decision-makers, such as members of the management team, at each of your target accounts. This is the basic data you need to start with:

• Email
• First name
• Last name
• Job title
• LinkedIn profile URL
• Phone number

Having these pieces of data for each of your contacts will enable you to search, filter more easily, and organise your database.

Another key to preparing your database for account-based marketing is creating uniform nomenclature for each dataset in your database.

For example, in the 'industry' field of your database, you should label all healthcare industry companies with a uniform nomenclature, such as 'healthcare'. This will make segmenting and targeting infinitely easier during the execution of your ABM campaigns. On top of all this, you should try to fill in missing information continuously where you can, so that nothing slips through the cracks. Working with your database will become a daily task, but it will make your ABM work much easier.

Now you know the steps you need to take before launching ABM - are you ready to get started? Book a meeting with me by clicking below and we can talk about how Zooma can help you on your ABM journey.

And if you want to continue learning more about ABM, make sure to take a look at our extensive ABM guide.