How to prepare your data for ABM

If you're a B2B company, account-based marketing (ABM) should be one of the key tools in your marketing strategy. ABM involves targeting a specific group of accounts that align well with your company's offerings and engaging them through personalised outreach campaigns and other initiatives. ABM often focuses on multiple contacts within an organisation, including email, social media, events, outbound calls, and targeted ads.

Due to the high level of personalisation involved in ABM, it's crucial to ensure that you have the right quantity and quality of information about your contacts. Therefore, preparing your database is essential to execute ABM effectively. In this article, I'll explain 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 contains relevant information about the contacts and target accounts you aim to reach.

Why is data preparation essential?

To effectively target prioritised accounts and their decision-makers, you need access to contact and target account data for efficient multi-channel outreach.

Preparing your database before it's ready for ABM requires significant effort. Your database should be filled out with the appropriate contacts that require outreach to your target accounts, and you will need to know what data is required when adding new target accounts and contacts. At a minimum, you should include the following information:

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

The more organised data you have in your database, the better. A comprehensive database makes filtering, searching, and organising accounts for your outreach tactics easier.

Additionally, you should have the details of two or three key decision-makers, such as management team members, for each of your target accounts. The basic data you need to start with includes:

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

Having this information for each contact enables easier database searching, filtering, and organisation.

Another important aspect of preparing your database for account-based marketing is creating a consistent naming convention for each dataset. For example, in your database's "industry" field, label all healthcare industry companies with a uniform term, such as "healthcare." This simplifies segmenting and targeting during the execution of your ABM campaigns. Also, could you fill in the missing information whenever possible to avoid any gaps? Working with your database should become a daily task, but it will make your ABM work much smoother.

Now that you know the necessary steps before launching ABM, are you ready to start? You can click below to book a meeting with me, and we can talk about how Zooma can help you on your ABM journey.

And if you'd like to continue learning about ABM, please review our extensive ABM guide.