The Role of Account-based Marketing in Financial Tech

Account-based marketing (ABM) has become a crucial tool for the financial technology (fintech) industry. Fintech companies have taken the financial world by storm, gaining leaps and bounds of market share with their digital-first ease of use and innovation, discusses Phil Marsalona, senior director of technology strategy at Merkle.

Account-based marketing (ABM) has gained traction over the past several years, and according to LinkedInOpens a new window , 84% of marketers say ABM significantly helps retain and expand existing relationships. Ultimately, an organization executing an ABM strategy must be able to understand each of the individuals behind an account, as this individual-level insight is essential to executing with the type of surgical precision ABM requires.

Today’s post-pandemic business world has made the buying process more complex for brands with the explosion of new channels and major shifts in customer behavior. As a result of the pandemic lockdown, consumers have become accustomed to fully digital experiences, and financial services are no exception, leading to the explosion of fintech adoption and new opportunity for legacy players. These fully digital experiences provide a wealth of data that can be a boon to account-based marketing. 

However, organizations must have a robust identity resolution capability to leverage this data fully. Identity (PII, device IDs, first-party cookies) acts as the connective tissue between the consumer’s behavioral data generated during digital experiences and the organization’s ability to create a singular view of the consumer within their marketing and operational ecosystems. If your organization can’t gain a complete view of the fintech buyers you’re trying to reach, you won’t be able to deliver the best content and context of how your solution can help them.

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So, for any marketer looking to enact ABM, the ability to have a singular view of the customer or prospect within your marketing and operational systems is essential. To enable identity resolution for your ABM strategy, there are three key things you and your team need to do:

1. Set a strategy and be disciplined in your identity data capture
2. Organize your identity data 
3. Operationalize your identity data

Strategy and Discipline for Identity Data

Defining what data you need to collect from customers and prospects and how you will utilize it will help set the foundation for your entire strategy. Precise targeting and effective personalization cannot happen when email addresses are invalid, prospect names aren’t formatted consistently, or important attributes like industry, job level, or title are left blank. For example, if you want to implement a birthday promotion for clients and prospects but don’t have that information, you would need to find a way to collect that from your audience.

Keep your ABM goals in mind, making sure to account for the variety of customer and prospect contact types, attributes, and account-relationship data points that are needed to support your ABM execution. Then, ensure your sales and service teams’ processes – as well as web forms and other data capture touchpoints – are set to capture data from prospects and customers comprehensively.  

Organize Your Data

You’ll need to organize and structure your data to enable your ABM strategy. This includes ensuring your marketing systems are of record. Ideally, a cloud-native infrastructure that can update in real-time and give the organization access to the same data is able to support the necessary linkages, relationships, and hierarchies from individuals, an individual’s various channel identities, and their associated organizations. 

As an example, your data must be organized to enable answering questions like the following: 

• If an account has multiple contacts, who is the primary contact? 
• Who are the key decision-makers on an account?  
• If a decisionmaker has multiple email addresses, which one is best suited for ABM messaging?  
• Which account contact should mailing statements be addressed to?

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Operationalize Your Data

With your identity data strategy set, data capture practice locked down, and identities linked, organized, and ready to go, it’s time to put it to work! For the last critical step, ensure your key marketing and communications tools are configured to leverage your identity resolution data. Your marketing automation and campaign management tools should integrate with your identity data to receive not only the target contact information but also any additional linked information, such as the target’s relationship to the organization, that may be critical to enabling the personalization that ABM requires. 

Similarly, giving sales and service teams a view into this identity resolution data set through their CRM enables them to see who the key contacts or influencers are on an account and thereby better tailor their interactions according to the ABM strategy. Finally, ensuring that all the interaction data is captured from the end-point systems like marketing automation and CRM platforms, flow-back at the individual level is a must if you want to measure the effectiveness and optimize your ABM tactics over time.

For fintech companies, this could be in the form of using a fully populated customer profile and leveraging distinct attributes like the contact’s industry or job title to intelligently segment and personalize communications across paid media, email marketing, and even sales interactions.

As ABM continues to gain traction across the fintech industry, an identity resolution capability will continue to become a must-have to gain incremental growth, and best grow customer and prospect relationships. Get ahead of the competition now by setting your identity resolution strategy, data capture discipline, identity data organization, and operationalization. At the end of the day, capturing and maintaining consumer identities at the individual level, and associating those identities to organizational constructs, is imperative to drive effective account-based marketing. 

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