According to CEB, an average of 5.4 people are involved in today’s B2B purchase decisions. Whether you’re responsible for content marketing, demand generation, product marketing, or digital marketing, as a marketer you need to successfully understand and engage all the people involved in making a buying decision in an account.  At the end of the day, this is really what account-based marketing (ABM) is all about.

Part of the challenge is identifying these people, but once you do, the challenge only becomes more complex. Once you know who the buyers are in an account, how do you connect with them, particularly when each of them has their own needs, concerns, and priorities that continuously evolve throughout their buying journey? ABM requires a deep understanding of your buyers and how and when best to connect with them through targeted messages and content. This understanding is the missing link in today’s ABM landscape that we’re helping marketers address with our new platform release.

Today we announced the expansion of our platform’s MA and CRM integrations, as well as our new content inventory and mapping features. These new capabilities, along with our existing features for building journey maps, personas, targeted messaging, and strategic content plans, help B2B marketers understand, attract, and engage all the people involved in making a buying decision in an account so they can effectively execute their ABM strategy.

Learn more about these features and the entire Akoonu platform, or schedule a demo.

Says Matt Senatore, Service Director, ABM, SiriusDecisions, “ABM is not something you can immediately start executing on. For it to be successful, you first need to have a strategy in place, and a critical part of this strategy is understanding your buyers and customers at an in-depth level. When done right, journey maps can provide you with valuable insights so that Marketing and Sales, as well as other parts of the organization, can successfully connect with buyers and customers in an orchestrated fashion at each stage of their journey.”

Some of our new features and their benefits include:

• Marketing Automation Integration to enable persona-based segmentation, nurturing, and campaigns: Enable persona-based nurture campaigns from first touch by connecting Akoonu to MA data to automatically match each contact to the buyer persona it represents in an account, and based on information collected on the contact, tag it to the relevant line of business and market segment created in Akoonu.
• Salesforce Integration to drive more targeted, higher quality Sales interactions: Automatically match each contact in Salesforce to the buyer persona it represents in an account. View the detailed journey maps and personas built in Akoonu directly in Salesforce to leverage insights such as the persona’s participation level, needs, barriers, content preferences, and interactions at each stage of their buyers’ journey.
• Content Inventory and Map to more strategically and efficiently plan and use content targeted by persona and journey stage: Via integration with WCM systems, Dropbox, Google Drive, and Box, automatically inventory all content assets from within your website and other disparate systems into one central location in Akoonu. Map each asset to its relevant journey map, buyer persona, journey stage, persona journey stage need, business objective, and content format.
• Content Coverage Map to ensure a balance of content across personas and journey stages: View a journey map visual for a particular line of business and market segment that shows the number of content ideas, candidates, briefs, and completed assets (for each) by persona and journey stage. From here, view and access the individual ideas, candidates, briefs, and assets. Easily identify where there are over-investments and gaps in content coverage to inform content planning.
• Inventory Dashboard to ensure a fresh content library across personas, journey stages, and business objectives: View the number of content assets by persona, journey stage, and business objective, as well as an “aging report” of the assets within each.

Learn more about these features and the entire Akoonu platform, or schedule a demo.