To more effectively market their products and increase lead conversion rates, business-to-business (B2B) marketing teams are increasingly turning to account-based marketing strategies. As HubSpot explains: “Account-based Marketing (ABM) is a focused growth strategy in which Marketing and Sales collaborate to create personalized buying experiences for a mutually-identified set of high-value accounts. [It] allows you to weed out less-valuable companies early on and ensure Marketing and Sales are in complete alignment — in return, your team can leap into the critical processes of engaging and delighting those accounts much faster.” Ultimately, account-based marketing involves a focused approach to prospect targeting, so that you can go after companies with a better “fit” in order to increase the chances of conversion.

Incorporating ZoomInfo in Your Account-Based Marketing Strategy

ZoomInfo allows marketing teams to do something they don’t often do: start with a target list of specific companies before starting the campaign. This may seem counterintuitive and involves rethinking how your marketing team builds and structures campaigns. Usually, digital marketing teams start with a broad net, with particular industries in mind. Rarely, if ever, do they start with an entire list of available companies in their market. ZoomInfo allows them to define what the total market is for their goods and services before even starting the campaign.

Paid advertising costs are rising, and recent privacy policy changes diminish the available information on advertising platforms. As a result, it no longer makes sense for digital marketing teams in the B2B space to flush money down the drain doing blind keyword advertising hoping that a 10% click rate will garner a lead from their target market. Further to this, marketing in a B2B context is only able to prove the value of its campaigns once a lead becomes known through an incoming call, email, or form. Prior to a lead revealing themselves, marketing and sales teams are left to guess about the quality of their campaigns based on aggregate traffic statistics like time on page, pages per session, and bounce rate. Using account-based marketing strategies with ZoomInfo helps you get around these problems.

What is ZoomInfo and How Does it Work?

ZoomInfo is an ideal platform to begin executing your account-based marketing plan. It is a massive global database containing company information and contact information for employees and officers across the globe. Using its database, you can search out prospects and potential leads before beginning marketing and sales campaigns. This allows you to define which companies fall into your target groups. It also makes ZoomInfo a game-changer, facilitating new approaches to acquiring prospects and leads.

Sales and digital marketing veterans will remember the bad old days of list buying, when they spent untold amounts of money on email contact lists that were of dubious value. Using such lists typically resulted in your email software being banned and your IP burned. Likewise, for sales teams. The old experience of phoning up contacts on lists often lead to the discovery that the person being contacted hadn’t worked for that company for several years.

Its virtue lies in its proprietary contact updating algorithm, which uses a variety of methods to collect data and keep it current. The company stands by the results of its software, with a guarantee to customers that its database is more than 90% accurate. Initially, we were dubious of this guarantee and wanted to validate it. To do this, we ran a test and looked up our own clients’ information, which was up-to-date, and checked it against ZoomInfo’s records. Their guarantee turned out to be accurate, which gave us the confidence to further use their software.

How to Use ZoomInfo for Lead Generation

To demonstrate ZoomInfo’s use, let’s take a hypothetical scenario: your company is marketing a new software app to the commercial and residential construction industry. Your ideal company profile includes a number of variables:

• An employee head count greater than 50.
• Annual revenue greater than $10 million.
• A geographic focus on companies operating in the Western United States, specifically California, Oregon, and Washington.

Furthermore, because your software would replace a competing legacy technology, you want to know who is using your competitor’s product.

ZoomInfo allows you to get real-time updates on all companies that fit your profile. But the benefit of ZoomInfo’s software extends beyond getting emails and phone numbers to the sales team.

Now that you have a list of companies in your target market, you still need to figure out how to approach them or make them aware of your company. If you just have contact info, you don’t want to spam them. This won’t significantly improve your conversion rates. This is where ZoomInfo’s ‘WebSights’ feature comes in.

Hitting Your Target with WebSights

ZoomInfo’s WebSights connects marketing’s lead generation campaigns with target company lists prior to them becoming leads. WebSights does an IP lookup on all website visitors to see if it can find a matching company IP in its database. If it can find a match, then this company is “revealed” as a website visitor in the ZoomInfo dashboard along with the number of visits it has made and the specific webpages it has visited. While there are many competing companies who offer a very similar service (e.g. EG, Clearbit, Leadfeeder, Fastbase), ZoomInfo’s IP reveal solution via WebSights has an advantage in two respects:

1. As we already mentioned, the claims to accuracy of its data is currently unchallenged.
2. Integration with a company’s Google Analytics data can extend the power of WebSights to include the type of detailed analytics on paid advertising that inbound marketing teams are constantly evaluating.

Thankfully, ZoomInfo provides a handy implementation guide to help complete this connection, which can be done quite quickly by using Google Tag Manager and creating some custom dimensions inside Google Analytics. It took our team no more than 3 to 5 hours of work to implement and test.

Integrating ZoomInfo and Google Analytics allows you to further benefit from an account based marketing strategy, including leveraging the closer collaboration between marketing and sales teams that this strategy fosters.

The integration allows paid advertising teams to evaluate the effectiveness of their campaigns much earlier in the sales cycle by getting relatively immediate feedback on the type of companies that their advertising is attracting. Let’s return to our scenario from above, whereby the objective of your campaign is to attract companies in commercial and residential construction of a certain employee and earnings size located in the Western United States. If you find that you are attracting companies from transportation, law, and accounting, you can make immediate adjustments to your campaigns as opposed to waiting for poor quality leads to trickle in before updating your campaign to make the appropriate exclusions and refinements.

“By starting to connect the content specific companies that are looking at your site prior to becoming leads, marketing can supply sales with critical intelligence on what products and services these companies may be interested in at this moment in time.”

The WebSights to Google Analytics integration allows teams a real-time understanding of which companies are visiting the website and what specifically they are looking at. This provides opportunities for sales and marketing collaboration. The first area of collaboration is identifying a company’s interest based on the content and duration of what they viewed. Inbound content marketing teams will already be creating niche content to be able to generate traffic and inbound leads. However, by starting to connect the content specific companies that are looking at your site prior to becoming leads, marketing can supply sales with critical intelligence on what products and services these companies may be interested in at this moment in time. In turn, this allows sales teams to refine their cold email and cold call outreach to specifically address those needs.

One word of warning though on this integration: what is not readily apparent in the documentation is that each company passed from ZoomInfo to your Google Analytics reports will cost you 1 bulk credit from your annual total. This can start to add up fairly quickly for high traffic B2B companies. This is not a problem per se if you can draw a direct line between your WebSights leads and ROI, but worth keeping in mind that you should keep one eye on your bulk credit burn once you have this integration set up.

Integrating ZoomInfo with your CRM and Sales Strategy: Examples from HubSpot CRM & Zoho CRM

Once you’ve discovered who’s coming to your website and what they’re looking at, with a few clicks ZoomInfo allows you to inject the list of target prospects that you’ve identified directly into your customer relationship management software (CRM). We connected this with a client’s HubSpot and our own Zoho CRM and were able to do so very quickly and intuitively. With this in mind, a team member in marketing or sales can be actively vetting if site visitors fit your target criteria. They can also check what pages businesses are looking at and then quickly inject them into the CRM for a sales follow-up. This comes with the bonus that the prospects from ZoomInfo have recently visited your site and are aware of your brand and goods or services. Meanwhile, your sales team has focused talking points based on what prospects have specifically looked at on the site.

WebSights leads are nowhere near as warm as a lead that has filled out a form on your website, but they are quite a bit warmer than a cold sales lead being drawn off a list and who you have no certainty is even aware of your company. In practice, we have improved our sales outreach response rate 100% in using such a technique. This technique is so effective because of the recognition of the company name combined with the timeliness and specificity of the sales outreach offer. From the client’s perspective, this appears a bit like magic. No matter what stage of the customer journey they’re in, receiving a sales outreach offering to help solve a particular problem within a day of the lead looking for solutions is much more helpful the typical generic sales call they are going to get.

ZoomInfo and RFDM Solutions

In sum, ZoomInfo and its integrations with Google Analytics and your CRM offers an ideal means to implementing an account-based marketing strategy that can allow you to better integrate marketing and sales processes to increase conversion rates. For more information on ZoomInfo, or for help developing and implementing an account based marketing strategy, contact us for a free consultation.

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