Finserv's Leap to Success: Union Bank's Account-Based Marketing Strategy

Account-based marketing (ABM) as a sales and marketing alignment strategy has been gaining traction in the financial services industry. James Meono, the Director of Digital Marketing at Union Bank, recently shared his journey of adopting and implementing ABM across his organization in our webinar, “The Secret to Account-Based Marketing for Financial Services.” Let’s dive into the pearls of wisdom James shared and how you can leverage those insights towards your ABM pilot whether you’re in banking, asset management, or insurance.

Navigating the Challenge: Aligning Marketing and Sales for ABM Success

Ah, the age-old conundrum: how to align marketing and sales around a new strategy and a new solution to drive it? Recognizing how crucial buy-in from the Sales team would be early on, Meono built a framework for alignment around an ABM pilot designed to provide sellers and customer relationship managers with valuable company- and industry-specific information, focusing on revealing account-level details and insights they never had access to before.

By regularly sharing results with sales groups, he not only proved the power of the platform but also demonstrated how ABM as an alignment strategy could gain momentum over time. With buy-in secured and results to back it up, James looked to refine and improve the program.

Gaining support for new, cross-functional initiatives can be a challenging endeavor for sprawling multi-national banks where big changes can be met with resistance. By consistently providing real-world use cases and tangible results from the Demandbase platform, James’ pilot brought Sales and Marketing together as true partners. They worked collaboratively to understand what’s working, what’s not, and how they could leverage the power of near real-time data to quickly see results or if necessary learn from it to pivot to another approach.

Mobilizing Intent: How Can ABM Identify In-Market Accounts?

An effective ABM strategy is a long game, building on incremental wins and the revenue opportunities uncovered along the way. The next step for Union Bank was to start identifying in-market accounts that were showing signs of making a purchase decision versus those that were only engaging because they’re interested in research around a general topic area.

With Demandbase, Meono and Union Bank leveraged ABM to:

• Identify new in-market account prospects that weren’t on the radar
• Evaluate accounts already in play that are serious about moving forward
• Determine which existing customers were in the market for cross-sell opportunities

The combination of intent and engagement data allows Union Bank to understand which accounts are in market right now for a particular product or service. When Sales approaches a new account or follows up with an existing one, they now know the topics people at that organization are researching and where they are in the buyer journey. That’s valuable information for sellers to have in their back pocket.

Seamless ABM: How can account-based marketing integrate with other marketing channels?

The pilot’s success at Union bank gave ABM the same broad buy-in, visibility, and dedicated resources as other marketing channels like programmatic advertising, paid search or paid social.

With ABM data and insights integrated into and leveraged across these channels, benefits have trickled down to other teams like Content and Digital.

The Content team leverages intent data to know what terms prospects are currently researching and uses that to streamline their editorial calendar and workflows by prioritizing topics that will have the highest impact. And the Digital team uses high intent keywords to improve the performance of organic and paid search. Using Site Analytics, they can also determine which web pages are being visited to optimize search results for those pages.

Next Steps: Learn more about ABM for Financial Services

An ABM platform configured to the needs of the financial services enterprise helps teams close more deals, gain operational efficiencies, and build better, longer lasting relationships with their customers by targeting better accounts and giving them the personalized experiences they’ve come to expect.

No matter where your organization sits in the changing world of Financial Services, we have advice on how you can outpace your competitors, stand out in a digital first world, and delight your customers.

ABM for Banks: ABM is not a nice-to-have but a necessity for banks that need to digitally transform their tech stack. We help you get up and running by unifying data from disparate systems and start helping your teams build insightful personalized customer experiences for investment services, corporate payments, and treasury management to influence decision-making, and close deals faster.

ABM for Asset Management: Face-to-face and IRL meetings make up about 30% of all asset management interactions today, which is why digital-first is the gold standard for sales and marketing teams. ABM helps you engage entire buying teams around the clock, unlocks access to data, and provides valuable insights from any location. Whether you need to target institutional investors, RIA’s, or broker-dealers, Demandbase partners with you to build a flexible platform that scales as you grow.

ABM for Insurance: We all live in the loyalty economy. Firms today need to scale how they engage policy holders with personalization that provides reassurances while building trust and nurturing loyalty. With Demandbase Account Intelligence, insurance firms can curb wasted time and money by accelerating policy research and identifying the right solution at the right time, whether that’s for general liability, P&C, or workers’ compensation. Help your policyholders start seeing you as an opportunity, not an obligation.

If you’re interested in hearing more about ABM, launching a pilot program, and guidance on overall strategy, watch “The Secret to Account-Based Marketing for Financial Services“ webinar to hear it directly from someone who’s already successfully gone through the process.

To go a bit deeper on how to build your target account list, get to an account-level focus for your marketing programs, advertise better, faster to your key prospects, personalize your website experience and effectively measure the results of ABM strategy, get the ABM for Financial Services E-book.