Creating Personalized Experiences for Your Target Accounts: 4 Steps to Success for Commercial Banks

When you don’t know your customers, they don’t want to know you.

Your commercial bank cannot win the attention and business of today’s highly-demanding customers with generic engagement approaches that treat all prospects the same.

That’s why personalization has become a key differentiator for commercial banks. Instead of being generic, you need to:

• Target prospects and accounts you actually know something about
• Take full advantage of opportunities to enhance customer experience by combining data from different sources to better understand, anticipate, and address the needs of customers and prospects as they arise.

This is called an “account-based experience” (ABE) strategy. It’s when your sales, marketing and customer success departments share account intelligence and work together to provide accounts with a unified, personalized experience throughout the buyer journey.

“Spray and Pray” Marketing No Longer Works

When you engage prospects and customers with generic, undifferentiated marketing, they assume that you don’t know them and don’t care enough to know them. Without accurate data and relevant insights about your prospects/customers and their evolving needs, you inevitably waste your marketing dollars on ineffectual outreach that potentially disengages the very people you seek to engage.

A much better approach targets your marketing budget on the accounts/prospects most likely to buy, enabling you to move from wasteful “spray and pray” approaches to more personalized and revenue-generating Account-Based Experiences that drive ROI. No serious customer wants to see a list of offerings that your bank needs to sell, but that they have no interest in buying right now.

How You Can Boost Your Advertising Metrics with More Precise Targeting

Most companies use a variety of tools for their marketing and sales efforts, which means sometimes different teams can be working within the same account, at the same time. This can result in uncoordinated activities, crossed wires, and, ultimately, lost sales. Prospects do not respond well to receiving redundant messages, conflicting messages or untailored content.

What you need is a comprehensive view of all activity within an account–a view ALL Your teams can access, so they can collaborate on a cohesive, account-centric approach.

That’s where an account-based experience (ABX) strategy comes in. It’s when your sales, marketing and customer success departments share account intelligence and work together to provide accounts with a unified, personalized experience throughout the buyer journey.

An ABX strategy identifies and engages the accounts most likely to generate revenues, allowing your revenue teams to build upon incremental wins and seize revenue opportunities uncovered along the way.

You can leverage ABX to:

• Trade hunches for data. Using tools like Demandbase, you can use more comprehensive data to fully understand your accounts. Armed with that knowledge, you’ll be able to target the right accounts with content they’ll love.
• Create more personalized buyer experiences. You can use the insights gained from Demandbase to tailor content based on the journey stage, intent signals, and levels of engagement from each of your accounts. This allows your messaging to be relevant and targeted and gives the buyer a better experience.
• Stop spamming accounts. When you have a unified view into all your account communications and activity, your teams no longer have to worry about confusing buyers with multiple messages.

4 Steps to Targeted Engagement Success

So how do you get from generic engagement to more targeted approaches that convert prospects into existing accounts and drive even more revenues from existing accounts?

Your commercial bank needs to build the data-fueled capacity to (1) sense the evolving needs of prospects and customers as they arise and (2) respond to those needs through timely engagement that addresses those evolving needs. To do so, you’ll need to:

1. Access and leverage rich data. That means the most robust intent, behavioral signals, web analytics, contacts, firmographics, and technographics. Demandbase data combined with your commercial bank’s own data, for example, gives you one complete, enriched, and accurate view of each account as a solid foundation for personalizing engagement.
2. Build lists of prospects most likely to be in-market. Demandbase can help you build lists of purchase-ready prospects from 100M+ company profiles and 150M+ contact profiles, emails and mobile numbers. Your revenue-generating teams can focus their resources on the target accounts and prospects most likely to be in-market.
3. Eliminate wasted ad spend with data that correctly identifies the right accounts to target. With Demandbase, you can deliver targeted and personalized advertising messages based on account journey stage, intent, engagement data, website analytics, firmographics and more.
4. Leverage an AI-driven platform configured to the needs of your commercial bank. Such a platform offers the data and tools you need to drive customized, account-based engagement, helping you close more deals, gain operational efficiencies, and build better, longer lasting relationships with prospects and customers based on offering the personalized experiences they expect.

No matter your commercial bank’s level of data and marketing maturity, Demandbase can help you outpace your competitors, stand out in a highly-competitive, digital-first landscape, and give your prospects and customers better experiences that result in more revenue generated.

Why not start small? Get a free report uncovering hidden opportunities for your commercial bank.