There’s an old truism in marketing that says the three most important success factors are (in order of priority): List, Offer, and Creative. In more modern terms, this means that in order to drive conversions, and pipeline, and revenue, targeting the right audience is paramount. If you’re aiming at the wrong companies, not even the best content or creative will save you.
Most marketers accept this axiom implicitly, and yet B2B companies routinely define their target audience with more attention to logos and aspiration than actual fit. Account-Based Marketing (ABM) programs are especially prone to unscientific methods of target account selection, as in: “these are the accounts that sales says they want to go after.”
Enter Exegraphics, an entirely new way of looking at companies that allows marketers to more accurately define, and target, those organizations that are the best fit for a particular product or solution.
Jeff Ha is Chief GTM Officer at Rev, developers of a sales development platform that uses exegraphics and the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to help companies find, and target, their “best fit” customers. (Disclaimer: our agency partners with Rev to help inform audience, media, and content strategy for our clients.) I asked Jeff to explain exegraphics and how they work:
How would you describe exegraphics to a marketer? What makes them different from demographics?
Exegraphic data helps you understand how a company executes its mission. Think of it as psychographics, but for B2B. By looking at how a company presents itself, their employees and other digital “breadcrumbs,” you can start to understand a company’s personality and how it will behave.
Demographics and firmographics, on the other hand, are much more superficial markers; they simply tell you about the company’s appearance. They’re important. There’s a lot you can learn from companies that are a certain size or belong to a specific industry. However, in order to understand if a company is a good fit for the products and services you offer, you need to know not only if the company needs the products or services you offer, but also why they might pick you over your competitor. Exegraphics can give you that insight.
How does AI play into exegraphics, and how are they used or developed?
AI has made exegraphic data available at scale. Each individual exegraphic is composed of different attributes that can determine if a company is a good fit for the products or services you offer. You could spend hours searching the web, gathering data and running analyses to surface exegraphic data manually, but by the time you’re done, the info you pulled has likely changed. AI can tackle this workload almost immediately because it’s great at pattern matching across large data sets and large language models.
Rev has a library of AI-powered, pre-built exegraphics that our customers can tap into, but more importantly, we have the capability to create custom exegraphics. These custom exegraphics let our customers define the attributes they know matter for their GTM motions—and then find the companies that have those specific traits. AI also has the ability to prioritize those companies by how closely they match your ideal customer profile.
What are some of the primary use cases for exegraphics? What’s the potential impact for a B2B marketer?
Exegraphics enhance how companies define their ideal customer profile (ICP), which ultimately enables them to target the best fit accounts. These days, revenue teams are being asked to optimize the way they spend budget, and exegraphics allows them to do that by targeting accounts with precision.
Some of the most common and impactful ways we see exegraphics being used to drive revenue include:
* Optimizing paid media channels by eliminating low-fit accounts that result in low-quality leads
* Adding exegraphic insights to accounts in your CRM database, allowing you to approach them with specific, highly relevant messaging or content
* Helping sales improve the effectiveness of outbound programs by only targeting five-star target accounts that match the must-have attributes of best customers
* Enhancing lead scoring and routing leads based on how “fit and ready” a prospect is and how likely they are to engage
* Measuring “pipeline health” based on how well opportunities match your ideal customer attributes
AI-based solutions are changing the ways marketers work in dramatic ways. What’s the future for exegraphics – what do you see on the horizon?
It won’t be long before AI will be able to inform marketers of new markets they should consider targeting based on data coming from their tech stack, and even how to market to these new audiences.
In the near future, I can imagine a marketer effectively managing hundreds of audiences simultaneously, where each audience has a finely-tuned and nuanced campaign, message, and content developed from exegraphic insights.
Photo by Miikka Luotio on Unsplash
