Future Proof Web Forms & Maintain Data Integrity for Account Based Marketing

Your sales and marketing teams are finally ready to adopt account-based marketing! But is your data ready?

As you move to ABM, the way you segment and communicate with leads changes. When you begin, your marketing automation software or CRM may be full of leads that are missing information such as job title, industry, or company size. Or, this information is incorrectly formatted or spread out across multiple custom fields. Whatever, the case, these leads are useless to your new ABM strategy.

While all companies must keep data integrity in mind, companies moving to account-based marketing (ABM) face a unique set of difficulties. Your ABM strategy will rely heavily on your ability to capture reliable, accurate and well organized lead data.

As the first stage of capturing lead data, landing page forms play an integral role in the data integrity process. Let’s explore the specific lead generation and data integrity challenges ABM presents and solutions you can use to enable ABM the right way.

Common Problems with Landing Page Forms

Unfortunately, there are several issues that can arise when moving to an ABM strategy. Creating and maintaining landing page forms can be onerous and time-consuming when not built correctly. Here are some of the problems that may arise:

Problem #1: Normalizing Lead Data

The Case: Another issue is sorting out the messiness that stems from customers using different terms to describe the same thing in a field. For example, one person may enter “Coca-Cola” into a field. However, another person may enter “Coca Cola”, while another may enter “CocaCola,” “Coke,” and so on. There can be numerous variations.

The Result: When this happens, the data can’t be properly aligned with a single (parent) account, and segmentation becomes impossible.

A potential workaround is to use platforms like Google Places and Demandbase to lookup information and provide clarity on a company. This will compare the information users type to broad databases to help users choose the right company. However, implementing solutions such as these can run into the same development issues identified in problem #2. Testing each one and getting it right is difficult, and making manual updates is meticulous.

Problem #2: Creating New Fields

The Case: You’ve most likely faced problems adding a new custom field to your marketing forms. To add this field to your forms, it needs to be done individually through all platforms (e.g. Eloqua, Marketo, HubSpot) in all countries, all regions and all campaigns. Each form must be republished individually, which can be incredibly burdensome. This usually requires the involvement of development teams, data integrity teams, and others.

The Result: Marketers will experience this problem in two ways. Either you spend an extremely long time to make a single change or take shortcuts that results in multiple custom fields that all represent the same data. These fields can be difficult or impossible to merge together for segmentation or personalization.

Problem #3: Collecting ABM Analytics

The Case: Including tracking URLs and meta data in every piece of marketing material you create is critical to understanding where leads are coming from and how to best sell them. Unfortunately, it is difficult to ensure every marketing team across your entire organization applies tracking codes in the same way to be able to merge data from multiple sources and regions. This problem is compounded when dealing with multiple websites.

The Result: Once a lead is captured and lead source data is left out, the opportunity to collect that information is lost forever.

Data integrity and data hygiene are essential. Companies need clean, accurate data to give to their sales team. When they run into issues like the ones mentioned above, their lead data not only becomes disorganized, it’s impossible to use. This means your sales team can completely lack the data needed to engage leads and capitalize on opportunities.

Enabling ABM Through Web Form Optimization

If your company is moving to an ABM strategy or is currently struggling to make one work, web form optimization is an important step to getting the data needed to power your new campaigns. Formulayt Solutions is a viable solution to the data integrity problems account-based marketers will see.

Instead of a long development cycle to create web forms that will result in disorganized or missing lead data, web form optimization makes the process simple. Here’s a quick overview of how it works:

• Set it up once at the point of configuration/implementation
• Put in an API key
• Do field mapping once (choose which fields are needed for a form)
• Create a template that can be reused across all forms in the organization

That’s it. Old forms will automatically update to account for any changes made later on. Formulayt Solutions is an incredibly dynamic tool that’s maintenance free. It greatly streamlines account-based marketing initiatives, while at the same time creating a smoother customer journey.

ABM has come a long way and provides a great approach for companies looking to better segment their audience and communicate with them in a more targeted way. However, as we’ve outlined, the challenges of shifting to ABM, in particular, sorting through the data required to support an ABM strategy need to be addressed.

Formulayt Solutions offers a simple, yet robust solution to streamline the process and ensure better data integrity with fewer headaches.

Take a look at how a world-leading industrial automation and information company deployed Formulayt Solutions to net a 700% increase in contact conversions.