Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is one of the fastest-growing activities within the B2B space, and when executed right, it can generate a significant amount of success for a company.
Napier recently held a webinar ‘Five ABM Campaigns to Increase Sales’, which explores ABM campaigns that can help B2B marketers achieve sales. We address:
- What we mean by ABM
- Why ABM is effective
- How many companies should be in your ABM campaign
- ABM campaigns you can launch today
- Pitfalls to Avoid
Register to view our webinar on demand by clicking here, and why not get in touch to let us know if our insights helped you.
Napier Webinar: ‘Five ABM Campaigns to Increase Sales’ Transcript
Speakers: Mike Maynard
Mike: Hi, everyone, and welcome to the latest Napier webinar. Today we’re going to be talking about account based marketing. And what we’re going to try and do is give you five campaigns that you can use to that will directly increase your sales using ABM techniques. If you have any questions, please do feel free to ask them, post them in the conversation box. And I will be very happy to answer them at the end. So please post questions as you as you think of them. And then it makes it easier for us to go through them once the webinars finished. So five campaigns to increase sales. So what are we going to talk about? Well, the webinars gonna Firstly, talk a little bit about ABM. So explain what we mean by account based marketing, and also explain why ABM is so effective. We’re also going to answer one of the big questions that we keep getting asked by clients, which is how many companies should be in your ABM campaign. We’ll talk then about the five campaigns that you can launch today. And then finally, the webinar is going to cover a few pitfalls that you need to avoid if you want to make sure your ABM campaigns are successful.
So what is ABM? Well, we went and had a look at Marketo. These guys know a thing or two about ABM. And they say account based marketing is a focused approach to b2b marketing, in which marketing and sales teams work together to target best fit accounts and turn them into customers. So I mean, there’s some obvious things here, you know, that we’ve got some cooperation between marketing and sales. We’re obviously trying to get customers which is, you know, not unusual for a marketing campaign. But really, the thing around account based marketing is that you’re focusing and what you’re focusing on is the best fit accounts, those companies that are most likely to become the best customers. And this is really what drives ABMs effectiveness and ABM success for a lot of our clients. So there are different types of ABM. And lots of people have different views as to how you should define ABM. What we’ve done is we’ve made use of the definitions by itsma, which is the organisation that really kicked off the enthusiasm around ABM. And they have definitions of strategic ABM, which is basically highly customised programmes for individual accounts. So you’re building effectively a bespoke marketing programme for each account. ABM light, which is basically clustering accounts together, they might have similar issues similar needs similar requirements. And you build campaigns for those clusters of accounts. And then finally, programmatic ABM, so programmatic ABM, will use technology. And it will allow you to tailor marketing campaigns for specific accounts at scale. And I think this is, you know, really important, the programmatic ABM lets you move from having a relatively small number of counts to having very, very large number of accounts without needing huge marketing teams.
Now, to be honest, at Napier, our view is that, you know, there is some overlap and approaches and certain one right approach what strategic ABM so creating this bursary much more powerful to do with petak a versa you can never scale those bespoke programmes in strategic a two ounce that you can read actually our view is is that you know, there are approaches, but in reality most of the company work with a using a kind of blend of two or maybe some different approaches to create an ABM or get an ABM programme that works for them. So these are the different types of ABM. And we’ll be talking about you know, these customised we’re talking about clustering accounts and we’ll talk about programmatic we’ll say Well okay, so I get ABM Why is it ABM what makes it well.
We’ve got quotes from Alexander I think Moe was the phone, amongst other things. And, you know, he’s talking about concentrating all the hand the sunrise rays burn until brought to a photo. Well, that’s certainly true up in Scotland, that you do need to focus things raised to make them burn. And so fame is really important. It does a lot of thing you know, so If you’re marketing more effective, and it makes it more effective by breaking through the noise, you can actually have much higher frequency of interaction with individuals within the target accounts because all your budget is focused on a limited number of targeted emotions. It lets you get to really target ROI opportunities. So everything is generating or your marketing is generating a certain conversion rate. What’s going to happen is the value of those conversions go up, the more you focus on key accounts. You can design campaigns to reach the right people and really talk particularly when we look at the customised ABM means huge bend. And finally, one of the things that ABM is very important importance of making use of synergies by sales. And this really often be from everything actually understanding which of the best accounts to tie sales thing. Those that follow up loop and work with, say any of these opportunities hold up and sell them incentive to do this. You’re actually targeting the Academy, one they asked you to do. So personalization, so ABM allows for very, very effective, personalised, those between the ABM lightened strategic ABM. I mean, you can either do action, which grounds you know the needs and requirements of a particular industry, or you can fully personalise and get down to individuals and typically, most ABM campaigns have personalization on the industry level, maybe personalization on the persona level. But if you have a really major target, you can do that full strategic ABM approach and personalised approach.
And the great thing about persona as Kylie and Joe some years ago, is that it reflection of how much you love that customer, you can show that your heart is oh so true. The important virtualization is personalization is not about putting the company name and an advert or console, expanding the accounts need. So the company the target accounts needs, what drives the persona. So how they are involved in different elements. So that is really ultimately about building trust is building trust by showing that you know, and what your target customer is facing what they’re having to deal with. So we’ve talked a little bit of definitions, but the last thing is, you know, you need to be a bit relaxed with ABM. The goal is not to do a programmatic ABM, you have a certain thing that you can list on your LinkedIn. It’s simply benefits from better targeting and personalization of content. And that’s really I mean ABM II to achieve that, and it’s a frickin it’s not the end goal. Clearly, ABM also has benefits with integration. So what I’d say is when you look at ABM, let’s not worry too much about whether it fits a better definition of ABM. Let’s make sure that it’s from any approach that you take.
So this is the first questions we ask that asked by any client account should be in our ABM programme. Fortunately, the answer is really depends. It depends on whatever ABM programme. If you’re launching your ABM, your first 1000 companies, you know, you can make it work before you scale up. It depends on your resources. This is not just how you have to drive the campaign. It’s also to help you and as we mentioned, KVM is great because it allows you to very large number of accounts, if you don’t have the programmatic technically not going to be able to scale. And it also depends on money. And we talked about the focusing of resort viewer accounts and try and focus on please enjoy a good two, three don’t break through the noise. So it really is a balancing act. And personalised can also have an impact impacts the amount of work you do. Sales support can have an impact both which account as a follow up and any other campaign. You know, unless you’re running an e commerce campaign, there’s very little leads if you’re not from sales, so if support a serve accounts responding, there’s no point having a human race twice the number of running active, more efficient, a smaller number get the other. Related to that, of course it can also depend upon the to win and service and account. If you have a very easy ordering system for new customers. Well, you know, the product need to then you might lock more accounts than a service where there’s a lot of onboarding and getting up to what your company goals are. And the company will have goals in terms of revenue, and that can often be trying to an estimate of the number of company.
So I’ve kind of copped out I’ve not given you a definite answer should tell you what people do at the end of the day. If you look at this this pie chart is based on HubSpot asked us what their typical target account list typically demand basis customers, the enterprise IT See there’s a huge range 13% of the counts, but almost 50% bounce in their campaign base, typically these these customers will be more towards the bend based programme. So over most likely one, one to 100, if we looked at people running ABM, but without a programmatic on base, and so you can see there’s a here It really is. And so it’s all about campaign that’s going to meet your needs, and ultimately help your business achieve its business goals. So, campaigns that we’ve got about really elements of ABM campaigns, and how they can work and how they can be more efficient, actually run ABM rather than running more of a broadcast type approach.
So the first one is targeted advertising. And this is a really simple approach Rabia, see the animation here? We generate followers for a company called tech core taking Veronica and we’re putting her photo into the ad. This is something that’s it means what you can do is knock us your advertising on care about. But it also means you can do some customizations, so you could address for example, and get specific pain points. And you can see in the background, a landing page for ABM account campaigns, that was targeted comm supplying the airport sector and talking about what their challenges were and how we can help. There are different ways adverts and obviously as I say LinkedIn is typical to generate leads.
So you can have a LinkedIn example as follows. People would be looking probably promoting content they’d be they’d be offering other activity with the customer. So that could be for example, a webinar. And there’s different approaches to personalising the advertising. So I think it’s a it’s interesting other ways that people and how you approach things really depends a lot on your brand to appear. So we can see here for example, forts have fought to personalising an advert, demand base as well. So if you’re looking for information, they’ve got an article on different ways ads accounts name, you can put it in the headline, or you can put the set on company, which is obviously part of the healthcare sector. So you can either use the attribute name, Alternatively, you can talk about Street, or you can tell us the company name, address. And if you look at this approach, what you typically do is you do many different versions each in a different gets. One thing I’d say is that, you know, personalization is still quite a bit of manual work involved. There are tool sets of ad as well. But typically today, there’s not end to end solution for creating and delivering dads. And so I think this is we’ll see nurture is ads personalised on the fly as they deliver to potential customers. And so I think this is something that’s definitely going to change. Ultimately, what it means for us is we’ll probably see our company’s names in more and more ads as people target us. And so targeted advertising, very simple approach. And particularly if you’re looking at kind of an industry sector targeting, it’s very easy to do, because you can reach and each account will have, and you can reach them all with a single advert. But the question is who when you pick from the ad, you know, you’ve got your targeted ad.
So what are you going to, I can campaign is targeting 10 offers any different ways to do this, but it’s about creating particularly relevant downloadable content. So this could be market specific content, or it could be fully personalised. And there’s lots of tools to do this that can create dynamic PDFs from simply putting your, you know, target customers logo on to actually completely changing the content within a PDF. And you can see a very similar on the Napier report tool that allows you to define what a marketing qualified and so I’d leave form and produces the definition. And if you enter your details, you can click through, get the definition and download the PDF. And obviously this PDF is exactly the content that you entered. Totally customise and a relatively simple site.
A campaign that is specific, is we ran is once we love with Nokia, we’d like to work with more division, downloadable content that showcased the work we’ve done some of the Nokia divisions we work with to encourage so it’s all looking results. It’s very custom be much specific content about Nokia here. I chose to realisation we don’t have on the landing paid work for Nokia you should work for us. It’s not too direct.
So with your campaigns you really need to understand how much personalization you can do without becoming a little bit creepy. And this is an important thing balls are there to insert campaigns and even individuals and things like that into marketing content, may not always want to use it, because you may find that actually it becomes people find just a little bit uncomfortable dealing with such content. Very much relate to or content offer is really personalization in general. And think the big issue here is looking at how you personally elements of the customer. So we see some background, there’s EasyJet for anyone to jet, you’ve probably seen the little infographic talking about where they tend to, you know, their favourite destination so flat organised on the website, you can see two different landing page and depending upon what the website knows about you, it might the complete staff say they’re built for growth. So it will try and get content on the website. But this is not specifically it’s upon role based targeting. And so what I’d advise is go beyond the basics, you know, the Hello first day, but the job role person might play in the decision making unit and when bite, perhaps the buyers journey stage understand where the particular individual being the journey stage, and a key use past engagement. If you know the pages that someone has visited, you can get a good idea of where they might be on their buyers journey. So you can then deliver personalization in this early stage of you know, gathering information start to up the funnel type issues. Whereas if they’re pretty much ready to place no research into checking more information. There’s not another funnel around, you know, for example, your products performance or social with custom, personalization done a name, it doesn’t necessarily mean present individual, it’s about around the needs of who comes and that can be the same as other people as well. There’s lots of different so probably the most commonly used. So when I make content on the personalization, and segment and get those groups of people, rather, it’s an almost infinite number of persons. But there’s also sorts there’s, you know, IP based and cookie based website personalization, where you can post upon the IP, which will and can look up and funny, they work for a little more COVID with people working from home, although a lot of people still have to log into their business through their VPN. So it’s often possible to see which company people work for based upon their IP address. And then lastly, dynamic he was actually, we love the use of dynamic email. And we’ll actually put different email prospects. And the great thing about always done automatically. So we can deliver content to each client in the full email without you having to fit into it once we’ve set up the email. So we can have a look an example of some personalization campaigns see the range of things you you can do so I mean, here is a very some campaign targeting Uber is created by slam is there basically the Uber logo and page. On the left hand side, however, is oldest tech with a big poster. But this is a graphic designers. They wanted to get some work with the agency, Ogilvy. And so they built bought the billboard that was directly out of Ogilvy office and create an advert that was specific to Ogilvy. So hundreds of people passing really cared about the people going into the job. so successful, that actually the Manage covey frequency, because he was so impressed with what they did from Ogilvy so easily use very, you know, what you might call olex. But you account based marketing, particularly interesting approach.
Another approach would be a great mailer. The thing I’d say, and again, this is maybe a little odd. But as people return to the office folks really well. And what you actually spend more on the postal mailers because you know, you’re targeting and they’re really sending as many as you would, entire market. But ABM is really about creativity matters on the printed card, to do something very clever. And what these mailers deliver. So often these are called door openers, they never let me forget where we sent to prospective clients. And the message was, you know, we’d love to work with you, and you’re only a stone’s throw away.
So anyway, we went to meet the client because they were meeting a lot just walking through the door and we did a great pitch team was amazing. We convinced them to work with us. And everybody in the office laughed because the marketing manager had actually already posted a blog about it, where he said the reason he gave us the business was the creativity of the mailer, and not our pitch, which I felt was kind of with the honesty of marketing managers. So a really useful I think very underrated and they’re very easy to do when you get to a VM because you’re dealing with numbers, something teams don’t their entire life thing mailers into boxes or apps. So there are ways to make mailers. And there are different services that will actually do automate your mailers for you. So if you run sample you can literally basically from all works over these mailers can be generic campaign with a note, choose to make customised or branded goods three of the biggest those so and Alice Alice is very well known in the States, but currently do the operate in the UK and across Europe.
I’d encourage us to use video personalization. Because its easy create a video. You can automatically convert solely something as simple adding in somebody click here we can see then we’ve made as being applied to document we’ve got a very happy man saying hello the different people changing the background as well as as he does it. And we can employer approaches like a video that I’m interested and I would only recommend looking at your laptop who personalised videos at scale so you record the video will replace the content and so they’ll replace the content. So if you’ve seen those, those video that they’ve not been personalised for you by someone nails and videos of different names, they’ve acted just like God.
Here’s my bonus idea what an extra bite Well, it’s effectively something like I don’t want a free that they can drink was the salesperson talks to see people don’t coffee whilst the salesperson talks them but it’s a great version of kind of gift to get approach where you give them a coffee they feel I’m you know morally indebted to you and more, I’m much more likely to take the sale. Think about this as it’s very simple to do because you can do it with vouchers you can do it electronically. And it scales very easily. As it does scale easily thing will not make your any your email persons thick. So definitely put the effort into personalization, if you are spending the money on vouchers.
So those are our campaigns we want it so some of the mistakes we’ve seen. So there are certainly pitfalls to avoid. I mean, it’s having too many accounts on the programme, particularly if got limited budget limited resources or you’re just you don’t go big initially you get the process working and also creating enough money to break through the noise. Equally. If you’ve got some resources and you’ve you’ve haven’t run into few accounts can also be a major pitfall fail to get the small number of accounts. I talked about being creepy. Don’t ever cross the creepy line over and be as much of a problem as underpass. investment is not a magic wand is going to magically get customers you do have to have money to break. We see people, a lot of us, you know everybody gets excited about particular I mean, if you come and talk to me, I’ll be reading about soldiers we work with like that offers programmatic ABM. It’s really it’s to me or tools is about achieving marketing, bam, and the tools help you achieve itself. I talked about personalization, no slides can be bad. His biggest pitfall and I think this is you know, pretty much the biggest pitfall for most marketing activities is failing to put in point launching an ABM campaign unless you can show that it’s more previous parties.
So if I was to share key pro tips, as we call them full of things I’d recommend looking at. Firstly, you know the ABM is going to be important. In fact, some people are predicting that b2b marketing or be ABM in the future. And the maybe will just disappear as everybody moves to actually using that as their default but get on board now moving on focus marketing to start small, advisory creative and see if they work. And obviously if they work, scale them up. Definitely use the technology but don’t be driven by the technology or tool. Get the sales team excited. I mean, the great thing about ABM is it can generate sales results because you’re fucking actually the biggest sales. So those tips are really what I’d read to look Adams of getting your ABM campaign started interested, you know, ABM certainly please do contact me.
So you can reach me by email LinkedIn as my details here or via phone. And then I guess the last thing to say is, please feel free and we’ll certainly learn them. Or alternatively, if you’ve got questions you’d like to talk about in more than easily please do email me and I’d be more than happy to so tips for our session we will be posting the slides on SlideShare will also make the webinar available A rebroadcast in case you want to share it, and we’ll let you know all the details.