How the ABM Advisor Works

The Napier ABM advisor asks questions about your target customers to determine the best approaches for your ABM campaign. It’s intended as an initial guide, rather than providing an absolute solution for your campaign: everyone’s situation is different so it’s always worth talking with Napier to find out if anything might change our initial recommendations.

The system uses a set AI logic that looks at things such as how many companies you want to target, whether you have contact data and how many decision-makers are at each company. If you’ve already got lots of data, then the system will recommend using that, whereas if you don’t have any contacts and are not sure about the best target job roles then you’ll be told to use programmatic advertising to get maximum advertising impressions reaching a wide range of people in the client.

The ABM advisor won’t always have a solution. If the system doesn’t think there are suitable ABM tactics, it will tell you.

Currently the following tactics are addressed by the ABM advisor:

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is one of the most popular platforms for ABM as you can target people by work-related demographics. This means if you have a clear list of companies you want to targets and the job roles of the decision-makers in the companies then you can serve adverts just to that audience. Although LinkedIn ads can be expensive, they are ideal if you know exactly who you want to target but don’t have their email addresses.

CRM Retargeting

CRM retargeting allows adverts to be shown based upon peoples’ email addresses, so it’s obviously only worth choosing if you have emails for your target audience. There are a range of different providers of CRM retargeting, including Google and Ad Roll. If you want more information on the benefits and drawbacks of the different CRM retargeting providers, contact us.

Email Campaigns using CRM or Marketing Automation

If you have contact details for most of the people you want to reach then outbound email and marketing automation works really well. We strongly recommend customising the emails as much as possible to increase their effectiveness, so use dynamic contact to talk about the needs of the contacts’ companies and any previous relationships you might have had with them, as well as getting the recipients’ names right!

Landing Pages and Nurturing

Almost all ABM campaigns will benefit from the use of dedicated landing pages and email nurturing, which is also called inbound marketing automation. By routing contacts to content or other offers, you can not only capture their details, but you can also profile their needs. Landing pages are particularly important to build contacts if you don’t already have a comprehensive database.

Programmatic ABM Platforms

Programmatic ABM platforms will target advertising directly at people in the companies you want to reach using IP address tracking or cookies. Because these platforms buy digital ads using a programmatic approach, they are a highly cost-effective way to get those target companies to engage with your website. These platforms can have quite high minimum spends or monthly fees, so they are best suited to campaigns where you are reaching a large number of companies. Because of the lack of targeting within the company, they’re also best suited when there are a large number of decision-makers to reach in every company.

Website Customization

Website customisation involves creating dynamic content that changes, typically based on cookies or IP address. At the simplest, you can mention a company name, but effective website customisation is generally quite complex, and can be difficult to implement for large numbers of target companies. Website customisation is also more effective when you are targeting a larger number of decision makers (and therefore potential visitors to your website).

Sales and CRM Systems

Sometimes the campaign doesn’t need marketing, or needs sales as well as marketing. if you are targeting a small number of individuals, a direct sales approach is an important element of your ABM campaigns, so get the sales team sending personal emails and calling the contacts!

Postal Mailings

Sometimes it makes sense to use postal mailings to reach your target customers. A postal mailing can have much more impact than a voicemail or an email.

We recommend sending highly customised mailings. We certainly think that you need to do more than just send a letter: creative, fun mailings are best, and things that will stand out in the office are always good. Clever ideas are the key, and nothing should be off-limits: we once won a client by sending them a pebble!