4 Steps to Account Based Marketing Success

4 Steps to Account Based Marketing Success

ABM is gaining ground with many companies, especially IT companies and businesses with complex products and long sales cycles. The reality is that most B2B companies realize 80% of revenues from just 20% of their customers. Still, traditional marketing is evenly spread through out the whole customer base, generating in a great deal of wastage.


Account Based Marketing is targeted marketing to the accounts that stand for the largest potential in revenue. If you’re thinking it’s time to get started or improve your ABM, here are four steps to set you on the right path:

1. Begin by identifying your top accounts

The majority of B2B marketers fail to produce reliable lists of their top accounts. Doing so is vital. The key to getting a high ROI from AMB is understanding targeted accounts.

First and foremost, establish the business value of your accounts Identify where the largest sales potential lies  Establish where each account is in the buying journey  If they’re current accounts, understand which products they have or have not purchased

Work together with sales and finance to create a list of high-profit target customers and document the information you need. Your initial investment in this process will enable you to make smarter investments, delivering the relevant content to the right people at the right time and generate sales.

2. Create valuable content

Your ABM program will feature ads to draw target customers to content published on your website. In this age of self-serve customers, your website needs to offer a much heavier dose of useful content relative to its sales pages.
You need a content marketing plan that becomes a roadmap to consistently producing valuable content in the form of blog posts, eBooks, video, research studies, infographics and more. As you create a content marketing plan, consider the following:
An ideal way to discover your customers’ information needs is to interview them. Also, ask your best sales people to create a list of questions they’re often asked

Audit your existing content. It’s possible you have useful content in various forms that aren’t published on your website. Even content on your website could become more valuable and relevant to current needs with some updates  Create customer case studies when possible, and include industry specific references in your content Communicate big ideas to establish industry expertise and become perceived as a thought-leader

3. Use a targeted distribution platform

Target via social media. LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook advertising programs offer highly targeted advertising programs Align marketing activities such as events and email campaigns with your ABM plan Vendemore offers an ad distribution service where top accounts are targeted based on their IP address. Learn more about how to place ads on large media networks to be seen by the employees on your target list

4. Measure your marketing efforts based on accounts

With ABM tactics website visits will come from people within the companies you’re targeting. Your challenge is to measure and assess user behavior.

Record ad impressions by account Use Google Analytics to gauge traffic and record engagement metrics from top accounts Set up systems with your CRM and marketing automation enabling you to measure win rates Establish revenue per account measures Consult with analytics professionals to develop a useful formula to measure sales and marketing costs per account

Informed by the type of analytics outline here, you’ll work with your sales managers to create smart follow-up strategies to nurture and/or close deals.

ABM takes time

Be fair and understand ABM takes time to gain traction. If your sales process usually takes over six months or more, resist evaluating results after just a month or two. Gather metrics on a monthly basis, but give it at least six months before you draw any conclusions

Email Marketing and Marketing Automation – How Similar or Different are They?

Email Marketing and Marketing Automation – How Similar or Different are They?

Most people would agree that marketing has become extremely technology-intensive. IT spends in various other sectors may be paltry, but the spends by marketing on technology have remained steady, despite the sluggish economy.
Email marketing is a key component of marketing technology. Most companies may already be using it in one form or another. Another related component is marketing automation. However consumers often mention the two components in the same breath. There are even debates in the industry about marketing automation being what email marketing aspires to be. However, in reality, they are an adjacent, but comparable, bunch of tools.
Email Marketing and Marketing Automation – The overlap

• Email marketing was traditionally used to reach out to individuals, keep them informed and stay connected. Companies would purchase email databases and use an email server with the capacity of high-volume mail blasts to send out mails to those in that database. Better capabilities emerged over time including:
• The ability to get leads from alternate sources
• Management of such leads
• WYSIWYG editors to draft emails using templates
• Monitoring and analytics

Marketing automation goes a step ahead with:

• Automating email campaigns
• Not only manage but score, prioritize, and nurture leads
• Not limited to email campaigns but includes mobile and social campaigns

However, some providers and vendors of email marketing claim that they too offer these capabilities, thus confusing customers.
How they work?
All of these tools help you develop, improve, and promote leads effectively to a “marketing database.” In B2B set-ups, tools help qualify and nurture leads until the point where sales teams can engage them using CRM platforms. In the case of B2C, such platforms will likely produce specialized offers to further engagement or drive transactions. Users can segment databases into certain subsets and prioritize and engage them, depending on behavior and attributes.
What exactly do they do?
Managing leads
Marketers must understand how to manage leads and prospects. Some of the high-level capabilities that can be considered include:

• Lead acquisition
• Information management
• Lead prioritization and routing
• Lead nurturing and engagement

Managing campaigns
While email messaging is important, social campaigns are also becoming imperative. Several vendors’ social widgets aim to grab enrichable email ids so that one can continue proactively marketing to that person. The capabilities that can be included here are:

• Campaign design and management
• Campaign creation and development
• Campaign implementation
• Campaign monitoring and analysis

One area where email marketing is distinguished from marketing automation is Landing Pages. While one can consider building and managing of landing pages as an extension of campaign management, they must be examined as a distinct challenge. Some capabilities to check for are:

• Page form and creation
• Testing and optimization
• Integration of web content and experience management

While email marketing and marketing automation are equally essential in the toolkit of a digital marketer, both have significant overlaps. While email marketing vendors focus on B2C use cases, marketing automation vendors target B2B use cases. However, a fair amount of crossover is observed among subscribers sometimes.

Marketers must thus, while evaluating tools, learn what each tool does and check what best matches their requirements.

Customer Experience Lifecycle / journey

Get Ready for Customer Experience Design Now! #CXDNow

 I will be interviewing Doug Folds, the product manager for IBM’s new Journey Designer product and one of the sponsors of the show to discuss his plans for bringing the practice of Customer Experience Design into the mainstream as a #NewWayToEngage.
If you are a customer experience designer, a journey mapper, an omni-channel marketer, a startup founder, a product manager or just someone who is interested in understanding this important topic further, #CXDNow is where you will expand your knowledge and hone your skills. Over the course of the series we will develop a body of work for the community that examines the business case, the core concepts and the specific practices that will enable you to design great experiences that enable your customers to find success on their journey.
While CXD has been around for quite some time now (often referred to as simply #CX, a cousin to #UX), it is just now finally coming into it’s own, hence the name of the show, #CXDNow. The Intention is to not only address the current state of the field but also to impress upon the business community the urgency for adopting these practices NOW. Given the soon to be released book, “X – The Experience of Business Meets Design” from my friend and colleague Brian Solis, and the other increase in interest and focus on this subject from organizations like IBM and others, the time to better understand this subject is definitely upon us.
I first began exploring the idea of journey mapping while working as the Chief of eBusiness at the United States Mint back in 1999, where I was charged with digital marketing responsibilities for the numismatist community (aka coin collectors). It was there that I developed what I called the “Customer Experience Lifecycle” (below), which later lead to my development of the Engagement Matrix while working with Palm and ultimately the Engagement Wheel while working with the American Heart Association while serving as a Social Business leader at Deloitte Digital.




What I came to realize was that organizations needed to go beyond customer-centricity, especially given how much lip service had been paid to that idea over the years without practical change in attitude or action. Now as a result of our increasingly transparent, connected market, it’s time for radical action, it’s time to embrace greater empathy, not only for customers, but also for employees, contractors and partners. In fact, as I think of #CXDNow, I believe there are three primary pillars that need to be explored:

1. The business value of customer empathy
2. Design thinking applied to the overall customer experience
3. How we work together to create greater success

While each show in the series and posts to this blog will address its own set of issues, I am, as is often the case, looking at this opportunity more holistically. At the end of the series, it is my hope that we will have produced a unique collection of insights and resources that can be utilized to bring Customer Experience Design to more organizations and more opportunities to customer experience designers as a result.