B2B marketers have employed account-based marketing (ABM) for well over a decade, but the approach has quickly begun gaining currency over the past few years and that growth is expected to continue. Forrester predicts that, by 2025, account-based marketing will become the main way most B2B companies identify, plan, manage, and measure buying and post-sale activity.

What goes into a successful ABM strategy? Best practices that have emerged focus on these five core areas:

• Data enrichment
• Account targeting.
• Personalization and/or predictive recommendations.
• Interaction management.
• Performance measurement.

MarTech’s Account-Based Marketing Tools: A Marketer’s Guide discusses each of these ABM strategy elements in more detail and shows how ABM platforms help marketers achieve these strategic objectives.

Also included in this free 56-page report are profiles of ABM tools vendors, capabilities comparisons and recommended steps for evaluating and purchasing. Visit Digital Marketing Depot to get your copy now.

The post 5 key elements of successful ABM strategies appeared first on MarTech.

• Have achieved a meaningful level of brand awareness in the market,
• Deliver messages that resonate with prospects and demonstrate intent,
• Close the deal by addressing pain points/solving problems.

Leading with awareness

Brand awareness is a requirement for successful ABM campaigns.

“You really need to have a baseline level of awareness in the marketplace,” said Megan Creighton, head of digital strategy for The Ricciardi Group, a boutique B2B marketing agency, who spoke at The MarTech Conference. “People really need to know who you are and you need to be part of the conversation in order for any of your downstream programs to really thrive.”

When you engage your ideal customer, they should know about you.

“In order for your message to be well received, I think that the person receiving it has to really feel that you’re a credible person to deliver that message in order for them to buy,” said Creighton. “So, being able to bolster your position in the marketplace is what is going to make your thought leadership resonate and what’s going to make that person on the receiving end feel more comfortable about interacting with your brand and wanting to go on that buying journey process with your brand.”

Top-of-funnel awareness messaging should prepare the way for and be consistent with messaging delivered further down the funnel, e.g. engagement, nurturing audiences and, ultimately, sales presentations.

“Once we raise the profile of the brand and have that baseline awareness, then we are able to get hyper-targeted from there, which is the fun part,” Creighton said.

Messaging has to resonate

To get the most out of any engagement with a prospect, the message has to resonate. So, marketers should use the data they have to create messages that do just that.

Dig deeper: How to use AI and machine learning to personalize and optimize campaigns

“Accounts are made up of people who are making the decisions and they have preferences on how they want to be [reached],” said Creighton.

Content should demonstrate awareness of the market in order to create a personal connection. Website content, social media messages, email, and other communications must deliver consistent messages in order to achieve maximum success.

Researching the market can also help identify key prospects. B2B brands should consider content syndication programs and surveys with customized questions that yield insights when prospects engage with this content.

“Identify…who was really showing that they were actively researching and showing a high intent for a solution that the brand is offering,” Creighton said.

Message your ability to address challenges

Once a prospect is aware of your solution, has engaged and demonstrated intent, addressing pain points and articulating the benefits of your solution become the mission.

“Now that we’ve identified that [accounts] are also expressing a level of intent… they may be more likely to give us more information,” said Creighton.

Deeper market analysis can also be prioritized. For instance, sales for a product or service related to your business’s offerings could be on the rise. Knowing who among your prospects is showing intent for those related products will help you prioritize the prospects your business should target.

Data from customer interactions and surveys will help identify topics and content for nurturing campaigns and for audience segmentation.

Register for The MarTech Conference here.

The post 3 best practices for B2B ABM marketers appeared first on MarTech.

We asked Annamarie Andrews, VP for global marketing at Cielo, an international talent acquisition partner, to walk us through two programmatic B2B ad campaigns — how they did it and what they learned along the way. 

“When we consider programmatic advertising, I tend to put things in two different buckets … brand and demand,” says Andrews. “Brand is the long game. If people don’t know who we are or what we do, they aren’t going to reply to our e-mail, send us an RFP or answer our phone call. The demand side is connecting with the right organizations that we know, that we want to win to grow. So think about programmatic ad campaigns in those two buckets. Is it leaning with brand and brand awareness or is it leaning with really more targeted sales messaging to the accounts that we know we want to win or that we know are in the market for our services?” 

Last year, the company launched two campaigns. One in the U.S., where the company was pushing into a sector they’d never been in before, was demand focused. The other was an international brand campaign which included introducing the company in several nations. It was also part of their global brand refresh.

Dig deeper: Get With The Programmatic: A Primer On Programmatic Advertising

“We shifted from a really specific category within talent acquisition called recruitment process. outsourcing,” Andrews says. “Now we’re much bigger and broader and do everything from executive search to more high-value transformational consulting. We’re trying to own a new and different space in the minds of our buyers.”

Moving to account-based marketing

The campaigns were launched as Andrews and her team were re-thinking how they approached digital advertising and how to make it more effective. One outcome of this process was a shift to a more account-based marketing approach. To do this they partnered with 6Sense, an ABM platform provider. 

For the global brand effort, Andrews and her team used 6Sense Targeting, which found “more than 160 accounts that we wanted to get our message and information through,’” says Andrews. “We never layered on buying intent or where they are in the buying process because frankly we didn’t care, we just wanted to get awareness and visibility.”

For the U.S. demand campaign they then dug deeper to find out which executives at these accounts would be the most interested in Cielo’s services. These people have the same responsibilities but may have different titles — chief HR officer, chief people officer, chief challenge officer. They also wanted to connect with the people in the role a step below them, the VPs for talent acquisition and/or human resources. 

Constructing personas

You can never know your customer too well in marketing, especially in a demand campaign. Which is why Andrews and her team went beyond the job titles, adding demographic and psychographic data to construct personas. These are then used to tailor the messaging.

“We always start with, ‘How can we connect the personal value that someone will gain from our new brand or our services and tailor our messaging there?’” Andrews says.

This is part of a messaging matrix or framework for creating headlines, supporting copy, proof points for the initial creatives. 

“Always leading first with that top level message, then think about the visual design and the way that it connects,” Andrews says. “Consider everything from important keywords that are speaking to pain points that we know that these personas have down to color theory and color and shape of button to people versus iconography.”

The customer experience after the ad

Then comes something equally important for both brand and demand campaigns: Determining what the experience should be when the person goes from an ad to a landing page, to an offer or to a piece of content.

For the demand campaign, this requires further segmenting the audience into where their organization is in the buying process. 

“We couldn’t do this before we had the capabilities within 6Sense,” Andrews says. “We could target based on self-reported demographics or singular points of digital behaviors. We were never able to say based on this cumulative activity across an entire organization, we have a pretty good guess about the actions that they’re taking and what that means in terms of where they are in their buying process. That has really completely been a game changer to our strategy and making sure we’re spending money on the right accounts at the right places.”

There are three tiers in this segmentation:

1. Low intent/beginning of the buying journey.
2. Mid intent/mid journey.
3. High intent/end journey.

This lets them further refine the messaging matrix by asking what pain points do you think they’re trying to solve at each point in the journey. 

This tiered approach to advertising helped Andrews prove a hypothesis that was built into the campaign from the start: Your ads will get more engagement when they’re being served to people that are later in the buying stage. Knowing this informed their pricing strategy for ad buying. “If we only had $10 we’re going to put two on low intent and the rest on mid- and high-intent because that’s where we’re seeing more engagement and more conversions.”

Now that they understood the impact of tailoring to the buying stage, the Cielo team started tailoring according to industry, adding industry-specific language and pain points to the messaging.

Don’t set it and forget it

The ads were distributed on the Google display ad network, LinkedIn and a B2B network via 6Sense. “It takes and distributes our ads across a multitude of sites and depending on our personas or where we’re trying to target,” says Andrews. “If we think about the more brand-focused campaigns, we will use the Facebook ad network which includes Instagram, but that isn’t ever our main source.”

After segmentation, the biggest draw of programmatic advertising is automation. Buying ad space, running the ad and more are done automatically. Andrews says this may make marketers think it’s a set it and forget it operation. Do that and you miss out on key data.

“A piece of work that we did after running a campaign for a month is going and diving into the detailed URLs to know what sites the ads are being served to and creating a list that we now use repeatedly,” says Andrews. “That pulls out and removes URLs that were either underperforming or were places we actually didn’t want our brands appearing. One perfect example is we didn’t want our ads appearing on any sites that were focused on politics because that’s divisive.”

How well did they do?

The big difference between brand and demand campaigns is the outcome: What you want the audience to do, think and feel from seeing/engaging with the campaign. So, how did these campaigns do?

“[For the brand campaign] our ultimate measure of success was, did we get this new brand in a new category in front of more than 160 organizations?” Andrews says. “We were able to deliver impressions for 98%.” 

About the demand campaign, Andrews says, “We’re now able to understand how these campaigns are influencing one opportunity. And not just winning an opportunity, we have seen really positive indicators with this hyper focused targeting on buying stage to deal velocity and increase in win rates.”

The post How to create winning B2B programmatic ad campaigns appeared first on MarTech.

From corner office strategy sessions to product development sprint huddles, business and tech leaders are exploring how to build, transform and add a PLG strategy to their business. 

So, why PLG now? 

The team at OpenView Partners, a venture capital firm, makes this thoughtful observation about the rise and appeal of PLG as a GTM strategy:

“Software has become a fundamental utility powering our working lives — just like water, electricity, the internet and mobile broadband. We used to ‘own’ and then ‘rent'”‘ software; now we simply use it.”

The Age of Connected Work

B2B market dynamics are also a driving factor:

• B2B buyer expectations have changed. User-driven control and self-service align with the way many professionals want to buy and use software and apps.
• Traditional SaaS buyer-seller relationships are no longer productive. The SaaS sales and marketing landscape has shifted. Buyers are not engaging as their balance sheet and tech closet are full of half-used subscriptions.
• Capital models have evolved. The “growth at all costs” mindset where capital was cheap is in the rear-view mirror. Profitability, efficiency and precision are today’s expectations for both vendors and the organizations they sell to. 

PLG enthusiasm is spreading across software providers, while interest in new ways to buy and use software intrigues business and tech professionals.

As a result, software GTM teams are taking a fresh look at how and what they develop, how they sell and distribute and how they charge and account for their software. 

Dig deeper: 5 strategies to become a more impactful, buyer-driven marketing org

What is PLG?

PLG, which stands for product-led growth, is a business methodology and a go-to-market strategy for developing, marketing, selling and using software.

An organization that gets PLG right will have its user/customer acquisition, expansion, conversion, retention and even development priorities driven primarily by customer usage and the product.

The goal is for a product to deliver value so easily and quickly revenue is generated by more efficiently jumpstarting and expanding customer relationships.

Datadog, Confluent, Zoom, Airtable, Calendly and Slack are examples of PLG companies at various levels of maturity and adoption.

Today, thousands of companies are pivoting or exploring PLG GTM models, with many more PLG entrepreneurs readying new solutions for the market.  

3 important PLG GTM lessons so far 

Let’s explore a few important lessons software companies are learning about applying GTM methods in PLG’s first generation. 

1. Not every company has the right product or right customer target for a PLG strategy

Despite the enthusiasm of investors and executives, not all products are ideal or ready to deliver the value of product-led strategies. The success of PLG enterprises (a few noted above) may make it look like the product sells itself, but that’s not true. 

Thinking a company can just create a product in a vacuum and it will go viral is unrealistic. In addition, software companies that try to take an existing product and slap on a PLG GTM model without the proper features or support to deliver value through the product’s lifetime are set up for failure.

“One of the most important lessons with PLG is that you can be very successful in getting pros and users signed up to test and use a product, only to realize the product was not ready for self-serve, easy to use, or is ready to expand beyond a single use case,” shares Manuel Rietzsch, B2B demand marketing executive. 

Like any good GTM strategy, PLG can be effective when the product is designed and developed for specific use cases and the entire company understands how and by whom the product is purchased, supported, managed and expanded. 

Experienced GTM leaders advise PLG will not be successful if the product:

• Is complicated to use or application requires technical know-how and complex integrations.
• Requires hands-on help and is not self-serve, especially at customer onboarding.
• Has a non-intuitive user interface (UI) and customer experience (CX).
• Is not supported by a well-defined and documented strategy to market, sell and expand usage. 

2. Developing a comprehensive conversion program is a must

Incorporating a PLG approach in the first motion of your GTM strategy has become an established method of filling the pipeline for big-name companies like Zoom, Slack and Stripe.

PLG builds this incredible base of buyers, but converting these prospects into paying customers requires a full customer lifecycle GTM strategy.

As Rietzsch puts it, “You can spend so much, time, money and resource to acquire new customers, then turn over to customer success or sales only to realize you’re not fully prepared to guide customers, expand use cases and develop deeper relationships required to increase ARR and move to company-wide usage.”

Some of the techniques that PLG veterans talk about to convert initial users into paying customers and accounts include:

• Thoughtful usage paywalls inside the product to access more capabilities and features by more people in the organization.
• On-demand interactive demos to experience new or full capabilities that drive interest, demand and expansion. 
• Offering timely smart trials to unlock and expand beyond a single user or use case.
• An ability to share the app with colleagues to either try the product or to collaborate with others using it in new ways. 

Done right, these PLG core methods are more natural in a customer’s journey.

A series of relentless marketing-driven subscription or upgrade offers or automated sales outreaches, which have defined the traditional SaaS GTM era, are simply not as effective.

3. Cross-functional and departmental collaboration is key to PLG’s success

PLG is great for stoking buyers’ interest and showing a product’s capabilities. However, once buyers are in, you need data, processes and defined roles to convert usage into annual recurring revenue (ARR). To make PLG scale, you also need key organizational roles to be in sync. 

The role of sales is among the biggest changes many experienced PLG pros cite.

“There are two common mistakes: involving sales and not involving sales. Recognize that PLG will be seen as disruptive to your sales team, so partner with them from the start. But resist the temptation to put a revenue target on PLG prematurely. Your first priority needs to be delivering value to future buyers – and that value should be great enough to cause a little discomfort in your organization,” guides Joe Chernov, CMO at Pendo.io. 

To provide a flavor, here is a quick snapshot of a few of the changes for marketing, sales, customer success and product teams with a PLG GTM approach. 

Marketing

Marketing responsibilities must be well defined at every stage of the user-customer-account relationships. For example, messaging must be contextual and tailored for every stage of user and customer interaction. 

Case in point, webpages must speak to users in the beginning to appeal to individuals and “jobs to be done” mindset. As a user looks to drive more adoption, messaging and outreach must focus on “customer” value and the value to their organization as a whole. 

This is the right message, right time that marketers always strive for. In the PLG model, personalized, precision communications are table stakes. 

Sales

The traditional SaaS model was to hire a software sales pro for every $1M+ in SaaS ARR you want to generate. In the PLG model, sales get involved primarily once users begin adoption. 

Account-based models complement PLG but at the right time of gaining user adoption and expansion. Also, successful enterprise PLG models can rely on a “sales-assist” motion to turn users into customer accounts. 

The sales-assist motion helps build trust through a consultative approach, not just selling more software during a critical time when your product is establishing value. 

Customer success/support

This area has the most nuance depending on your product type and applications. The most important move here is to have ample self-service support and the right level of customer success and service to match the user, customer and account stages and needs. 

For example, the initial engagement may be all self-serve. With deeper adoption, customer support resources and/or customer success likely will be required.  

Product

An often overlooked reality is that the product team must play a lead role in the GTM strategy, not a back-office support function. 

Product pros rely on usage data, interaction within the UI and listening to the user base to evolve the tools into products and products into solutions with an eye toward customer use cases and changing needs. 

Dig deeper: How to align B2B sales and marketing teams

PLG is a company-wide commitment

What’s clear is the traditional SaaS buyer-seller model is tired and broken. PLG is rapidly rising as a strong GTM strategy. 

However, as many GTM teams are experiencing this is not as simple as choosing to implement a new model with a few product features and some tweaks to sales and marketing. 

Rather, PLG requires a company-wide commitment and a well-thought-out, user- and customer-driven approach to developing, selling and delivering products.

The post Product-led growth: 3 important lessons from the front line appeared first on MarTech.

Our new report, “B2B Marketing Automation Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide” is now available for free download.

Overall, perhaps the most compelling is the increasing demand for personalization. B2B buyers, like consumers, expect sellers to provide experiences that meet their needs and concerns. It’s hard to do that at any scale without using automation.

The personalization imperative

Personalization is an increasingly important part of B2B marketing. Salesforce’s survey of B2B buyers and marketers found 69% expect companies to anticipate their needs, while 60% are comfortable with having their personal information gathered for the purpose of personalizing their experiences.

The benefits of using B2B marketing automation

The proliferation of channels and devices makes it difficult to target prospects with the right messages, on the right devices, at the right times. The rapid shift to all-online interactions sparked by the COVID pandemic also raised the level of competition in the inbox, so relevant messaging is more important than ever before.

Prospects are managing more of the buying process themselves. They are creating short lists of vendors by researching brand websites and social channels without ever speaking to a sales rep.

Being effective in this environment means marketers must be creative, targeted and aligned with sales goals; they must also have visibility into buyer attributes and behaviors. These challenging market dynamics and increased ROI pressure make these potential benefits of a MAP more attractive than ever.

These benefits include:

Increased marketing efficiency. Automating time-consuming, manual tasks around content
creation, management and personalization; campaign scheduling and execution; data hygiene; communication with sales; and lead nurturing, which saves time and improves productivity.

Enhanced ability to generate more and better-qualified leads. Marketing automation can
combine multiple criteria with a lead scoring system to generate and identify sales-qualified leads.

A multichannel view of prospect behavior. Today’s MAPs integrate multiple channels and
devices — including social media and mobile — to create more comprehensive prospect profiles
and holistic views of prospect behavior.

Better alignment of sales and marketing goals. MAPs can help align sales and marketing
efforts to ensure that sales reps are working with sales-ready leads.

Improved lead conversion and ROI. Numerous studies have found that using a marketing
automation system can increase conversions.

For much more detail about the potential benefits of B2B MAPs, download the latest edition of our free report, “B2B Marketing Automation Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide.”

The post Does your organization need a marketing automation platform? appeared first on MarTech.

With our increasing reliance on intent data and its broadening definition, now is a good time to assess the state of intent and plan on what might be ahead.

I tapped into a group of trusted B2B marketers to gain perspective on all things intent. In this article, we will: 

• Sprinkle in knowledge gained from a recent roundtable with B2B marketing leaders on the data, tools and processes used in sales and marketing account-based go-to-market (GTM) motions. 
• Get a broad view from three savvy data and intent executives who have seen a few things in building Michelin-rated worthy GTM strategies. 

Together, we can capture a snapshot of intent’s current state, understand the challenges and opportunities and preview what should be on the menu going forward. 

What is the number one value proposition of intent in today’s GTM efforts? 

Marketing is playing a larger, more proactive role in the buying-selling process. With B2B buyers and buying teams spending more time doing their research online and through peer networks, sales has less access to buyers. 

This big shift has thrust intent into the spotlight to identify and prioritize the right accounts to reach out to based on account and buyer behavior and, in turn, catapulting outbound sales and outreach as today’s number one intent use case. 

Mike Burton, co-founder and head of commercial sales at intent industry pioneer Bombora, puts it this way:

“Because sales sit so close to revenue, intent data can galvanize action and increase sales productivity. This sales use case has a compound effect making other GTM functions more impactful including demand gen, SDRs and field marketers.”

Orchestrated timing between sales and marketing still remains a significant challenge, largely because of the data, tech and process silos that exist across departments.

Intent data is being relied on to integrate GTM motions and define roles across functions helping sales and marketing stay in sync and to identify the best opportunity accounts at the right time. 

Kerry Cunningham, director of research at revenue technology leader 6Sense, shares:

“Most buyers are researching your solution and don’t know your company or solution exists. Here’s the reality — you lose 100% of the deals you don’t compete for. The goal is to never miss an opportunity when your solution can solve a customer problem or fill a need.

Intent plays an essential role in exposing account timing and need to prioritize account and buyer engagement.”

Dig deeper: How to leverage intent and engagement in the buying cycle

What can GTM leaders do now to get more value from intent signals?

Sales and marketing teams are not leveraging intent to its full value or potential yet. 

Beyond account identification and prioritization (timing), more GTM teams are starting to apply intent to identify and align buyer and account needs with contextual content and messaging. 

David Crane, VP of portfolio marketing and marketing chief of staff at intent aggregator Intentsify, says:

“If we boil down all the use cases across all the GTM functions that leverage intent data, the common denominator is efficiency.

“Rather than marketers, BDRs, sales pros and customer success reps having to spend valuable time and effort to understand buyers’ specific needs and pains, they can gain insights directly from intent signals.

“Done right, GTM teams can quickly supply buyers with the information they want (e.g., content, creative assets, talk tracks) when they need it.”

As more GTM teams adopt account-based tools and more effectively use their websites to implement and manage ABM programs, intent’s value is increasing. 

More than a quarter of an ABM platform’s value is the intent data it generates to use in sales and marketing activities, according to Gartner.

When intent powers ABM tools and an organization’s webpages and these components are used together, marketers highlight the increased intelligence they can put to work resulting in higher conversions to sales opportunity and revenue. 

Cunningham emphatically states:

“The most valuable signals we don’t pay attention to are on your website. Only 3% of visitors fill out forms, so relying on this tactic is futile. Rather, deanonymizing traffic and using intent is the key to unlocking immediate opportunity. GTM teams need to harvest this info otherwise, you will waste all that marketing and sales time and effort.”

Dig deeper: Using intent as a unit of B2B campaign measurement

Where can intent play the biggest role in the immediate future?

With the changing B2B buying-selling landscape, experts highlight that to get more value out of intent data investment, we must:

• Focus on where and how to apply intent during the GTM process.
• Collapse data and functional silos that leave big gaps. 

Bombora’s Burton cites two areas in his work across more than 650 customers: 

“The first is using intent for strategic planning. This means understanding what is happening across different cohorts of your total available market (TAM) and where your target accounts are in their buying stages.

The second is augmentation of first-party anonymous data, especially as third-party data becomes scarcer. We see leading organizations creating a first-party data mart and augmenting it with intent data. Having this info appended allows for precision targeting at scale.”

Crane weighs in on what he is seeing across a rapidly growing Intentsify customer base: 

“First, GTM teams and the data science and ops teams that support them, need to get better about baking intent data into their GTM strategies from the start. Today, intent data is treated more like an after-market component that individual roles use but don’t always share across functions.

Secondly, GTM teams need to improve how they convert intent signals into actionable insights as well as their processes for quickly acting on those insights while the data is still relevant. These challenges are likely a consequence of difficulty in effectively leveraging multiple intent data sources, which we see more and more B2B teams focused on solving.”

Intent as marketing’s essential ingredient in GTM strategy

Intent data is seeing an unprecedented rate of adoption as B2B GTM teams focus on:

• Efficiency and productivity internally.
• Customer experience and engagement with buyers and accounts externally.

While outbound sales are the top use case today for intent as noted by our experts, we’re seeing marketing teams be the driver of activation. As Cunningham succinctly summarizes:

“Marketing’s job is to ensure organizations never miss out on an opportunity to compete for a deal; this is how marketing becomes indispensable!”

The post The state of intent data in 2023 and beyond appeared first on MarTech.

In doing so, marketers need to deliver the experiences and content that are appropriate depending on how advanced the prospect is in the buyer’s journey. This means organizing a strategy around the various levels of engagement that your marketing team reaches with their target.

“It’s our job to make the connections with buyers in the channels that they’re in, and that now requires more digital touchpoints and involves more individuals in the decision-making buying group,” said Stephanie Swinyer, precision marketing company Integrate’s head of revenue marketing, at The MarTech Conference.

First, you need to know how many individuals within the organization that you plan to communicate with for a given message or experience. Then, line these strategies up with actual companies in your target market or region.

3 levels of targeted engagement

Here are three basic levels or flavors of engagement around which you can organize your ABM strategy. Depending on how engaged the prospect is, you will be serving up experiences that are one-to-many, one-to-few, or one-to-one.

Account (one-to-many). Anybody within the organization can be engaged with these experiences. This is early in the organization’s buyer journey, when individuals might be doing their own research on your company’s offerings. They also might be researching your competitors or reading reviews posted by industry peers.

Based on the intent signals generated by these interactions, your team can determine if the account is in-market and looking to buy. They might be searching for prices or showing they’re interested in other ways.

Demand Unit (one-to-few). This is a smaller group within the organization tasked with making key decisions around buying.

“When we’ve determined that an account is in-market, that is the impetus for us to go into that demand unit or buying committee,” said Swinyer.

Instead of passively showing ads on a peer review site, you’ll message these demand unit members on more personalized channels like social media, or invite them to a webinar that gives them more information about your company’s offerings.

Individual (one-to-one). Further down the funnel, your ABM strategy will lead you to key executives with buying authority. The sales team will also be involved with personal calls or meetings. For marketing communications, these messages will be personalized to mirror the one-to-one attention that a live agent provides.

Dig deeper: Why we care about B2B marketing: A guide for marketers

Delivering the right experiences to key accounts

The levels of engagement are shaped like a pyramid, with many experiences delivered one-to-many, and only a handful of one-to-one messages delivered to the key individuals at the very top.

At the bottom of the pyramid, your one-to-many experiences include paid media, display ads, retargeting and emails designed to nurture all prospects within your target market.

“Think of this as your ongoing effort across marketing and sales to qualify, discover and nurture those that fit your ideal customer profile,” said Swinyer.

From these initial engagements across all target accounts, new experiences higher up in the pyramid will be introduced. Because it’s a smaller pot of contacts, more attention and resources will be paid to the way your team engages these higher-value individuals. That’s why one-to-few is the best approach.

“When you get to one-to-few, this is really the account-level,” Swinyer said. “So you’re thinking about the account story you’re telling.”

At this point, marketing is delivering more targeted campaigns and also aligning with sales and their actions, which might include a product demo or call blitz on these key people.

This leads to the key executives at the top of the pyramid, where more data and intelligence will be used to fuel personalization. More paid media can also target these individuals one-to-one.

When your ABM strategy is organized with these distinct tiers of engagement, all of your marketing resources can be spread out efficiently to move buyers through their journey.

The post How to sharpen your B2B marketing experience strategy appeared first on MarTech.

6Sense offers AI-driven insights into account behavior, identifying accounts to target and generating buying-stage predictions. Integrate manages and measures campaigns across demand channels, measuring impact and guiding optimization.

Why we care. It has long been clear that ABM solutions, as originally conceived, do some things better than others. Few offer a complete B2B revenue platform, hence a series of acquisitions, integrations and partnerships in the space.

Integrate and 6Sense have proffers aimed at solving parts of the B2B jigsaw. It makes sense to bring them together.

How it works. For mutual Integrate and 6Sense customers, the new feature will be available within Integrate’s Demand Acceleration Platform. Users will be able to select target account lists relevant to a campaign and drag them into the campaign as a domain list.

Users can choose the cadence for importing updated account lists.

The post Integrate and 6Sense announce ABM partnership appeared first on MarTech.

Let’s take a look at two important steps to take when executing a successful ABM go-to-market strategy.

1. Make sure the ABM strategy is cross-functional

“Whatever we do has to be cross-functionaI involving the people that are going to impact [the strategy] and are going to touch the accounts and the buying committees at those accounts,” said Scott Vaughan, chief advisor for Vaughan GTM Advisory at The MarTech Conference.

He added, “One of the things that really gets you off on the right foot, not just when you’re starting but every year in your planning, or every quarter in your quarterly business reviews, is to go back to the definition and the blueprint that you’re building for your account-based strategy.”

The strategy needs to include a range of functions that fit with the markets and geographic areas where your buyers are. And the strategy should be reviewed regularly to make sure the strategy remains aligned with your customer base.

“Does it still fit?” Vaughan asked. “Have we optimized it? What do we learn? This regular review process will help you find the cracks and challenges where you need a makeover…Getting it straight, reviewing it, optimizing it and going through those success metrics consistently and regularly, at least on a quarterly basis, is essential to continue to make progress to get the most value out of an account-based strategy.”

2. Keep strategy as the top priority along with the people executing it

“Make sure you absolutely slow down and focus on strategy and the people involved first,” said Vaughan. “Technology comes last. One of the big mistakes is you get so excited and energized that you’re going to move to an account-based strategy, or you’re going to revise your account-based strategy, that you need to run out and change every process and  buy new technology. That’s probably all true, but that’s not how you want to start.”

Organizations can run off the rails with new technology if they don’t have a solid strategy in place first.

Also, there should be more than just one leader running the entire ABM show.

“It takes a village — you need integrated plays across functions, departments, systems,” Vaughan explained. “You don’t want to anoint somebody as the ABM person because that’s when you put somebody out on an island, and they’re not set up to succeed.” 

Spread out responsibilities across the marketing team and other departments. To avoid silos, have more than just one single ABM person on each team. This will make sure that the ABM go-to-market approach is a connected strategy.

Organizations can then decide what kind of ABM strategy they’re looking to execute. Do they want a one-to-all strategy, where they target every prospect with ABM tactics? Do they want a one-to-one strategy where they are training the ABM strategy on one particular high-priority buyer? It’s up to the organization to find the right mix, either with one or multiple strategies.

“You may start one-to-one to really get an understanding of what works for you in terms of account-based [strategies],” said Vaughan. “[Or] you may start one-to-few to get your feet wet.”

Now you can pick your technology

“Once you have that set, then you can begin to think about technology, automation, scale analytics, and actually how you’re going to activate,” Vaughan said.

He added, “A lot of times what we find is you can start with some of your current stack tools and make small adaptations…The label of ABM platforms vary widely, so we also want to be thoughtful and cautious.”

Dig deeper: 24 questions to ask account-based marketing vendors during a demo

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Sendoso’s full offering supports the sending of a wide variety of gifts, not just cards, with customization and personalization available. The primary audience has been B2B marketers looking for creative ways to engage with prospects.

Personalized experiences. “The idea is not just sending a logoed coffee mug, but doing really personalized experiences in a way to open doors for meetings or demos, or reward customers for retention, or thank employees for hard work.” The explanation came from Karen Steele, Sendoso’s chief marketing adviser.

She also filled in some of the company’s background. “In 2016 the company was founded and they started out in the eGifting space. Then they built this whole marketplace of products and gifts — including high-end stuff and custom stuff — and they built their own warehouses. They have complete, turnkey fulfilment services, so that anywhere you are in the world you can be sending these experiences to your customers and prospects.”

Why we care. Emails, phone calls, white papers, webinars — there are many ways for marketing and sales organizations to drive acquisition and retention. But even B2B buyers enjoy experiences, especially creative and personalized ones. Steele has been on the sending end — she used Sendoso as a marketing executive at Marketo, LeanData and Near — and she’s been on the receiving end too (not necessarily via Sendoso).

“I had someone reach out to me on LinkedIn — and what he did was really smart. He went and found me on Facebook and realized I had two dogs, Henry and Louie. So when he sent me a gift, he sent a custom package addressed to Henry and Louie that had dog treats and toys. It created a personal connection with me; I would have taken a meeting in a heartbeat.

Dig deeper: B2B marketing confidence survives budget pressures

An onboarding strategy. Sendoso Express is intended, of course, to make SMBs aware of Sendoso’s paid services. “100 percent,” said Steele. “We have a variety of different paid services but this is our first toe in the pool on the product-led growth side of the house that everybody’s talking about right now. It’s a great opportunity for small to mid-sized companies to experience this.”

She also observed that the benefits of eGifting are not restricted to B2B marketing. “As companies get more mature and sophisticated and move into a different part of the market, we have a very robust marketplace.”

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