Account-Based Nurturing Strategies
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This document summarizes strategies for account-based nurturing to turn target accounts into customers. It discusses how marketing funnels are evolving to focus on accounts earlier in the buying process. It then outlines several account-based nurturing strategies like always-on versus campaign-based nurturing, account-based advertising, social and website personalization, and email nurturing. It provides an example of how one company implemented an account-based nurturing campaign and achieved a 44% lift in target accounts. The document concludes with a question and answer session.
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Account-Based Nurturing Strategies
- 1. #LLCSeries #LLCSeries Account-Based Nurturing: Strategies for Turning Target Accounts into Customers SPONSORED BY
- 2. #LLCSeries Follow this webinar on LinkedIn & Twitter #LLCSeries Demand Gen Report: @DG_Report Demandbase: @Demandbase John Dering: @D_Rang
- 3. #LLCSeries #LLCSeries Prize Box For each live session you attend from the #LLCSeries, you will be entered to win an item from the Prize Box! Up to 12 entries per registrant allowed. Microsoft Surface 3 Apple Watch Sport Fitbit Flex Three #C2C16 Tickets
- 4. #LLCSeries About Demand Gen Report • Launched in 2007 to track best practices in lead generation • Newsletter has grown to more than 30,000 readers • We also offer a menu of research and best practices reports • New audio/video podcasts at DemandGenReport.com @DG_Report http://linkd.in/DG_Specialists
- 6. #LLCSeries Panelists John Dering Director, Marketing Programs Demandbase MODERATOR: Andrew Gaffney Publisher, Demand Gen Report @D_Rang
- 7. ©2015 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 7 A Brief History of Lead Nurturing
- 8. ©2015 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 8 A Brief History of Lead Nurturing
- 9. ©2015 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 9 Lead Nurturing Goes Digital The Digital Age Give Marketers Tools to Automate
- 10. ©2015 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 10 Lead Nurturing Goes Digital Nurture Email Nurture Email Nurture EmailWait Wait
- 11. ©2015 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 11 What’s your score? Lead Nurturing Grows Up
- 12. ©2015 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 12 Lead Nurturing Grows Up Marketing Scores Leads
- 13. ©2015 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 13 Lead Nurturing Grows Up Marketing Scores Leads • Implicit Data • Explicit Data
- 14. ©2015 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 14 Lead Nurturing Grows Up Marketing Scores Leads • Implicit Data • Explicit Data MQL
- 15. ©2015 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 15 White Paper Webinar Web Visits Analyst Report Pricing Page 2 1 2 4 2 Peggy Smith Senior Manager, Professional Services Carson Plastics Industrial, MA Not a role or a department we sell into. Reject. Sales Reaction Limitations of Lead Scoring Alone
- 16. ©2015 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 16 White Paper Webinar Web Visits Analyst Report Pricing Page 2 1 2 4 2 1 1 2 0 0 Peggy Smith Senior Manager, Professional Services Carson Plastics Industrial, MA Not a role or a department we sell into. Reject. Bob Clark Director, Marketing Carson Plastics Manufacturing, CA I’ll call and leave a message after lunch…tomorrow. Sales Reaction Limitations of Lead Scoring Alone
- 17. ©2015 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 17 White Paper Webinar Web Visits Analyst Report Pricing Page 2 1 2 4 2 1 1 2 0 0 0 0 3 2 2 Peggy Smith Senior Manager, Professional Services Carson Plastics Industrial, MA Not a role or a department we sell into. Reject. Bob Clark Director, Marketing Carson Plastics Manufacturing, CA I’ll call and leave a message after lunch…tomorrow. Joseph McLaren Manager, Sales Operations Carson Plastics Durable Goods, MA Looks interested, but sales isn’t who we sell into. Sales Reaction Limitations of Lead Scoring Alone
- 18. ©2015 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 18 White Paper Webinar Web Visits Analyst Report Pricing Page 2 1 2 4 2 1 1 2 0 0 0 0 3 2 2 3 2 7 6 4 Peggy Smith Senior Manager, Professional Services Carson Plastics Industrial, MA There’s something going on. We should call the account. Not a role or a department we sell into. Reject. Bob Clark Director, Marketing Carson Plastics Manufacturing, CA I’ll call and leave a message after lunch…tomorrow. Joseph McLaren Manager, Sales Operations Carson Plastics Durable Goods, MA Looks interested, but sales isn’t who we sell into. Sales Reaction Limitations of Lead Scoring Alone
- 19. ©2015 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 19 Marketing Funnel is Evolving
- 20. ©2015 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 20 Marketing Funnel is Evolving
- 21. ©2015 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 21 Marketing Funnel is Evolving
- 22. ©2015 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 22 Marketing Funnel is Evolving
- 23. ©2015 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 23 Why is the Funnel Changing? Typical B2B Buying Process $
- 24. ©2015 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 24 Why is the Funnel Changing? SALES CALL LEAD SOCIAL MEDIA WEBSITE VISIT SEARCH DETERMINE PROBLEM WEBSITE VISIT WEBSITE VISIT WEBSITE VISIT Typical B2B Buying Process $
- 25. ©2015 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 25 Why is the Funnel Changing? SALES CALL LEAD SOCIAL MEDIA WEBSITE VISIT SEARCH DETERMINE PROBLEM WEBSITE VISIT WEBSITE VISIT WEBSITE VISIT Typical B2B Buying Process $ Marketing Spend is too late in the cycle
- 26. ©2015 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 26 Focus on nurturing what matters: Accounts Identify the right accounts to nurture Market to & nurture those accounts Measure by accounts STEP 1 STEP 2 STEP 3
- 27. ©2015 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 27 How to Nurture Accounts Always-On Nurture vs Campaigns Account-Based Advertising Account-Based Retargeting Social Account Nurturing Personalization Email
- 28. ©2015 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 28 Campaign vs. Always on
- 29. ©2015 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 29 Consistency pays off in B2B Always-On Campaigns see better results than discrete campaigns: 29% increase in companies lifted 20% higher CTR127% more website engagement WEBSITE ACTIVITY BY COMPANY EXAMPLE DISCRETE CAMPAIGN CAMPAIGN AVG. DROPOFF -90% target account traffic
- 30. ©2015 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 30 Account-Based Advertising TARGET ACCOUNTS B2B Display B2B Mobile B2B Video 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 General Motors 152.3 General Electric 146.9 ADP, Inc. 34.4 UnitedHealth Group 72.9 Qlogic Corporation 2.3 Amazon.com 128.4 Motorola Solutions, Inc. 15.9 Capital One Financial 37.5 Xerox Corporation 12.3 Medtronic Inc. 52.3 COMPANY NAME REVENUE ($b) ADVERTISE ONLY TO THOSE COMPANIES ACROSS THE WEB MEASURE RESULTS BY ACCOUNT
- 31. ©2015 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 31 Account-Based Retargeting WEBSITE TRAFFIC FROM SINGLE COMPANY Make Buying Signals Actionable
- 32. ©2015 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 32 Account-Based Retargeting WEBSITE TRAFFIC FROM SINGLE COMPANY PAGEVIEWS1 Make Buying Signals Actionable TIME2
- 33. ©2015 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 33 Account-Based Retargeting WEBSITE TRAFFIC FROM SINGLE COMPANY PAGEVIEWS1 CONTENT3 Product page 18 pageviews 7 unique visitors About page 10 pageviews 4 unique visitors Home page 5 pageviews 3 unique visitors Whitepaper 26 pageviews 10 unique visitors Pricing page 28 pageviews 6 unique visitors Make Buying Signals Actionable TIME2
- 34. ©2015 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 34 Account-Based Retargeting WEBSITE TRAFFIC FROM SINGLE COMPANY PAGEVIEWS1 CONTENT3 RETARGETED ADS Product page 18 pageviews 7 unique visitors About page 10 pageviews 4 unique visitors Home page 5 pageviews 3 unique visitors Whitepaper 26 pageviews 10 unique visitors Pricing page 28 pageviews 6 unique visitors Capitalize on opportunities ONLY with your target companies that are showing interest Make Buying Signals Actionable TIME2
- 35. ©2015 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 35 How to Identify New Target Accounts
- 36. ©2015 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 36 How to Identify New Target Accounts • Give Sales Marketing Intelligence
- 37. ©2015 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 37 How to Identify New Target Accounts • Give Sales Marketing Intelligence • Empower Sales to Build Lists
- 38. ©2015 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 38 How to Identify New Target Accounts • Give Sales Marketing Intelligence • Empower Sales to Build Lists • Take Action on the Lists
- 39. ©2015 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 39 Campaign Overview The campaign is designed to sell CSC’s five solution areas to approximately 300 select companies by way of a targeted, “always-on” account- nurturing campaigns. The solution areas include Applications, Big Data, Cloud, Storage as a Service and Cybersecurity. Computer Sciences Corporation is a multinational corporation providing information technology services and professional services with ~74,000 employees in over 70 countries.
- 40. ©2015 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 40 Always-On Account-Based Nurturing Target: Approximately 300 ABM Companies Personalized Display Banners for Solution Plays Landing Page w/o Registration Primary Offer / Content Personalized Retargeting Banners Landing Page w/ Registration Secondary Offer / Content Telephone Qualification Email Nurture Campaign CSC Sales Highly-focused approach to extend reach, impression & lift. The approach is based on pre-defined rules, including: • 2 unique impressions per day • Visitors from all of CSC.com, omitting career pages • Duration of 10 days
- 41. ©2015 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 41 Account-Based Retargeting Campaign Highly-focused approach to extend reach, impression & lift. The approach is based on pre-defined rules, including: • 2 unique impressions per day • Visitors from all of CSC.com, omitting career pages • Duration of 10 days Target: Global 1000 Companies Landing on CSC.com Personalized Display Banners for Solution Plays Landing Page w/o Registration Primary Offer / Content Personalized Retargeting Banners Landing Page w/ Registration Secondary Offer / Content Telephone Qualification Email Nurture Campaign CSC Sales
- 42. ©2015 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 42 Campaign Asset Details Online Banner Ads Landing Pages Online banner ads will drive traffic to the specific landing pages created for each key solution area. Each ad will highlight an offer that aligns with the Always-On campaign. *Creative assets are not final App Display Banner 1 – 300x250* App Display Banner 2 – 300x250* App Retargeting Banner 3 – 300x250* Landing Page 1 – Non-Gated* Landing Page 2 –Gated* Personalized Company Name
- 43. ©2015 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 43 CSC Results
- 44. ©2015 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 44 CSC Results 44% Lift of Target Accounts Over the Life of the Campaign
- 45. ©2015 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 45 CSC Results 44% Lift of Target Accounts Over the Life of the Campaign Excellent Revenue Forecast from Marketing Nurtured Accounts
- 46. ©2015 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 46 Account-Based Social Nurturing Organic Social Media Paid Social Media
- 47. ©2015 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 47 Account-Based Social Nurturing Organic Social Media Paid Social Media 53% Will follow your social presence during an evaluation - 2015 DemandGen Report B2B Buyer’s Survey
- 48. ©2015 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 48 Account-Based Social Nurturing
- 49. ©2015 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 49 Account-Based Social Nurturing
- 50. ©2015 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 50 Account-Based Social Nurturing
- 51. ©2015 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 51 ABM Nurturing – Website Personalization OPTIONS: Industry/Vertic al 1
- 52. ©2015 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 52 ABM Nurturing – Website Personalization OPTIONS: Industry/Vertic al 1
- 53. ©2015 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 53 ABM Nurturing – Website Personalization OPTIONS: Industry/Vertic al 1
- 54. ©2015 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 54 ABM Nurturing – Website Personalization OPTIONS: Industry/Vertic al 1 2 Company Size
- 55. ©2015 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 55 ABM Nurturing – Website Personalization OPTIONS: Industry/Vertic al 1 2 Company Size
- 56. ©2015 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 56 ABM Nurturing – Website Personalization OPTIONS: Industry/Vertic al 1 2 Company Size 3 Account Status
- 57. ©2015 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 57 ABM Nurturing – Website Personalization OPTIONS: Industry/Vertical1 2 Company Size 3 Account Status
- 58. ©2015 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 58 Account-Based Nurturing - Email
- 59. ©2015 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 59 Account-Based Nurturing - Email • Still one of the most effective channels for known
- 60. ©2015 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 60 Account-Based Nurturing - Email • Still one of the most effective channels for known • Focus on nurturing target accounts
- 61. ©2015 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 61 Account-Based Nurturing - Email • Still one of the most effective channels for known • Focus on nurturing target accounts • Tailor programs to your same account list segmentation plans
- 62. #LLCSeries Q & A // Panelists MODERATOR: Andrew Gaffney Publisher, Demand Gen Report @D_Rang John Dering Director, Marketing Programs Demandbase
- 63. #LLCSeries Thanks for attending this webinar! www3.demandgenreport.com/lls15 NEXT SESSION:
Editor's Notes
- Throughout our presentation we encourage you to interact with our speakers by typing in questions and comments using the questions pane. We will be answering questions live both during the event and after the presentation.
- Back when marketing was really just advertising (think MadMen) sales people did the true nurturing and marketing focused on creating brand awareness Sales folks used to call or send notes to prospects and customers to keep them informed of the latest trends in the industry in an effort to remain relevant, provide value, and develop more personal relationships which often helped drive sales and customer loyalty Usually their biggest asset was a rolodex and the relationships they had within it.
- When the digital age of marketing and sales arose, marketers began to have tools at their disposal that could help them automate the methods/experiences learned from the best sales people Marketing could now create an automated approach to the methods of the best sales folks using marketing automation systems For a while, this was very successful and an easy way to provide the sales people with more time to focus on generating deals as opposed to working their rolladex. The problem was that the information and targeting were static and didn’t deliver the ultimate experience that a sales person could in real time with the personal insights they had about the prospect or customer. Once these became common practice, their effectiveness quickly diminished as the automation became transparent.
- In the late 2000’s, marketing generated nurturing programs began to focus not a series of messages, but rather scoring the quality of a person in the database and passing that person to sales when their score broke a threshold that was defined as indicating a propensity to buy (a.k.a. hotness). Marketing began scoring leads to determine if they should be nurtured by markeitng activities or handed to sales. Scores are based primarily on two elements: explicit (expressed) and implicit (implied) data. This means that data in the contact record is combined with website behavior activity to create a “sales ready” measurement. And this score relies exclusively on the records being put into the scoring system (typically a marketing automation system) Certainly an evolutionary leap in marketing nurture programs from their genesis, this method proved very successful at optimizing which leads sales should focus on to follow up with at a given time – especially in high volume scenarios. And marketers could focus on acquiring net new leads and marketing to them to increase the scores and pass MQLs to sales Working to create MQLs and warm up the scores is still a top focus of marketers today, but challenges began to arise with the acquisition arm of this approach. Too often marketers would run acquisition programs through 3rd parties that base their audience on profiles or personas. The challenge here is that personas are based upon technologies like cookies that create the profiles based upon implied data. This approach can be highly inaccurate as they tend to classify based upon activities. Personas aren’t all bad, they just have limited reach and present blind spots for reaching the accounts that matter most to increasing your pipeline. Let’s take a quick example of this in action:
- Cite: SiriusDecisions research example… Talk to build… Then transition to funnel conversation.
- All of these lead nurturing and scoring models are based on one thing – THE FUNNEL. We’ve seen the traditional funnel used to plan engagement strategies for nurturing accounts into customers. We build content for different stages of buyer interest based upon our lead scores. Thought leadership for the top, case studies and competitive differentiation for the bottom and so forth. We’ve seen that funnel flip upside down as we try to focus on target account-marketing in an effort to them to evangelize our offering. How do we get our best accounts to work for us and reduce our acquisition costs. But with the evolution of “customer experiences and journeys” your funnel is starting to look more and more like this. Buyers are not engaging in the linear fashion we as marketers want them to so that we can track them in the funnel – they jump around from the traditional “funnel” and seek out multiple resources to inform including peers, social media, & expert advice. They go in and out of consideration phases based upon other factors like work priorities or situational circumstances. Some of this we can measure with implicit and explicit data. But much of it, we cannot. Especially if the buyer is anonymous and there we have neither explicit or implicit data. And this mean that our traditional approach to looking at our funnels and planning how we can engage targets at various stages of that funnel to nurture them closer to a close becomes far more complicated.
- Why is this? The buyer journey is starting earlier Buyers are taking their buying habits from their consumer lives and applying them to their business practices. Which means… Buyers are savvy and avoid engaging with vendors until they are ready to discuss the product Its not news to most marketers that B2B buyers are doing more than half and sometimes more than ¾ of their research anonymously before talking to a vendor. Further, as these buyers jump in and out of consideration phases, its hard to keep them going down the linear path we as marketers want them to travel. Knowing that buyers are controlling far more of the journey, marketers can take steps to address their funnel hopping, but the real question is how do you nurture when you don’t have the person or account in your MAS and can’t score against it? Further, what if you only have one contact in your MAS to nurture, but there is a buying team involved? Your sales team needs to know when the account is engaging. With the average buying team ranging from 4-7, only nurturing one contact is no longer sufficient to maintaining control over a deal or keeping your brand on top of the short list. As marketers, we need to keep message relevant to buyers as they engage and investigate outside of your brand’s assets
- And of course we want to cast as wide a net as possible for our programs. How else are we going to guarantee that we remain top of mind if we don’t have all the right contacts to market to? But as the last few years have shown us, focusing our efforts on the accounts that matter the most will dramatically improve our performance and keep our sales counterparts satisfied with the right leads to follow up with. Focusing on nurturing the right accounts starts with knowing which accounts to nurture – i.e. an Account-Based Nurturing Program Step 1. Identify the accounts that sales values most and is most likely to close and prioritize your nurturing efforts against those accounts Step 2. Market to & Nurture those accounts – nurturing is more than a post engagement strategy that focuses on individuals in your database. Nurturing of an account starts long before a prospect enters your database. This isn’t to say that traditional nurturing is wrong or bad, just that as B2B marketers we have to start thinking about nurturing accounts in a whole new way. Step 3. Measure – keep Sales in the loop, and show them which accounts are progressing, which need attention…collaborate on actionable insights. Make sure they can see which accounts are being impacted by your nurturing efforts so that they can take appropriate, timely actions to capitalize on implicit interest.
- Always on vs Campaign based So what’s better, an always-on or campaign-based approach? The answer is neither or both – which is to say that there is a time and place for both. Well my gut would tell me that I’d rather always be in front of my prospects than just during a single campaign. But that thought shouldn’t discount the necessity to execute campaign based approaches. Rather, the two should work hand in hand to deliver a cohesive experience that engages the prospect account with relevant info Work to develop a segmentation plan for who you want to nurture. Do you want to start with an underserved industry or geography? How about accounts that have expressed interest in certain products or offerings or are great candidates for cross and/or upselling? Again, the key isn’t to boil the ocean, but rather to find a segment that you can demonstrate success and then scale. Work with sales to identify the key roles that influence the purchase of your offering and design programs that educate these roles and empower them to drive the evaluation process. If you have to source contacts to accomplish, do so, but your nurturing efforts should rely solely on contacts in your marketing automation system. Then, think about the buyer team and how they may need insight into what is going on in the industry and why you are the best provider/partner for them. Create a communication series that leads them to that conclusion; show, don’t tell. They need to feel like they reached the conclusion on their own, so help them understand the nuances in the market and what they need to know to be prepared to evaluate their options. What happens if you don’t have the contacts in your marketing automation system but still need to influence the account? You should consider Account-Based Advertising
- Over the last 2+ years Demandbase has tracked results for customers and come away with some key learnings. Ultimately an always-on approach sees better results that discrete campaigns that are only active over a few months. On average, subscription advertisers see 29% increase in the companies lifted (considering the percentage of more active companies vs. baseline) 127% more website engagement (considering the percentage of companies with additional pageviews over baseline) 20% higher click-thru rates What we also notice with discrete campaigns, is that there’s a significant “faucet” effect. Once we stop advertising to the group of target accounts, website traffic decreases significantly. So stimulating and, more importantly, maintaining engagement from your target accounts can make a significant difference in your ability to build pipeline and contribute to revenue over time.
- Account-Based Advertising is a great way to initiate an always-on approach to reaching a target account before they have engaged with you or raised their hand. ABA means using online ads to target only the accounts that matter the most to your business, those that you want to get into your pipeline because they will most likely become clients. The real benefit here is two fold: First that you can focus your efforts the same accounts that your sales teams are focusing on. Second is that it dramatically optimizes your display advertising budget and effectiveness. You can track display to revenue and show a positive correlation. With ABA think less about a reactive nurturing approach and more about nurturing the entire buyer team while they are anonymous. As they say in sports sometimes, the best defense is a good offense. Most of your prospects and accounts don’t frequent all the same media outlets where you can reach them. Relying on personas to target them can leave you spending crucial marketing dollars to influence people who really aren’t buyers. Since they are members of the company, they get included in the targeting and are exposed to the messaging that you want to convey. This approach is a great way to nurture an account and warm them up – especially before a big push to get them into your sales cycle. Ask any sales person – they’d rather be calling on a lead that knows who their company is vs one who does not. They key here is that you can nurture an account before they engage with you. From a performance perspective, you will want to monitor how companies being nurtured are engaging on the website and how that engagement changes.
- Now that you’re nurturing the anonymous companies, they’ll start to show up on your website. Typically businesses use a retargeting/remarketing approach to take the conversation to the next stage. This is a great next step in the nurturing process – especially for the anonymous researchers as we need to evolve our conversation as their interest and intent evolves, but since they haven’t identified themselves, you can’t score them or take them to the next stage with traditional nurturing. Account-based Retargeting is a great way to do this . Account-based portion of Retargeting is a key differentiator to standard remarketing/retargeting as it allows you to accomplish the same goal, but just like Account-based advertising, it improves your effectivsness by only focusing on, and remarketing to, accounts that matter. Research with DemandBase customers has shown that approximately 80-85% of B2B website traffic is unqualified to be buyers. If you remarket to ever website visitor chances are 80% of your retargeting budget is being wasted and you’ll have a hard time proving its value and continuing to invest in this tactic. Further, if you rely solely on persona for retargeting on certain networks, there’s a degradation of targeting quality due to personas (some stats show that the average cookie life ranges from a few days to less than a month and that often their accuracy can be called into question) – combine that with the limitations of reaching an entire buyer team since it is rare that the entire team frequents all the same networks and most won’t raise their hand to you and you have a real blind spot for nurturing the accounts who are ready to buy from you. With Account-Based Retargeting, you can automate the retargeting approach to only engage accounts that are engaging with you. So you can create thresholds or limitations to only engage target accounts that exhibit the right types of behavior. For example, if a target account is looking at pricing page, you may want to serve a message to that person around value vs price or your price vs a competitor. But if someone from your target account is looking at a careers page, you probably don’t want to retarget them. Or if one account has engage with 10 high value pages vs another that has only looked at 1, you may want to prioritize the account with great engagement in your retargeting pool – or rather create a threshold that an account has to cross before they are retargeted. They key here being able to reach your target accounts, and only your target accounts, anywhere the buyer team frequents after they engage with your website. Let’s take a look at how one Demandbase Customer is using Account-based Advertising and Account-based Retargeting to drive sales opportunities in their target accounts.
- Account-Based Social Media Nurturing General awareness with content Pushing your nurturing content out via social media is a great way to nurture your followers with the same experience And according to the 2015 B2B Buyers Survey, 53% of buyers connected with a tech vendor before making a purchase. So getting your nurturing content out this way helps to spread your voice across as many channels as possible. But that only covers, at best, about half of your target accounts – and only when they are in a consideration phase. Account Targeting (Paid) Luckily most major social media networks offer marketing services now that allow you to target users of the network. Unfortunately they haven’t evolved to provide services specific to ABM and still work from an individual user perspective. However, there are work around’s for targeting accounts and buyer teams. Most will let you target based upon an email addressed matched against the user account. You can match your database to theirs’ to see how many people at your targets accounts are identifiable and therefore targetable. Some will even allow you to build lists by account, but that process is very manual using copy & paste. Either way, the key is surrounding your target accounts online with the appropriate messaging
- Website Engagement With the proper account-based nurturing tools in place, you have to also deliver on the promise of personalized messages when they arrive on your website. Just like the early sales people who knew info about their prospects and used that to tailor their messages to resonate with the prospect, so too must B2B marketers. Ultimately, your website is where you plan to drive your target accounts when they respond to your nurture message. So you have to use the information you know about the account to create an experience that resonates and engages them when they arrive. Simply adjusting imagery and copy to align with the visitor’s industry has been proven to generate dramatic results in engagement, conversion and revenue. (STAT from Adobe or other client?) According to the 2015 B2B Buyers Survey, over 85% of respondents stated that knowledge of their industry and demonstrated experience in their line of business influenced their decision to buy from the winning vendor. So don’t discount the importance of nurturing beyond digital outreach. It continues deep into the engagement and buying cycle
- ABM Email Nurture Programs – this approach is closer to the historical nurture approaches than any of the others to follow. The main distinction between an ABM Email Nurture Programs and its predecessors is that you want to focus your efforts exclusively on the accounts you and your sales teams are targeting as opposed to every lead that comes off your website. As your program executes, you should see these prospects engage with your content and website which should increase their lead score and get the right leads into sales’ hands. Especially since they have been exposed to you through so many other channels.