Account-Based Marketing

Account-Based Marketing Account-Based Marketing BRING LASER FOCUS TO THE TOP OF YOUR FUNNEL 84% of marketers say ABM provides significant benefits to expanding customer relationships. Account-Based Marketing Brings Laser Focus To The Top Of Your Funnel 1

Intro Traditionally, marketers capture as many leads as possible but don t qualify those leads until they are well into the sales funnel. It s a numbers game: the more leads you generate up front, the more eventually convert into paying customers. But while this kind of lead generation is incredibly powerful, it s also true that (according to MarketingSherpa) 79% of marketing leads never convert into sales. By adding account-based marketing (ABM) tactics to your repertoire, you amplify your lead generation results. ABM is a strategic approach to lead generation in which your time and resources target a key group of specific accounts. Lead generation draws in the numbers, and ABM qualifies and targets those leads before you market to them. In other words, by inverting the traditional early-stage marketing process, you target your campaigns to specific customers the moment they enter your funnel, and you do it with real-time, personalized content. You not only zero in on your conversion process, making it easier to measure, you also align your marketing efforts more closely with your sales goals. 60% of marketers say personalizing messages based on customer behavior is their top challenge. Account-Based Marketing: Bring Laser Focus To The Top Of Your Funnel 2

How ABM Solves the TOFU Paradox The results that ABM delivers are particularly valuable in Top-of-Funnel (TOFU) marketing, where at least 98% of your web visitors are anonymous. You can certainly employ seed nurturing to share valuable content and build your reputation with these unknown prospects. But wouldn t you also like insight into who your visitors are, right off the bat? 82% of prospects prefer content targeted to their specific industries. Identifying visitors is a huge opportunity to nurture brand affinity. It can also help you avoid a potential deal breaker: irrelevant marketing messages and badly timed pop-up chat boxes can easily seem like spam to your prospects. If a visitor clicks on an ad or searches for you specifically, shouldn t you be able to welcome him with a message that appeals specifically to his intentions? Until now, even if you could identify visitors and their backgrounds and interests, you wouldn t have the tools to feed them personalized content in real time. 75% of executives say they would read unsolicited marketing materials containing ideas relevant to their business. Account-Based Marketing: Bring Laser Focus To The Top Of Your Funnel 3

TOFU Gets Real-Time & Personal To get started with account-based marketing, you first create a wish list of strategic accounts you d like to land also known as named accounts then craft dynamic marketing messages to target each specific audience. This is the key to ABM. Here s how real-time personalization tools take ABM to the next level: 1) The reverse-ip-lookup functionality of personalization software automatically identifies a prospect s organization and by extension you can deduce her industry, the size of her company, and some technology specifics. 2) If the prospect s organization is on your list of named accounts, you can personalize her experience with appropriate content and CTAs (calls-to-action). 3) You can also follow the prospect throughout her engagement with your content, offering dynamic, real-time information that matches her place in the buying cycle, visit by visit. Voilà! You can now turn previously anonymous prospects into qualified leads during the TOFU stage, targeting high-yield accounts right from the get-go. And you ll drive higher engagement with named accounts by offering personalized, real-time content designed to educate, nurture, and accelerate velocity through your funnel. With a little strategic direction, real-time personalization software makes ABM an elementary affair, requiring very little human input. The brilliance of account-based marketing is that it reverses the typical process. Instead of marketing to a broad audience and then filtering your leads, you re filtering in advance and then marketing to a more defined audience. Mike Telem, Co-founder of Insightera Flip the Lead-Gen Process with ABM Using ABM, you identify strategic accounts the ones most likely to create revenue or meet other high-level goals of your business and make them the focus of your early-stage marketing efforts. In other words, you generate leads that are already qualified. Account-Based Marketing: Bring Laser Focus To The Top Of Your Funnel 4

Empirical Alignment with Your Existing Practices With real-time personalization tools now at your disposal, account-based marketing is a powerful new addition to your marketing arsenal. But ABM does not exist in a marketing vacuum. In fact, ABM is effective largely because it aligns with your existing practices, which means it doesn t require a big shift in thinking (or budget). Account-Based Marketing: Bring Laser Focus To The Top Of Your Funnel 5

Sales Analytics Most organizations are account-centric: they measure and monitor opportunities based on accounts and revenue from those accounts. Executives, to whom sales numbers are paramount, are often more inclined to buy into a marketing plan that is closely aligned with sales goals. Account-based marketing gets marketers talking and thinking like the sales team, which makes it easier to communicate with leadership about real-time personalization. It s easier to prove marketing attribution when you re talking about specific accounts. With real-time personalization tools, you can optimize your marketing budget by measuring the performance of your campaigns against those accounts. How are visitors from your named accounts behaving? What are the campaigns and channels driving them in? When they arrive at your website, what do they click on? When your ABM campaigns are aligned with sales goals, you drive the deals everyone talks about. Say your company has a strategic sales goal to land one or two major healthcare clients. Using personalization software, marketing can identify healthcare visitors from your named accounts while they re still in the Top-of-Funnel stage. Next, you feed those visitors strategic messaging that explains how perfect your product is for their exact healthcare needs. Of course, this is a simplified description of how ABM works, but it demonstrates the principle: with new real-time personalization tools, you can dial your message down to a very specific audience. The precision of your content strategy is limited only by your imagination. Account-Based Marketing: Bring Laser Focus To The Top Of Your Funnel 6

Marketing Automation Account-based marketing aligns with your existing marketing automation strategy both in terms of your philosophy and technology. Philosophically, you can set up your ABM strategy to segue smoothly into your overall marketing automation strategy. And technologically, real-time personalization software works in tandem with your marketing automation solution, so the content you re feeding prospects during the Top-of-Funnel stage aligns with the content they receive throughout their buyer journey. With ABM amplifying your marketing automation solution, you can sync your email marketing campaigns to your web and mobile content seamlessly. You can also track customer behavior across all of these channels, creating ubiquitous, synchronized web marketing. Real-time personalization tools multiply your return on investment in marketing automation. Take the example of Panaya, a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution. Panaya s product reduces the cost and risk of change for Enterprise Resource-Planning (ERP) systems. The organization wanted to expand into new markets and was specifically looking to generate more revenue from a list of target accounts. To do so, they created a full-funnel content stream aimed at attracting, engaging, and converting named accounts with Marketo s real-time personalization tools, using the five-step approach outlined on the right. Panaya s 5 Steps to Account-Based Marketing Mastery 1) Identified named accounts fitting a certain criteria, then created personas based on these accounts. 2) Arranged their library of content into buckets: case studies, videos, landing pages, and calls-to-action Next, they assigned content from each bucket to a target segment. 3) Defined top- and mid-funnel content campaigns for each persona and used real- time personalization to feed visitors relevant content. 4) Used A/B testing to continually fine-tune their campaigns. 5) Ran bi-monthly analyses against sales numbers throughout the campaigns. The results of Panaya s use of ABM were definitive. In their first month, the organization identified 215 web visitors from named accounts. They honed in on the most effective content with constant testing, and saw content engagement increase by 113%. Crucially, Sales and Marketing alignment dramatically improved. Account-Based Marketing: Bring Laser Focus To The Top Of Your Funnel 7

Getting Started The first step to launching an accountbased marketing campaign in real time is to define the three W s of personalization: WHO: Create your list of target accounts. WHAT: Define content that fits each account group or persona at each stage of the customer lifecycle. WHERE: Present the targeted message to each visitor, based on where she is in your marketing funnel. Once you ve established your goals, named your accounts, and selected your content, personalization tools take over. Working in conjunction with your marketing automation solution, personalization tools automatically feed visitors dynamic content based on their origin, behavior, and place in your buying cycle. 84% of marketers say ABM provides significant benefits to expanding customer relationships. From the prospect s point of view, you re showing her exactly what she s looking for every single time she visits your site. But your experience is the opposite of labor-intensive. Now, instead of spending all your time qualifying anonymous leads, you re focused on testing and refining your ABM strategy. Over time, it s easy to make ABM marketing a precise and profitable! science. Account-Based Marketing: Bring Laser Focus To The Top Of Your Funnel 8

What to Expect (Hint: a Lot) Adding an account-based marketing strategy to your existing efforts leads to more and better traffic on all your marketing channels. Suddenly, a much higher percentage of your up-front marketing investment (of time and energy) pays off in numerous and tangible ways: You Become a Thought Leader. When you personalize content for an individual visitor, he is more likely to return to your website when he needs reliable information about a specific topic or product. This type of fine-tuning makes your content more effective across the board, from your website to your mobile app to your email marketing campaigns to your social media updates. A timely, personalized message means you are always relevant to your reader. You engage your current customers on a deeper level, and you become their trusted source of the latest, most relevant information about your type of product not just your specific product. You re also more likely to engage C-level visitors, who don t have time to sort through extraneous content. Your Marketing Attribution Gets Precise. You can measure your campaigns more effectively because you focus your initiatives so precisely. This makes it easy to calculate marketing results against sales goals, bringing marketing and sales into tight alignment. Your Sales Get Truly Strategic. The biggest payoff for ABM practitioners, of course, is more and faster sales. You re selling to the clients who will further your overall business strategy, and you re building trust with new buyers from the moment they enter your funnel, locking them in and shortening your sales cycle. Account-Based Marketing: Bring Laser Focus To The Top Of Your Funnel 9

With the right tools, you can now use marketing automation to launch personalized ABM campaigns, driving your prospects straight to the point. When you give visitors exactly what they are looking for (even if they don t know they are looking for it), you become the go-to expert in your industry. And all of this traffic ultimately leads to one destination: more sales. Account-Based Marketing: Bring Laser Focus To The Top Of Your Funnel 10

Marketing Software. Easy, Powerful, Complete. Marketo (NASDAQ: MKTO) provides the leading cloud-based marketing software platform for companies of all sizes to build and sustain engaging customer relationships. Spanning today s digital, social, mobile and offline channels, the Marketo solution includes a complete suite of applications that help organizations acquire new customers more efficiently, maximize customer loyalty and lifetime value, improve sales effectiveness, and provide analytical insight into marketing s contribution to revenue growth. Marketo s applications are known for their breakthrough ease-of-use, and are complemented by the Marketing Nation, a thriving network of more than 190 LaunchPoint ecosystem partners and over 40,000 marketers who share and learn from each other to grow their collective marketing expertise. The result for modern marketers is unprecedented agility and superior results. info@marketo.com www.marketo.com DG2LG-01142014 2014 Marketo, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Designed by SCORCH