You’ve invested heavily in your MarTech stack and have likely gone through a ‘crawl, walk, run’ approach to standing up each of your new tools. Sometimes you find the technology that fits your ABM strategy and other times you need to adjust your strategy to fit the capabilities and functionality of the tool. Despite all this, once you’re up and running, you’re able to develop more personalized experiences for your contacts throughout the entire buyer journey.
From content to landing pages, and emails to direct mail, you’ve got the right personalized messages ready to go for each stage along the way.
But where do you find yourself on the ABM advertising maturity curve? Many marketers find themselves dug in on Stage 1. They’re launching generic ads, paying too much per click, seeing average click-through rates, and waiting around for conversions.
Others have pushed through to Stage 2 and are segmenting their audiences into common personas with common pain points. The message may land more effectively as it’s more likely to resonate with an audience who is currently faced with the problem that you’re promoting a solution for. It is likely that you’re being rewarded by the ad network gods because your CTRs are higher than average and therefore you’re getting more impressions and possibly lower CPCs.
But at the end of the day, this is still an inbound effort and you’re still waiting around for leads to fall into your lap. Some of the vendors facilitating this methodology are referring to it as ‘account-based advertising’ which is a bit of a misnomer considering that a more apt description would be ‘persona-based advertising’. Despite your ability to target a specific account, you’re not actually personalizing anything at the account level. All accounts on your target list are getting the same ‘persona-based’ message.
So as you can probably guess, Stage 3 in the evolution of your ad strategy is to not only target individual accounts, but to personalize the creative at the account level (and do this at scale). This next stage has tremendous upside. Not only are you going to be paying less for each click, but now you’ll be able to measure your CTR at the account level. You’ll have the insights to know which accounts are clicking the most on your ads.
With a transition to true account-based advertising, Stage 4 in your ABM advertising journey is to flip your ad strategy from an inbound effort to an outbound one. You can still sit back and wait for leads to fall into your lap (with the peace of mind of knowing that any conversion will be from a key account) but now you can also get your Sales team involved in the process by having them chase down the accounts that are clicking the most (because remember, you can measure that now).
It’s in this final stage that you’re able to work with your Sales team on better alignment, and let’s face it, a solid and successful ABM program depends on it. The more tactics that you’re deploying that work in lock step with Sales, the more successful your organization is going to be in attracting, engaging and retaining new business.
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