A crash course on account-based marketing

In modern B2B marketing, there is no shortage of strategies designed to boost a company’s marketing efforts. But at the end of the day, B2B marketers have the same goal — to drive leads, convert them to customers, and boost ROI. So how can you streamline your processes to grow your business most effectively? The answer is simple: account-based marketing.

What is account-based marketing?

The concept of account-based marketing isn’t new, and it does exactly what its name says. ABM’s main focus is not on lead generation, but on identifying and targeting key accounts and focusing B2B marketing efforts on what will engage targets that are most likely to convert to sales. Oftentimes marketers personalize their content to fit a customer’s unique need.

Why use ABM?

Account-based marketing aligns sales and marketing in a way that standard lead generation campaigns cannot, as each prospect is heavily researched and hyper-targeted. This, in turn, means that while your ABM campaign may not necessarily cast as wide a net as a lead generation campaign, the leads that are “caught” tend to be stronger and more ready to be funneled through to sales — think “quality over quantity.”

Can I use my existing content with ABM?

Because of its laser-focused nature, ABM requires substantial research on your target audience. From this, you can identify strong, existing content that may be valuable to your prospects — so if your business has marketing pieces detailing services you offer that your target wants, you can make good use of this content and spread it to more sales-ready leads.

As marketers, we want to ensure our marketing efforts are as successful as possible. This approach, when used correctly and appropriately, can aid in reaching those goals.

Artificial intelligence in marketing

Artificial intelligence (AI), potentially the most disruptive technology in human history, is perhaps most disruptive in the field of marketing.

Ad tech companies use AI to power programmatic exchanges and to automatically optimize ad campaigns. Search engine companies use it to power smart bidding of terms. Marketing automation software relies on it to send nurture emails and qualify leads. Many companies are using AI technology to improve the customer experience.

In fact, an article in Econsultancy in April of 2016 (seemingly a million years ago when it comes to this topic) pointed to 15 examples of artificial intelligence in marketing at the time.

Artificial

Intelligence

has exploded

in recent

years due to

the convergence

of Deep Neural

Nets, Graphics

Processing Units

and Big Data.

Movéo insight:

While it’s true that companies that don’t begin to integrate AI into their operations risk becoming less competitive than those that do, it’s important not to get caught up in an AI “arms race.”  Whether or not you need to remake your business around AI should have more to do with it being core to your offering than what others are doing. If it’s not core (or at least not yet), it may be far more economical to outsource AI capabilities via third party bots and platforms.

*Chart adapted from Gartner presentation, “Artificial Intelligence Technologies Fuel Competition in User Experience.”

Accelerated change & beating perpetual novice syndrome

When it comes to ever-evolving technologies and tools, the world will not slow down and apparently, we cannot speed up enough to catch it — making us perpetual novices in the face of changing marketing tools. In light of this, the only real answer is to heighten our ability to deal with hyper-change by perceptually slowing it down to a conceivable rate. In combination, the following strategies can prove to be beneficial:

Accepting accelerated change

Don’t get bogged down in the way you used to do things — three- to five-year high-level marketing plans, divided into 12-month sections and based on strict schedules. Such approaches may have worked well in the past, but they are far too rigid for today. Programs can have broad contours, but it’s better to think in terms of weeks — not years. Also, forget about having perfect information before you act. Today, such perfection comes with a high price — prospects that are sucked up by aggressive competitors, or the loss of coveted “first-mover” status. Besides, as Malcolm Gladwell has noted, there are times “when our snap judgments and first impressions can offer a much better means of making sense of the world.”

Decoding accelerated change

To avoid being spotted by an enemy, military aircraft can spread a cloud of small, thin pieces of aluminum called chaff, which either appears as a cluster of secondary targets on a radar screen or swamps the screen entirely. Companies today must be able to see which new trends and technologies should be targeted by their organizations and which are “marketing chaff.” Do you have a process for identifying salience (e.g., appropriateness to your organization) of oncoming change? A simple “gut check” may have sufficed at one time, but something more formal is in order now. Try developing strategic filters with which to review new trends and technology — long-term impact vs. short-term impact, highly aligned with business strategy vs. less aligned, etc. The better your vetting process, the more focused you can be on what matters most.

Processing accelerated change

A distinction needs to be drawn between information marketers get bombarded with everyday and information they should actually use. In fact, the processing overload that fuels perceptual novice syndrome can, in many cases, be viewed as “skeptical underload” — the problem is not so much the speed and volume of information, but our difficulty discerning bias in that information if we are not authorities on a certain subject. In an era of accelerated change, it is critical to not lose your “North Star” — the precepts that govern good marketing. These should serve as a litmus test when you are engulfed in the hype of a new tool, social media gateway or methodology. Yes, look closely at harnessing the advantages of the next new thing, but always keep one eye on the fundamentals.

While it’s nearly impossible to master every new tool and trend, keeping these three strategies in mind can help you avoid tunnel vision and get the most out of new technologies that can help propel your business.

Identifying perpetual novice syndrome

From the moment you hear about a new tool, technology or trend, the clock starts running. As marketers, we’re expected to figure out what it is, evaluate its appropriateness for our organizations, vet competitive solutions, integrate it with our IT infrastructure, begin executing it flawlessly and stand ready to prove why it is such a great investment.

Instead of the field of marketing being comprised of people who have had time to develop expertise and judiciously act on their knowledge, however, it is increasingly populated by perpetual novices — people so busy trying to learn the next new thing that they can’t master anything.

It seems as though most marketers are trying to cope with the breakneck pace of change by simply running faster. Yet, the net effect of this is a loss of marketing effectiveness. Why? It’s exhausting – for you and your team.

So what can be done? Clearly, the answer is not taking things slower. Perhaps you can wait it out? After all, the rapid rate of change could be an “acute” rather than a “chronic” condition of the current environment. If it is the former, the rate of innovation will return in the near future to a more manageable pace.

What we believe to be far more likely is that a constant state of disruption is the “new norm.” If that is the case, an entirely different type of behavioral approach will be needed to thrive in such an environment.

Take advertising via Facebook, for example. Just as the social media platform itself changes for the average user, so too does its advertising capabilities. Facebook’s acquisition of the photo sharing application Instagram allows marketers to expand their reach by syncing posts across both sites’ platforms without any extra work on the part of the advertiser. Parameters for different posts continue to evolve as more capabilities become available, leaving advertisers to stay up to the minute on updates to the platform.

The emergence of more and more sophisticated tools, technologies and channels separated by shorter and shorter time intervals is not something we can control. What we can control is how well we adapt to such an environment. Increasingly, this will be the key determinant of whether we realize a positive return on acceleration. In fact, you may set yourself up for success in overcoming perpetual novice syndrome by utilizing these strategies.

Influencer marketing in the B2B realm

In the news:

A recent study showed that 31% of B2C marketers reported that they are experimenting with influencer marketing and 48% are running ongoing programs. Contrast this with B2B marketers — 49% were still experimenting and only 11% were running ongoing programs.

http://www.influencermarketingreport.com

While B2C influencers may be more numerous, credible outside experts with active networks (if not fans) can be considered influencers in most B2B industries.

Influencer marketing places focus on specific key individuals rather than the target market as a whole.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influencer_marketing

Movéo insight:

There is a big opportunity for B2B marketers to integrate influencer marketing more strategically into their programs.

Movéo recently interviewed a respected industry consultant on behalf of a client. Aside from gaining content that can be repackaged in several ways, his association lent independent credibility to our client’s claims. Is there someone in your industry that your brand should build a relationship with?

Scoring models: How to better predict buyer behavior

Making an impact in the marketplace takes critical thought in the early stages of planning and strategizing. While using your data to improve upon your past performance is one of the most important steps in the process, it’s also imperative to be able to anticipate how leads and prospects will react to your marketing efforts.

In order to begin predicting which leads and prospects will react in what way, it’s essential to develop scoring models that will help you separate your strongest leads from the weaker ones and map out exactly what makes them most likely to buy.

Insights from the following questions can inform the development of a scoring model that attributes numerical scores to each action a lead takes based on your assessment of its potential to impact a future sale:

• What content does a prospect find most relevant?
• How might they have answered certain questions on specific forms?
• What role do they play at their company?

Using Data to Score

You might observe, for example, that 60 percent of your recently closed leads visited the pricing page on your website, and 25 percent downloaded at least one of your case studies. Because of this, you’d assign a high number of points to those who visited pricing, and a not-quite-so high number to those who downloaded a case study. Conversely, you may notice that people who visited your careers page are (unsurprisingly) very unlikely to become customers: these people might get assigned negative points and be filtered out of the funnel so they never make it to your sales team.

Developing Your Scoring Model

Top of the funnel actions like visiting your homepage may receive a single point, while actions that typically take place further down the sales funnel, like downloading an in-depth white paper, viewing a case study or completing a form, might receive 10 points. Based on this scoring model, you can begin to determine which leads are most likely to buy and predict future sales weeks or even months in advance. With this created, you can monitor prospects’ behaviors and identify opportunities not just for further marketing outreach, but for the sales team to step in at the right time and help lead a particularly engaged prospect over the finish line.

You don’t have to be a data scientist to develop a lead scoring model, but enlisting one can certainly help. Consider working with a data consultant or analytics specialist, like the ones on our team at Movéo, when you’re ready to take your lead scoring beyond the basics. They’re the ones who can help you wrangle the many complex variables that typically come into play and improve the accuracy of your scoring models and the success of your campaign. Further, our experts will be able to identify strategies to tailor future marketing communications to reach prospects at all levels of the funnel, and know which assets are making an impact.

Analyzing and improving your campaign data

Data is no longer an optional add-on for your campaigns — it’s a given. To demonstrate your ROI as a marketer, you should be able to track your results and predict buyer behavior on a given campaign, which should include KPIs, measurements and metrics in your strategy. Referring to these metrics will help to determine whether or not you’re moving in the right direction.

Getting Started

Improving marketing predictability through data requires multiple trials (and often many errors) to determine what works. Be sure you’ve set your marketing and CRM systems up to deliver as much real-time data as you possibly can, and then analyze it carefully. Ensure you’re tracking both tactics and strategy. Keeping account of whether your tactics are working, whether your models are correctly calibrated, and the success of your targeting is essential to understanding the current and future actions of your campaign.

Questions to Consider

When analyzing data, it is important to ask yourself the following questions: Are the tactics you’ve employed in the past performing as you predicted they would? Is it time to modify your predictions or work new tactics into the mix to bring more leads into the funnel? Are your lead scoring methods accurately predicting a lead’s likelihood to close? Or do you need to modify your models based on new data and insights? In order to optimize your predictability and performance, you should be able to answer these questions.

Take Small Steps

Rather than making big, sweeping shifts to your campaigns and processes, try tweaking just one thing at a time, and testing that change during a period of focused analysis. As you become more comfortable predicting campaign performance and analyzing it in real time, this will begin to feel more like a science than an art. Stay at it long enough, keep making improvements, and soon you’ll be able to determine the impact of nearly every element of your marketing program with a fair level of accuracy. And isn’t that every marketer’s dream?

Assess and improve: Using your past performance data

With the advent of ever-improving technologies and marketing tools, today’s marketers must find a way to stand out more than before to prove their worth. Doing so has become a challenge for some, but those ahead of the curve realize the importance of marketing predictability in increasing their ROI. In the sections below, we’ve outlined a few strategies to help you get started integrating marketing predictability.

Knowing where to start can often be troublesome, as a high level of data proficiency is required, and you may feel underprepared. Every prediction you make must be based on data from past campaigns. If you’re using a CRM and a marketing automation tool, you should have historical data about the source of each of your recent leads and the tactics that nurtured them down the sales funnel.

By assessing which tactics generated the greatest quantity of leads, which tactics impacted the conversion of those leads into customers and how much you invested to make each sale, you should be able to gain a relatively clear understanding of the potential impact of the various components of your marketing strategy.

Based on data from past campaigns, develop an estimate of the number and types of leads your current campaigns will bring into the funnel, compare against strategic plans and goals and optimize your marketing mix accordingly.

If you want more insight into the right marketing mix for your business goals, contact Movéo.

Vitaly rules Google

In the news:

A Russian spammer known as Vitaly is using twitter.com referral traffic to promote himself.

If your Google Analytics account data is targeted by this spammer you will notice an unusual amount of referral traffic coming from Twitter and a page title called “Vitaly rules google.”

This type of ghost traffic can taint your Google Analytics data and make it hard to monitor your website’s real performance. For example, you may not be able to determine your site’s actual bounce rate unless you filter the ghost traffic out.

Botcrawl

Spamming aimed at search engines involves making repeated web site requests using a fake referrer URL. When the spammer never visited the affected site, the fake visits are called ghost traffic.

Ohow.co

Movéo insight:

“Vitaly rules google” can be a headache, but it will not harm your web site or affect its SEO ranking. The best way to combat it is to (A) be aware of it, and (B) set filters in Google Analytics to exclude it from your web traffic data. Contact Movéo if you need help doing this.