5 Ways AdTech Can Scale Account-Based Marketing

Sangram Vajre

April 30, 2015

Buyer habits are changing. Today’s B2B buyers want to engage with your marketing on their own terms, and they expect your marketing to cater to those expectations, whether they’re engaging on social media, online search, mobile, video…the list goes on.

How can marketers be everywhere their buyers are during the selling process — and reach all of the necessary decision-makers — without being intrusive? This is where account-based marketing (ABM) comes into the picture.

What is Account-Based Marketing?

ABM allows you to target your marketing on the account level rather than at the individual level. This means that you can serve up your marketing messages via online ads to your target accounts while increasing your reach and exposure to other decision-makers and influencers within an account.

5 Innovative Ways to Scale Your Account-Based Marketing Campaigns

1) Put Your Sales Team’s Pipeline on Steroids

Let’s be honest here. Not everyone is waiting for a marketing email or a sales call to start their day — but we’re all buyers, and we like to consume information from multiple channels, such as social media, mobile apps, videos, and blogs.

Fortunately, for the sales reps and marketers who are struggling to make contact with their buyers via traditional outlets, there is a way to address this: B2B account-based advertising marketing.

Sales and marketing can work as partners to increase awareness, which helps drive pipeline velocity.

Example: Marketing team delivers ads to accounts that sales is trying to reach. When sales calls on those accounts, there is greater awareness of your company and the conversation is much easier.

2) Wake The Walking Dead in Your Email List

Another important application for account-based marketing is “waking the dead,” or reviving your cold and inactive leads. These leads are a valuable source of revenue just sitting in your database — neglecting them could mean losing out on a lot of potential revenue.

As you can probably guess, sending more emails isn’t going to wake the dead. The better way is to target them on their terms with ad campaigns wherever they are online.

Here are a few keys to success with this technique:

Decide what qualifies as a “dead lead” in your organization
Develop light messaging that can be helpful to the entire account
Find more than one champion in the account with different content offers
Optimize along the way to get closer to your target goal

3) Scale Your SMB with ABM

Small and medium-size businesses have an advantage over their enterprise cousins. You’re innovative and nimble. You don’t need to rely on mainstream media or big-budget advertising campaigns to generate awareness for your brand. In fact, we’d like to propose a less expensive alternative.

Account-based advertising is a great way to develop a brand awareness campaign for your product launch with a targeted list of companies, and it can be done on a budget. Because you are starting with a much smaller list of companies, the actual ad spend is significantly less than a traditional campaign and you will yield a much greater return on investment.

Example: You are bootstrapping your way to success on a very limited budget and raising awareness about your product is crucial to your success. A small, targeted and inexpensive account-based ad campaign can be a key differentiator in the success of your product.

4) Create Insane ROI At Your Next Event

How do you get the most out of your event marketing investment and make sure that the leads you collect aren’t going to waste? If you’re like many B2B companies, you’re funneling a good bit of money into event sponsorships, booths, speaking gigs, and more. You want to make sure you’re getting out at least as much as you’re putting in.

Here is what that might look like:

Prior to the event, try to obtain a list of current (or previous) attendees from the organizer. Now turn them into accounts and target the entire account instead of just one lead.
Develop a landing page where attendees can sign up for demonstration appointments with you.
Run account-level highly targeted ad campaigns to direct attendees toward your landing page.
After the event, you can use the actual attendee list to target the entire company or specific roles within each of these companies with content oriented ads to stay top-of-mind and drive more revenue.

For more tips, see “More Than Just Events: 4 Ways Field Marketing Drives More Sales.”

5) Fuel Your Account-Based Nurturing Fire

The reality of B2B marketing is that sales closes accounts, not leads. We often get too caught up in single lead-based marketing and overlook the importance of targeting entire accounts to reach key decision-makers.

Suppose that every lead that comes into your CRM also reaches out to two of your competitors. If everyone is emailing and calling this one lead, then it is safe to say that everyone has a fair chance of winning them over, right?

Instead of just calling and emailing this same individual, you use account-based marketing to automatically put a message in front of all of the decision makers that can influence the deal. Now that’s called an unfair advantage, especially when reaching your target accounts fast is the name of the game.

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