Getting Your ABM Program Off the Ground: a case study in starting out
There are certainly companies out there that can go all in on ABM in one big, bold move. I've listened to them at conferences and envied their boldness, executive buy-in and budget. For the rest of us, we can't abandon our traditional lead generation model and we've got to prove the worth in order to justify large investments in this new strategy. It seems like most marketers I talk to are in this situation and are trying to figure out how to adapt all the big ideas around ABM into a practical approach. Which is exactly where my team was a year and a half ago. So this is what we did and we got tremendous buy-in along the way from both sales and executive leadership, we got additional budget investments and most importantly, we were able to execute with a small team.
(1) Start with running trials just using the new shiny tools you've bought so you can start to understand how they work. We started with a couple individual tools:
- Using Bombora for a couple of individual targeted marketing activities like retargeting ads. We took a programmatic ABM approach to our list segmentation and created a list of accounts for this pilot using companies with high intent data scores along specific interest topics and who matched our Ideal Company Profile. This gave us a strong list of accounts that were a fit and displayed clear interest, allowing us to start with the right target list. We ran several different versions of the ads and measured things like the CTR and ad share win rate against our retargeting ads that didn't use Bombora. This taught us what kind of copy and CTAs worked best, how to work through the segmentation, what kind of results we could expect, how to connect the dots to landing pages that worked, etc.
- Using Triblio to test out website personalization from a copy, CTA and placement perspective. We started with two different audiences at the high-level - known and unknown. For the known audience, we were able to offer a more personalized journey with specific offers and copy based on their history of actions and interest. For the unknown audiences, we segmented them based on where they came from and what we could infer about their product interest from that. We then offered up tailored a website journey based on the interest. We ensured that we were measuring length of site visit, pages visited, bounce rates, etc against our standard non-personalized traffic. This taught us how to best to use the tool itself, how to align what we could accomplish with the tool behind our marketing strategy, what kind of results we could expect to see, how best to tailor communications, etc.
(2) Move to an integrated pilot where you combine tactics. For us this was a direct mail, email, retargeting, website personalization campaign that centered around a proprietary event. (You can see examples of the creative in the PDF on my page titled AMY Award - Best Integrated B2B Marketing Campaign).
The key here is that you don't get lost in all the tactics and lose the driving force of ABM - you've got to still be hyper-focused on getting the right message to the right prospect. It's not just getting more targeted in your list segmentation and dropping people into a generic campaign. So keep your goals and your messaging and your audience absolutely top-of-mind as you develop each individual tactic. We had several different tiers with customized messaging for each, personalized tactics when applicable, and a very specific timeline that allowed everything to build on each other and have a cumulative effect for the biggest impact.
This integrated pilot gave us a feel for how to connect the dots between the different activities, how to connect the data between different tools, and how to measure and communicate results.
(3) Now you're ready to implement a broad-scoped ABM strategy, whether you choose a one-to-one model or the programmatic (aka one-to-many) model. The key here is to keep very aligned to your goals and the model you've chosen. Ensure that you have adequate tracking in place so you can be constantly communicating the results to your executives and your sales teams. This is how you'll get more money to expand the program in the future.
Have more questions? Don't hesitate to reach out; I'm happy to share!