With a sold-out crowd during his talk at HubSpot Inbound, Peter Clark, Director of B2B Product, dropped some serious knowledge. His presentation, “Outbound at Inbound” speaks for itself on the benefits of taking both an outbound and inbound approach to improve your B2B marketing. Here is the 20 minute presentation along with 10 takeaways (+1 bonus from RollWorks) to help you, our fellow B2B marketers, improve your marketing.
Topics covered include: new metrics for marketers, how to find your ideal target personas, bringing marketing closer to sales, the gulf of intent, personalized SDR campaigns, the benefits of using social media to amplify your ABM, and much more.
Feel free to play the video as you read more detailed explanations below:
10 Key B2B Marketing Strategy Takeaways (along with timestamps)
1) Most marketing tools are built for e-commerce. (3:20)
Peter explains that one reason B2B marketers struggle is because most online tools are tailored to the e-commerce space where everything is done on your website. Your customer visits your website, they learn about the products they like, and they purchase them then and there. Finding solid B2B lead generation companies to work with is a challenge but can pay off in big ways.
2) It takes 4.5 (at least) people to buy a piece of B2B software. (4:20)
B2B sales involve a lot more than just a website, they require people. On average it takes 4.5 people to sign off on buying a piece of software. To facilitate that purchase you need a great website, great content, and a great sales team. All three of these have to work together to make improve B2B sales.
3) A higher bar for marketing performance is being set. (6:15)
At Adroll our marketing has evolved very much like the B2B marketers we’re serving. At first marketing was only judged based on the number of leads they were bringing in. Then we changed the success metric to generating quality B2B leads by educating prospects with our marketing content. Now we judge our B2B marketing based on how they’ve impacted revenue through multiple marketing touches.
4) How to figure out your ideal customer profile (ICP) and target account list (TAL) (8:57)
In two words: ask sales. As Peter explains, “it’s very hard to generate the leads that sales cares about if you never ask sales what they care about.” ABM forces B2B marketers to actually start talking to the sales team and collaborating. You can read more about how to find your target account list here.
5) The gulf of intent (10:30)
In between inbound and outbound there is a gulf. These are people who aren’t high intent since they don’t know about your product, but could be a high fit for your business. This is where account-based marketing fits into your overall marketing strategy. ABM allows you to find those potential customers and get your product in front of them.
6) An example of how RollWorks and AdRoll use ABM (11:55)
Here is an example of how AdRoll uses ABM in the direct mail marketing channel. We begin with a door opener kit that is sent to prospects we’ve selected as having high-fit potential. Once a meeting is established, we send another direct mail kit as our follow-up. Finally, even once the prospect has become a customer, we send them a welcome kit to continue improving that relationship and showing our appreciation.
7) How to map your marketing and sales stages on the same timeline. (13:30)
In order to figure out how our sales and marketing efforts aligned, we mapped out each of the sales stages to the corresponding marketing stages. Then we could see where there was overlap and where there were gaps. This allowed us to adapt our digital marketing campaigns and B2B marketing activities as intent grows along the sales (and marketing) funnel.
8) Creating personalized campaigns for each SDR (14:30)
Here Peter shares a real world example of ABM at AdRoll. We combined personalized landing pages, personalized display ads, and personalized calls to action into one ABM campaign. If you’re interested in learning more about this campaign feel free to ask one of our ABM specialists how it was put together.
9) Next steps to make ABM work for your business (15:50)
Adding account-based marketing programs to your current B2B marketing strategy is a lot easier than most people think. Peter explains that you can use ABM to improve your B2B marketing techniques and enhance what you already do by:
- Sending personalized physical goods via direct mail
- Finding multiple contacts at each of your target accounts
- Upselling into different departments within your current customers
10) Three results you should expect from ABM (18:35)
- Locating leads: ABM allows you to find new leads using look-alike audience
- Accelerating pipeline: Using customized content helps you accelerate your sales pipeline
- Multiplying growth: upselling and cross selling to your already engaged customers
11) Bonus: Use Social Media to deliver results for B2B Marketing & Sales teams
With the right marketing strategy and tactics, social media can be a goldmine of engagement for your content marketing efforts. Combine that with the ability for your sellers to both research AND reach users where they spend spare time online at work and it is easy to see why LinkedIn has proven to be one of the most effective social media platforms for B2B marketing. There really is no better way to locate and engage with your target audience than through the LinkedIn platform. In fact, our integration with LinkedIn allows you to run account-based advertising campaigns alongside targeted display giving your sales team the air cover that will make your brand impossible to forget in the minds of prospects.
Next Steps
Improving your B2B marketing involves a lot of moving pieces working together to drive deals forward. Because B2B marketers these days are much more sophisticated, it’s becoming more and more difficult to improve most marketing strategies.
But of course there’s always room for improvement.
As Peter explained, Account-based marketing isn’t a strategy that will replace traditional inbound marketing, it will just make it better. ABM links all your separate B2B marketing initiatives together into one cohesive marketing strategy. Each target account within this strategy then gets its own dedicated campaign and you can keep track of its performance using a number of different tools.
If you’re serious about doing ABM right, but you’re not sure where to start, you can schedule a free demo with an ABM specialist who can answer your questions.
About the Author
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