The best B2B marketers maximize their resources.
Whether that means extending the reach of limited budgets or quadrupling campaign impact with limited headcount—or both—technology almost always plays a role in helping them to do more with less.
This is especially true for small teams in the wake of the pandemic. While not every B2B marketing team is resource-strapped, most are resource-conscious, which is one of the key reasons a growing number readily embrace ABM.
The problem? Lack of integration across platforms and messy CRM data hinders ABM campaign measurement, leaving a significant chunk of marketers struggling to map leads to corresponding accounts and tie account engagement to known stakeholders.
In the face of changing times, mastering measurement is no longer an option, it’s a necessary part of sustaining success.
Through the lens of case studies, here’s how three real-life small teams yield the most from their ABM campaigns.
1. Focus on the right leads
ABM isn’t a shiny new toy—it’s a complete mindset shift that requires marketers to let go of preconceived notions like:
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More is always better. Unlike traditional demand gen, ABM isn’t about casting a wide net to attract the most leads. ABM is about targeting your efforts to a select group of buyers that seem the most likely (or ready) to buy your solution.
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ABM is a standalone fix. Successful ABM implementation isn’t possible without an integrated view of everything—CRM, MAP, advertising platforms, gifting services, sales enablement platforms, conversational marketing, plus any other tools that track stops along the buyer’s journey.
“Some marketers look at ABM as a new frontier and a massive shift that leaves the past behind. However, ABM is really about infusing efficiency into your full lifecycle of marketing, many parts of which are existing programs and tasks.” – Randi Barshack, CMO, RollWorks
Naturally, this full lifecycle approach extends to what account-based marketers measure, with the most popular methods including:
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Individual campaign and channel metrics
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Conversion of engaged account to opportunity
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Overall number of engaged accounts
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Marketing qualified accounts
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Influenced pipeline
Don’t make the mistake of treating ABM like a silver bullet or standalone approach. To extract the most meaning from ABM measurement, start with the right foundation: a data-backed target account list.
ABM in Action: How Snapfulfil generated 4K TOFU leads by refining its TAL
THE CHALLENGE
SnapFulfil’s marketing team consists of two employees who wear many hats while directing the company’s entire global marketing strategy. As the self-proclaimed “lean” division was struggling with limited resources in a fast-moving category, they realized they needed to refine their ABM strategies to launch a program that generated high-value leads efficiently and quickly.
“We’re operating almost 100% remote, so nailing down our ideal TAL was difficult,” said Katie McCauley, Marketing Manager at SnapFulfil. “It had to be as targeted as possible; I didn’t want to hand over leads that were unlikely to adopt our solution. We’re paying for those impressions, and we can’t afford those impressions if they’re not leading to conversions.”
THE SOLUTION
McCauley turned to HubSpot and RollWorks to help generate demand from target accounts and nurture them into leads.
That may sound simple on its face, but the team’s strategy currently includes:
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TAL building and account scoring (to prioritize accounts even more)
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Display and social media advertising with intent-based targeting
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Optimizing website content with engaging experiences and demo requests
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Coordinated sales outreach
Additionally, McCauley’s team and their sales counterparts can add or remove companies from the TAL from a single, unified dashboard. They also utilize RollWorks’ playbook for LinkedIn advertising, as well as intent data and LinkedIn’s prospect tool to continually replenish their prospect lists.
THE RESULTS
Since launching its refined ABM program at the start of 2020, SnapFulfil saw:
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27% of websites visitors coming from ads
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4,000 new top-of-funnel leads to its marketing automation campaigns
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6% conversion to MQLs
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Closer alignment between sales and marketing
2. Develop strategies to build brand visibility and engagement
Most B2B marketers have anxiously checked in on campaign progress at some point, but many of them were powerless to course-correct when those campaigns showed signs of underperforming.
Not so with ABM. Real-time metrics give account-based marketers an undeniable edge: the power to make changes that improve campaign conversion rates on the fly.
But beyond sparing marketers the agony of helplessly watching their campaigns crumble, gaining the visibility needed to improve outreach and messaging in the moment has other ROI-boosting benefits. It helps teams identify mission-critical insights like:
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High-value accounts
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The best time to approach a target
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The messaging most likely to resonate with targets
ABM in Action: How Auditoria achieved a 208% increase in brand engagement from account targeting
THE CHALLENGE
Brand building and engagement are top priorities when you’re charged with aggressive growth goals in a relatively unknown category.
That’s how Nick Ezzo, VP of Marketing for Auditoria, knew that relying solely on inbound wouldn’t cut it as a marketing strategy—the company was creating a new kind of software that buyers aren’t necessarily looking for (yet).
To support the company’s aggressive growth goals leading up to their Series A round, Ezzo and his small team of contractors and interns needed to create and validate Auditoria’s TAL to get in front of high-value prospects.
The Auditoria team also needed to better engage their target accounts to maintain that success.
THE SOLUTION
To use their martech stack to its fullest potential, Ezzo and his team implemented LinkedIn, RollWorks, and ZoomInfo to collect, augment, and clean data to find the best-fit accounts for their businesses.
Then they used HubSpot and Salesforce to route, score, and automate activities related to the data. Ezzo and his team also used a full suite of engagement tools to reach accounts on multiple channels.
With a clearly defined target list of about 15,000 accounts, Ezzo took a rotating approach to his programs. Rather than trying to go after all 15,000 accounts at once, he aligned with the sales team to pick 100 to 150 companies at a time and surround them with outreach and air cover for 90 days before moving on to the next set of accounts.
The shared goal for these 90-day pushes was simple: Book the first meeting. While marketing hosted webinars, ran display and social ads, and promoted content to this target account list, sales conducted outreach and looked for warm intros from that same list of accounts.
THE RESULTS
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Reached 93% of their TAL with 59% visiting the website
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Engaged 31% of those website visitors, leading to a 208% overall increase in the number of accounts engaged from their TAL
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Achieved an almost 4% clickthrough rate from their LinkedIn Connector Campaigns
3. Use technology to accurately track account actions
ABM in Action: How Goverlan generates 40-50 demos per week
Treating every account the same undermines the targeting prowess of ABM.
With access to account-based data, B2B marketers can group accounts by a common factor (such as buying stage), enabling them to efficiently cater the most relevant content to specific accounts.
THE CHALLENGE
As a growing company that traditionally sold to SMBs, Goverlan needed to target higher-value deals in order to hit its aggressive revenue goals, but its two-person marketing team was struggling. The marketing team had no sales prospecting support and wanted a reliable way to convert free-trial customers into paid accounts.
THE SOLUTION
Goverlan leveraged HubSpot data to run targeted ad campaigns based on awareness-level accounts, then implemented a scoring mechanism to sync different audiences into RollWorks for more account-based campaigns.
The marketing team was able to map the content they built for target accounts to different stages of awareness—unaware, aware, and engaged.
THE RESULTS
Thirteen months after refining its ABM technologies and data initiatives, the Goverlan team:
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Generated 40-50 demo requests per week
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Generated closed/won revenue 15x higher than their initial ABM tech investments
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Created 173 conversions with the retargeting campaign
BONUS: Measure account progression
The overall goal of ABM measurement is to determine which areas of a campaign are working and which areas might need re-tooling to continue driving pipeline.
To effectively drive pipeline, marketing and sales need to understand the relative buying journey of your organization’s top prospects—and the right technology can help them do it.
“In an ideal world, marketers would have an ABM platform that connects to a marketer’s CRM, MAP, and other marketing tools to ingest data and automatically map activities and events to account engagement. It would also track an account’s progression through the stages of the buying journey, showing the ROI of ABM campaigns and how they are generating revenue.”
–Vandana Mehra, Director of Product Marketing, RollWorks
Given the pandemic, account engagement and/or intent data is even more relevant. Between added constraints and scrutiny around budgets and significant employee attrition, any data that helps teams better understand target accounts and buyers can also help them identify low-hanging fruit.
These easy wins often translate to continued or increased investment in ABM initiatives, especially when the C-suite sees that success replicated.
For intent data specifically, intent monitoring tools help marketers identify an account’s previous actions and predict its next point of engagement (e.g. email clicks, landing page visits, form fills).
Over the next 12-18 months, marketers plan to implement account progression metrics such as:
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Closed-won deal analysis
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Cost of customer acquisition
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ROI by channel
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Cross-channel engagement
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Cross-channel attribution
Companies are also monitoring specific engagement points to determine performance:
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Multi-touch attribution
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Single touch/first touch
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Single touch/last touch
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Pipeline Velocity
Putting it together
Small teams are usually scrappy for a reason. They can’t afford to squander resources.
“We only have so many darts to fire and we have to make sure each one hits the bullseye. Unlike larger companies, we don’t have the luxury of wasting darts. We have to make sure every touch counts and that we’re reaching the right people at the right time with the right message.” —Nick Ezzo, VP Marketing, Auditoria
Modern technology providers are leveling the playing field for teams of all sizes by allowing them to launch campaigns that drive results despite their size, budget, and/or resource limitations.
With the right ABM platform, resource-strapped marketing teams can automate time-consuming processes and gain critical insights that usher their organizations into a profitable future.
