Account-based (ABM) advertising programs offer a new way to reach and engage the “hard-to-reach” senior buyers at target accounts. Here a B2B company starts by identifying a set of target accounts, specific buyer personas at those accounts (e.g. Director of IT) and then targets those accounts with display ads. With high-quality targeting data (online cookies or business IP ranges) we are able to target exactly the right accounts and buyers with minimal media waste, to drive high levels of engagement. Traditional display programs have been all about leads or form-fills. ABM advertising programs offer much richer engagement metrics and new ways to measure and prove business impact.
Business Impact Measurement – Some Best Practices
Here are some best practices for demonstrating positive impact from your investment in ABM advertising programs:
Better Account Prioritization for Sales: One of the key reports that are now possible to build out and deliver to both inside sales teams and sales reps (or account executives) is a Sales Insights Report (SIR) as shown below:
This report goes beyond traditional marketing qualified lead (MQL) metrics that describe only form-fills, to show a much richer view of B2B buyer journeys from target accounts, across ad clicks, website visits to different pages, live chat conversations initiated by a buyer, and form fill on landing pages and conversion pages.
Using this report, sales teams can now better prioritize their daily/weekly tasks, while pursuing the right accounts that may be in an active buying cycle. To see examples of live SIR reports, please contact us.
Identify all Known Contacts at a target account who engage with ABM ads: The ABM SIR report as shown can show individual buyers who have expressed interest in each product/solution when engaging with ABM ads.
With a very simple MAP integration, we can now identify EACH buyer from a target account who clicks on an ABM ad or visits the website. We share their MAP contact email address via our report where available (i.e. the visitor was cookie-ed by the MAP system). This can be very useful for inside sales, who now have MULTIPLE contacts that they can email at that account, around a specific product/solution (and not just say the one person who filled out a lead form).
Identify ALL Buyer Personas at the Account that engage with ABM ads: The SIR report can also be extended to show ALL buyer personas (e.g. Director of IT, CIO, VP of IT) at each target account that has engaged with ABM ads over a specific duration. This requires building out an ABM Sales UI using engagement data from your ABM advertising programs with engagement data available from other core internal platforms and tools (MAP, CRM). For each engaged buyer (anonymous or Known), our SIR report provides the geo location of the buyer. This again helps inside sales teams with new ways to tailor outgoing email messages as they try to secure an appointment or meeting.
Send Customized Sales emails: Inside sales teams will be able to utilize the SIR report to better customize sales emails into individual accounts. They can add more color or detail to their emails to indicate the breadth and depth of engagement from any specific account, and the content offers or assets that are being consumed by various buyers from that account. To see examples of how to use the SIR reports to customize sales emails, please contact us.
Visually engaging ABM Sales UI: By utilizing and aggregating engagement data across multiple online channels, it’s now possible to build out an ABM Sales UI that provides rich visualization of all engagement at each target account, organized around each product/solution (i.e. each buying group at that account).
You can set up each inside sales team member with an easy-to-review visual view of the entire buying group, their level of engagement (e.g. green, orange, or grey), account-level and individual buyer-level activity across all marketing and sales outreach efforts. You could present a buyer matrix that shows the various personas at the target account that have engaged with your brand.
This single integrated ABM Sales UI would complement other sales tools (e.g. CRM, sales intelligence tools such as Discover.org, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, sales emailing cadence tool such as Salesloft or Outreach) to improve downstream conversion metrics (i.e. appointments, opportunities, closed/won deals). We are working with partners who specialize in Sales Enablement tools and processes to deliver this type of compelling ABM Sales UI capability. For more information, please contact us.
First Appointment / Meeting (SQL) Volume: We recommend establishing a baseline prior to running your ABM ads, and then measuring how many first meetings / appointments have been set to-date across the target accounts. Track how many new appointments/meetings are set by the inside sales team over the course of the ABM program execution. You can also measure the conversion rate of these first meetings into open opportunities. The quality and volume of open opportunities should go up versus more traditional modes of outreach alone (e.g. marketing emails, live events).
Pipeline Value Growth: Capture the open opportunity (pipeline) value across your list of target accounts at the start of the ABM advertising program. Then track net-new opportunities (and their value) added into the pipeline during and by the end of the program execution.
Pipeline Velocity Impact: Measure the “days-to-close” or the total duration of your sales cycle across a set of opportunities – and across the list of accounts that you are targeting through ABM advertising programs. Then track the days-to-close and any reduction in days-to-close as you reach and engage the buying groups at these same target accounts, with both existing (open) opportunities and new opportunities added into the pipeline.
In summary, it is easier than ever to measure the impact of investments in ABM advertising programs. There are several areas of impact that can be tracked through a combination of technology and process, across an ABM advertising platform, and core marketing automation and CRM platforms and tools.
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