Many B2B marketers are throwing the demand generation rule book out the window and embracing a new approach to marketing: account-based marketing (ABM), a strategy designed to flip the funnel and focus solely on reeling in the big fish. If you’re not exactly sure what ABM is, we’ve got you covered. Here’s a great definition from Engagio, “Account Based Marketing is a strategic approach that coordinates personalized marketing and sales efforts to open doors and deepen engagement at specific accounts.” Marketers have implemented ABM programs to narrow their focus on the highest value accounts instead of simply generating the highest number of leads possible.
Marketing teams have been moving fast to plan and implement their own ABM programs. This typically requires a large amount of time and money be allocated to this new, largely untested strategy, and executives are eagerly awaiting the results. However, ABM can be a slow and drawn out process as you nurture key accounts closer to the finish line. Instead of sitting back and waiting for their efforts to turn into revenue, marketers need to continue evolving and optimizing their ABM programs and diversifying the metrics which signal success.
Take a Breath and Figure Out What Actually Works
Marketers are throwing their entire arsenal at these key accounts, but it’s crucial that you pause, take a breath, and figure out which ABM programs are actually working. Most marketers will be tracking performance across each ABM channel, but the outbound marketing tactics required for ABM are notoriously hard to measure. Take display advertising. This is one of the most popular ABM tactics as it gives you the brand awareness necessary for developing early stage opportunities. However, display advertising – like many ABM channels – isn’t solely for generating new leads, it should also be influencing existing accounts. This focus on influence makes it very hard to measure the value of each ABM program. Marketers need to move past traditional demand generation metrics and adopt a new measurement philosophy for ABM. One that will enable you to determine which programs are the most impactful, as well as prove overall ABM success.
Transition Your Reporting to Reflect ABM Success
Since account-based marketing is largely unproven, if you want to continue running an ABM program your CEO will require evidence that your efforts are driving results. Due to the longer sales cycle and smaller number of opportunities, measuring pipeline and revenue will not do ABM justice. It requires a new measurement framework which introduces new metrics into your marketing reporting. There are many versions of this ABM measurement framework, but they all revolve around one core theme – measuring engagement across all channels for each of your key accounts.
Counting new leads and employing first-touch attribution to measure channel success makes very little sense for account-based marketing. ABM requires marketing engagement throughout the entire sales cycle and across multiple contacts within each account – your measurement needs to reflect this. Most marketing tools struggle measuring this at the account level. To assist marketers in their ABM measurement efforts, new software vendors have emerged and existing firms have released solutions designed specifically for ABM measurement. These solutions allow marketers to tie each of their marketing programs to specific contacts and aggregate this data at an account level.
Measuring performance at the account level requires a strong foundation of engagement at the lead or contact level within your CRM and marketing automation databases. While most marketers have the ability to measure online engagement at this level, many lack the ability to track high value engagements that occur offline, such as phone calls. This requires call attribution technology, which allows marketers to fine-tune their optimizations by including call conversions. Only with the ability to measure both online and offline engagement for every contact can marketers view this data at the account level and truly prove ABM success.
The learn more about the importance of call attribution for tracking engagement, check out our on-demand webinar, The Marketing Black Hole: Why Inbound Calls are the Biggest Challenge for CMOs in 2016.
