There’s not much better than grandma’s homemade apple pie. The problem is she never writes it down!
Mixing up that scrumptious pie is nearly impossible without some written instructions.
The same goes for ABM strategies, believe it or not. That’s why our content team at Terminus has created a step-by-step ABM cookbook, detailing 13 of our favorite concoctions.
And, in this episode of #FMF, two contributors to the cookbook, Joel Garcia and Bailie Ward, outline several of our famous ABM recipes.
Here’s what we’re unpacking today:
- The reasons why our content team chose the cookbook layout
- The best ways to stay at the top of your customers’ minds
- How to creatively use direct mail in your ABM strategy
- Tips on retaining top-tier customers
This post is based on a podcast with Joel Garcia and Bailie Ward. You can listen to the full episode here and below.
The cookbook for ABM champs
Bailie: Why did you choose a cookbook?
Joel: The primary goal of this specific piece of content was to gather a collection of account-based marketing tactics that we could provide to our customer base and to other ABM practitioners in a memorable and really actionable way.
ABM is a new practice. So, having these methodologies in a way that’s really easy to follow is important, especially when you have a lot of different tools. Your tech stack is growing. It just made a lot of sense to format it that way.
Previously we would see things like this in the market, in the form of playbooks, usually for sales. It seems like they’re starting to really come back into vogue.
It just felt like the right time to put together a content piece like this, especially as an ABM company because you know, ABM is really about bringing creativity back into the B2B process and making content that’s a little bit more bespoke to the people you’re trying to reach.
That was really the inspiration behind the cookbook format at least.
Recipe #1: Topical Tater Tots
Bailie: Topical Tater Tots is an account-based tactic that uses direct mail to take advantage of topical events in the news or pop culture to stay top of mind. This can manifest itself in many different ways.
We came up with this campaign and we started thinking of ways that we could nurture accounts without seeming overly pushy. We were trying to brainstorm ways to get in front of our prospects in a way that seemed a little bit more natural. A little bit more fun and less of, you know, “Hey, this is my third email to you this week.”
But more of like, “Hey, just wanted to send this along because it reminded me of you. And by the way, we haven’t spoken in a while. How about we revisit that conversation from a few months ago?”
What we do with this campaign is basically keep track of a number of things. We keep a list of those standard hallmark holidays that, you know, most people think aren’t real holidays. Like Grandparents Day or National Cookie Day, National Donut Day.
We also keep track of major pop culture events and we try to find ways to incorporate direct mail touches into those.
Recipe #2: Strawberry Surround Sound Ice Cream
Bailie: We did a pretty large-scale campaign where we shipped cases of Jenny’s ice cream to accounts around the country. I think we might’ve done it anywhere from 100 to 200 different companies.
Then, we followed that up with a complete multichannel ad campaign. We did display ads, we did personalize one-to-one emails. We did a larger scale Marketo campaign. We had a custom landing page in addition to, of course, the direct mail.
If you’re trying to execute something like this in your own company, you’re going to need your ABM coordinator or your digital marketer and a salesperson for this. You’re probably also going to want to pull in your copywriter and your graphic design team.
If you’re not doing it all yourself and you do have that extra bandwidth, make sure that you’re bringing in those teammates so that you have somebody who can create a really visually appealing set of ads and somebody who can whip up a really compelling email sequence.
The tools that we use for this were Sendoso to send the ice cream, SalesLoft for the emails, Terminus for the ads. We had a Sigstr banner in all the SDR outreach that also matched the display on creative.
We used Salesforce to track the success of all of this. We also ran ads on LinkedIn.
What we essentially did was we combined Terminus data with the campaign to know when to send it. So on a weekly basis, we would generate a list of accounts that had shown an engagement spike in the week prior. Then on the day that we got that spike data in, we would launch a two-week display ad campaign that had ice cream all over the imagery and it says, “Scoop up your ideal customers with Terminus.”
That took them to a custom landing page. We let that run for about one to two weeks, just so they started getting that brand and that imagery in their mind. And then at two weeks, we would ship out the ice cream.
Recipe #3: Retention Rigatoni
Joel: This tactic is to protect your key accounts from turning right when they’re starting to consider competitors.
To execute this retention play, you need your sales development, your ABM coordinator, and marketing ops.
You also potentially need someone from product marketing, someone who has the knowledge and visibility into the discrepancies between your product and your competitor’s.
The ingredients you need are intent data — some sort of third-party and first-party intent data — that’s integrated into specific hubs so that you’re able to act on it. That goes for engagement data as well.
You probably need some sort of retention deck prepared for your sales team that would be arranged by your product marketing lead or your account-based marketing professionals depending on how your org structure is set up.
You might also need something like a competitive battle card. A quick way to synthesize your competitive differentiators in the market so that when your sales team needs a quick reference they just have it on hand.
You really want to start targeting your list of key accounts, customers that are your dream customers that you want to renew year after year.
Then, you want to be tracking their renewal date so that as they come upon their renewal date, you can automatically spin up ads to get in front of them before your competitors do.
Final thoughts
Thinking of trying out some of these tasty ABM recipes? Check out the full episode to hear more details and even more easy-to-follow ABM strategies.
