If you’ve been reading our blog, then by now you’ve learned about the history of ABM, the benefits of aligning your sales and marketing teams, and must-try ABM strategies. But after all of that, one question remains: how do you measure whether or not your account-based marketing efforts are successful? Let’s walk through one of the most important parts of account-based marketing and advertising: measurement and optimization.
While many traditional marketing strategies don’t allow you to optimize until after a campaign has run its course, advertising at the account level gives you the ability to optimize your campaigns on the fly using A/B testing. This allows you to see which advertising creative and marketing messages are falling flat with your target audience as the campaign runs, giving you the opportunity to swap out copy or ads that aren’t top performers in real time.
Tip: In order to make sure campaign updates happen seamlessly, have alternate messaging and creative ready to go.
An important part of the optimization process is gathering feedback from your sales team, which should happen continuously as you run your ABM campaigns. Ask your sales team if they’ve had better success penetrating key accounts, and see if there’s anything you could be doing to better support their goals.
Measuring the success of your account-based marketing campaigns is a lot like measuring the success of key account marketing, except this time, you’re restricting your measurements to key accounts.
Your metrics will depend on your business goals and the type of campaign you’re running, but the below list of popular account-based marketing metrics is a great place to start. Here are seven KPIs every account-based marketing team should track:
1. Interactions with Ads
It’s one of the most basic yet most important questions in ABM: is your target audience clicking on your ads? Keep an eye on your engagement rates to see how well your advertising is resonating across devices, personas, sales stages, and the different campaigns you may be running. Keep in mind that the goal here is to see how your ads are performing within your target audience.
2. Conversion Metrics
Is your target audience taking the desired action? Whether your goal is to have them click your ad to fill out a form, request a product demo, or visit your website, this is a crucial metric to track. Your conversion metrics can help pinpoint important areas for optimization. For instance, if your click-through rates are high but your conversion rates are low, your messaging may not accurately reflect the offer presented on your landing page or on your website.
Note that these metrics may change depending on the type of campaign you’re running. While website engagement may be a significant measurement for an ABM campaign aimed at engaging leads after an event, a campaign that aims to “reawaken the dead” will be looking more at the number of leads who take an action, period — even if that means they just clicked on an ad and didn’t take any further action.
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3. Overall Engagement
The goal of an account-based marketing campaign is to increase engagement with your brand (and ultimately with your sales team) within target accounts. Measuring prospect activity levels and engagement with your website can help determine whether or not your campaigns are really reaching their mark.
4. Reach
Account-based marketing can be an important awareness generation tool within your key accounts. Better understand your success by tracking the number of new contacts generated from and reached with your ABM campaigns.
[Tweet “Tip: Track how many new contacts your #marketing reaches to measure success of#ABM campaigns.”]
5. Return on Investment
Like with any marketing campaign, you want to see a positive impact on your bottom line. Are you getting more out of your ABM campaigns than what you’re putting in? Be sure to constantly optimize your campaigns in order to ensure the highest return on investment possible.
6. Sales Cycle Length
By exposing your target audience to personalized messages that are targeted by account, you can shorten the awareness and research phase of the buyer’s journey, thereby reducing the length of the sales cycle. Keep an eye on your sales cycle length to gauge the impact of your ABM campaigns.
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7. Customer Retention
Account-based marketing isn’t only for generating new business. It can also be an important tool for customer retention (and even for upselling and cross-selling). Monitor retention rates among the accounts that are being targeted with account-based messaging to track the percentage of customers that churn.
Learn More About Account-Based Marketing
Using any combination of the above account-based marketing metrics — and optimizing your marketing based on your results — will help you build the most impactful ABM campaigns possible. But these aren’t the only possible metrics you can use to track your success. In my book Account-Based Marketing for Dummies, I explore tons of other ways to measure and optimize your campaigns. Click the banner below to download the first chapter of the book for free!
