When you hear ABM, your mind may automatically go to account-based marketing.
But there’s another ABM that is worthing giving your attention to.
Attention-based marketing.
Marketers spend a lot of time, money, and resources to get a buyer’s attention.
But what comes after that?
This is a problem that is extremely prevalent in the marketing community – a problem that Elle Woulfe, VP of Marketing at LookBookHQ, and her team have devoted a lot of time to remedy.
The Problem
Marketers put most of their time into getting people to take those first actions – to click on an ad or to open an email.
But after the email is opened, or an ad is clicked, what happens next? How do you hang onto them?
It’s really expensive to get people to engage with you and your content. So shouldn’t it be important to spend time figuring out how to keep people once you’ve gotten them?
It seems fairly simple, but it’s not.
Fighting For Attention
When it comes to getting someone’s attention, all of the things that have been done for a long time don’t work as well as they used to.
Why? Well, there’s a lot of competition, noise, and emails.
Everyone’s attention is really distributed. Your emails are battling facebook alerts, news updates, and tweets for attention from the buyer. Attention is a gift that should not be taken for granted.
“Once it’s gone, it’s gone.”
Once you lose someone’s attention, it’s gone forever. When buyers clicks on your email, they may be looking to give you a lot of attention at that moment.
However, many marketers run on their own schedule and not the buyer’s schedule.
Does this situation sound familiar?
Thursday you send an email. If you see that the buyer is interested, you send another email… Next Thursday.
What’s wrong with that scenario? It’s traditionally how emails are handled in marketing.
The problem is that the buyer was interested and ready to engage in that first moment. Not a week from then. They may have wanted to consume a lot of information right then and there, but the moment passed, and now it’s gone.
Buyers Binge Information
“Binging”: it’s what you do when you sit down to watch hours of that Netflix show you can’t get enough of.
It’s also a term that can be used to describe how people consume information.
Marketers aren’t always the best at making it easy for buyers to consume a lot of information when they want to. Too often, the buyer is expected to do a lot of the research themselves.
Think about when you’re about to make a big purchase. Maybe it’s a car or a new TV. You don’t want to make the wrong decision. Stakes are higher when you make a big purchase.
So what do you do? You comb the internet reading and comparing reviews. Do you do this once a week for three months? Most likely no. Most likely you research binge in 30-minute increments with intense concentration and energy.
This is exactly what buyers are doing. Especially B2B buyers. Except, their stakes are higher than not being completely satisfied with the size of the new TV they bought.
Their jobs are on the line.
Content Engagement = Sales Readiness
When B2B buyers spend a lot of time and put a lot of energy into research, it’s because they are trying to figure out what solution to buy, and who to talk to.
This is a significant indicator of sales readiness.
Take a look at some of these statistics:
Prospects that binge:
- Are 2.4x more likely to be sales accepted
- Move 2.3x faster through the funnel
- Have 2.4x higher ACV’s
However, there’s a challenge.
The challenge is that marketers are dependent on proxies for engagement.
Today the leading way intent is calculated is by looking at if someone clicked on an ad or fill out a form.
Many still assume that “action” is a signal of intent.
The issue is, you have no idea if they actually read it or not.
So what should you do?
Calculate Engagement
Track how many assets someone is consuming, and how much time they spend with each one.
Elle and her team calculate all of the time their potential clients spend and turn that into an engagement score.
Here’s a process Elle shared that is working well in helping target interested accounts.
When a buyer shows intense engagement and their points reach a certain threshold, an alert is sent to the sales rep at that account and they’re able to see the assets that were consumed, who they are, and from there they’re able to click into Salesforce.
It’s giving marketers another dimension of intent and interest that they can use to identify who is actually engaged and sale ready.
It also removes friction from the buying process, and makes it easy for buyers because they don’t have to work so hard to learn the things they want to learn.
ABM In Action
A client of Lookbook, Kyle Johnson, who is the Marketing Automation Lead for Legal Thompson Reuters, shares about the impact ABM had in their marketing strategy.
Kyle and his marketing team work with a finite group of people, and they were running out of runway. Having already reached and retained 87% of the AMLaw 200 law firms, they were attempting to reach the remaining 13% of the AMLaw 200.
However, they found that the remaining 13% were tough to get and weren’t biting on what they did in the past.
So they started looking at different ways to serve up content and moved into an exploratory phase. Ultimately they found themselves with Lookbook.
Once they came across LookBook, they signed up right away. Immediately they looked to solve the biggest need: giving people more content.
They took their old approach (sending an email, then a form) and added more pieces of content in the email which offered people more options. Their potential buyers were also given the option to choose which content they wanted to read.
This is all they changed, and immediately they experienced more engagement and interest from potential buyers.
It wasn’t a painful or hard switch.
And it made a huge difference in their marketing outreach.
So whether you are focused on specific accounts or broader-based horizontal demand gen, attention-based marketing is the next big thing.
At the end of the day, attention is this commodity that everyone trades.
It’s the currency we all use to get results.
