Editor’s Note:
This is a guest blog post from Heidi Vandermeer, the Account-Based Marketing Manager at Uberflip, a cloud-based platform that allows B2B marketers to create personalized content experiences at scale. As an Account-Based Marketer, Heidi develops marketing strategies to drive interest, engagement, and revenue acceleration from top tier accounts at Uberflip. She lives and works in the city of Toronto.
Editor’s Note:Getting Started with Account-Based Marketing (ABM)
In 2016, my team at Uberflip began to lay the groundwork for account-based marketing. Previously, we had a heavily ingrained inbound marketing program, so we knew that change would not happen overnight. We had to slowly change our infrastructure, alter our teams, and switch our Salesforce reporting from leads to contacts.
We definitely experienced a few growing pains as we made these transitions, but we had full buy-in from the executive team on down, and were confident our efforts would pay off.
In June of 2016, I moved into a marketing role purely focused on ABM. My biggest priorities as Uberflip’s Account-Based Marketing Manager are:
- Creating more sales and marketing alignment.
- Developing marketing campaigns for every stage of the buying cycle.
- Managing marketing channels — the biggest of which are direct mail and digital ads.
The Importance of Personalization in the B2B Sales Process
Time and time again, research has shown how important personalization is, and we see this in the results from our campaigns. According to Marketo’s State of Engagement Report, irrelevant content is the #1 reason why consumers don’t engage more often.
[ctt template=”1″ link=”tl07L” via=”yes” ]”Irrelevant content is the #1 reason consumers don’t engage more often w/ your brand. @Marketo”[/ctt]
A study from Demand Gen Report concluded that “leads nurtured with personalized content tend to lead to 20% more sales opportunities.”
[ctt template=”1″ link=”98qaR” via=”yes” ]“Leads nurtured with personalized content tend to lead to 20% more sales opps.” @DG_Report[/ctt]
Account-based marketing is a highly targeted approach to marketing, so it’s crystal clear that personalization is key to an ABM strategy.
Personalization at Scale with Terminus and Uberflip
The time it takes to truly personalize your outreach and engage your target accounts can seem overwhelming. If I’m looking to target accounts by region, industry, department, or on a one-to-one basis, the amount of work required to properly personalize a campaign adds up quickly.
I’ve found huge benefits in using Uberflip and Terminus together for scaling personalization within our different segments. I’ve used Terminus since I began my ABM work, and it has been extremely helpful. It allows us to segment and target the right audiences with right messages using digital ads. This level of targeting and customization for our online audience was something that I was never able to do before.
In addition to using Terminus, I also use our own platform, Uberflip, to quickly build the destinations for our Terminus ads. I use Uberflip to curate custom collections of content to drive each account to specific information and lead forms that are relevant to them.
As we built out our account-based marketing program, being able to properly segment our accounts was an integral part of scaling our entire ABM strategy.
Segmenting Our Target Accounts for ABM
The first level of segmentation we used for our accounts was a three-tiered approach based on priority. My talented marketing team and I worked with our sales team to examine our best customers’ data to create a tiering model for target accounts. As a result, we divided our accounts into three tiers based on projected revenue.
Tier 1
The highest valued segment is Tier 1. Since it offers the largest return on investment, we invest more effort and money into these accounts. For these accounts, we often create campaigns and content at a highly personalized level to the account or specific buying group.
Tier 2
For our second tier, we use less direct personalization, but we still segment our Terminus campaigns by industry, persona, or technology integration.
Tier 3
For accounts in our third tier, we take a less targeted approach. While we occasionally add them to an industry- or persona-based campaign, we spend much less effort on personalizing these campaigns. Our approach to Tier 3 accounts more closely resembles an inbound marketing strategy compared to our other tiers.
We’ve also found it highly valuable to divide our digital advertising campaigns not only by tier, but by stage of the sales cycle. We create different campaigns and content destinations based on whether an account is a cold prospect, an existing sales opportunity, or a current customer.
Account-Based Advertising in the Wild: 3 Real-World Examples
So, what do our campaigns actually look like?
The example below is a campaign that we ran to engage accounts that would benefit from our integrations with marketing automation platforms. We ran three different campaigns for users of three different types of marketing automation, and we also included a generic ad for companies where we did not have that data.
Unsurprisingly, the more tailored ads performed significantly better!
This second example is a campaign we ran for accounts that were further in the buying cycle and had an existing sales opportunity. We are lucky to have great customer reviews, so we drove this audience directly to our review page to provide real testimonials to support our prospects’ purchasing decision.
This third example is a one-to-one campaign for one of our top-tier prospects. We wanted to tailor a custom experience for them, so we created personalized ads and a destination with messaging specific to the account.
Being able to target specific accounts, industries, buying stages, departments, and more with Terminus has been a game-changing for our marketing and sales program. Paired with personalized Uberflip content streams, it’s even more powerful.
To learn more about how Terminus and Uberflip work together to drive account-based marketing success, watch our behind-the-scenes webinar now.
