This isn’t your first rodeo. You’ve been playing the account-based marketing game for some time, but you’re looking for a few new long-term plays to take your team to the next level of hero mode. You already know that well-executed ABM programs equal more revenue and happy customers and now you’re ready to do even more.
Well, you’ve come to the right place. We’ve brainstormed, tested, and executed four amazing multi-channel campaigns built for teams who have enough ABM experience in their arsenal to make the magic happen, but are ready for some fresh inspiration.
In this blog post, we’ll break down a few campaigns highlighted in our Crawl, Walk, Run Multi-Channel ABM Playbook. We’ll show you how to use a breezy direct mail piece to connect with your key accounts, how to get your targeted digital ads in front of your audience even if they’ve never submitted a form, how to prevent the customer churn that keeps us up at night, and how to leverage field marketing to target new and renewed accounts based on location.
Use Direct Mail to Lean Into the Things That Your Accounts Love
A simple direct mail campaign provides an easy way to connect with your prospects. Staying top of mind with something tangible is an easy way to give your accounts an “A-HA” moment about your brand.
Have your team put on their thinking caps to come up with a holiday or a cultural touchpoint or a topical event that you want to lean into. Donut day? Great. The finale of the latest and greatest show? Love it. A pop culture reference that is everywhere in the news? That will work great.
Don’t over complicate things. Whether it’s a dozen donuts or a (well-timed) funny postcard, find the best way to send it. A platform like Sendoso is great to parter with if you are committed to making this happen.
Follow up is key. You’ve invested the time and resources. At the very least, have a follow-up template and phone/email cadence queued up for SDRs, but don’t be afraid to go bigger: digital ad campaigns, landing pages and custom chatbots are all clutch moves.
PRO-TIP: Don’t forget about social media. If your prospect shares your direct mail piece on social media, it’s a great way to engage with them.
Part of any good campaign is the willingness to get smarter. Setting up a Salesforce campaign (or even a basic spreadsheet) with delivery metrics will help you be a better marketer every time. You’ll also find out what kinds of campaigns are getting your accounts excited.
Leverage Always-on Digital Advertising to Nurture Your Target Accounts
Display advertising has historically been tricky. Many marketers can’t serve ads to specific audiences unless they’ve converted in some way (AKA collected an email address), so they rely on either list uploads or user data on various ad platforms to target. Headache.
But with Terminus, you can get your ads in front of a specific list of accounts anywhere online – even if they’ve never submitted a form on your website. That means you can nurture your list of target accounts across the web and introduce them to your brand’s resources with always-on display advertising.
Figure out the logistics. Work with your team to create multiple display ad sets along with the corresponding landing pages. Think: new product announcements, case studies, or downloadable content.
Decide on your flow. You’ll want to move the audience through the campaign based on the notion of a journey. Timing and impressions will be key. Our ebook will show you an ideal timing structure with ways to tell the story.
Lock in on the platform that will tell your story. Ads + chat, web personalization, and/or email signature marketing creates a connected account experience that will increase intent, engagement, and drive pipeline.
PRO-TIP: A platform with multiple native channels will always drive better results.
Launch your ads. With ABM, your audience should be restricted to the accounts within your total addressable market (TAM) or target account lists (TAL).
Watch. Iterate. Track. If you notice engagement dropping, you may want to restructure your campaign organization or refresh your ad creative. If you want to get fancy, you could progress your audience through various ad creatives with criteria such as:
- Number of Impressions / days since last spike (bucketed by low, medium, and high impressions)
- Numbers of Impressions / showing intent (visits to a specific product page for example)
PRO-TIP: Don’t forget to track the velocity of accounts progressing through your program. If they are progressing slowly, your messaging needs additional urgency.
Proactively Prevent Customer Churn
Intent is critical for preventing churn. If a customer is considering competitors, it’s time to act. And to know that’s happening, it’s key to bring together marketing, sales, and customer support to create a list of competitive intent keywords.
Set up a regular meeting for CSMs and marketing to identify accounts at risk of churning. Monitoring competitor search queries per your key accounts, you can also prioritize outreach based on companies who are researching competitors.
You’ll want to set up a view within Salesforce that filters accounts with intent groups and data. We recommend filtering your competitive intent keywords like the brand names of your competitors.
If an account is demonstrating intent for churn by showing signs of researching a competitor, set a meeting with your account. You may consider having your design team spin up a display campaign referencing pieces of your battlecard (created to show how your brand positions itself against competitors).
PRO-TIP: Depending on the size of the account, you may notify executive leadership so that they can begin reaching out or planning a VIP event to save the account.
As you measure the results of your efforts, be sure to focus on your overall renewal rate, segment by intent for competitors and, if possible, deals lost to that competitor. Our ebook will help you understand and measure the impact of each retention activity and determine how you can prevent losing more deals in the future.
Use a VIP Experience to Help New and Existing Customers Feel the Love
When done correctly, events can serve your team by bringing together a collection of industry experts, peers, colleagues, partners, and thought leaders. Those feel-good events can often translate to more meetings set, contracts signed and ambassadors met. We’ve teed you up to make a huge impact in the field (even virtually) within an ABM framework.
Rally your team with a report that pulls together fit, engagement, and intent data to isolated cohorts of your ideal customer profile (ICP) by location. Pay special attention to both prospects and current customers with renewal on their radar. Bonus points if you can dial in to identify renewal accounts that may also be at risk to churn.
- Have your team begin thinking through ideas for event platforms, venues, who you will invite (and how), and which swag and direct mail options you’ll use to WOW them. Be bold. Make it fun. And use your data to create a theme that will be relevant to your target accounts.
- If your cohort in a particular area is small, you might consider hosting a simple exec or VIP dinner (if able to do so in person) with a smaller audience. If virtual, we suggest creating a custom experience like a coffee or wine tasting.
- Depending on the subject and the size of the event, you may also consider flying in customers outside of that geographic area to speak.
- Activate customer ambassadors. Offering these thought leadership opportunities to top-tier customers is another proven ABM tactic to keep decision makers at target accounts engaged and happy
Now let’s shout it out. A few weeks before the event, you’ll want to start promoting these events through a series of multi-channel efforts.This can include personalized emails from your sales team, marketing emails, LinkedIn campaigns, account-based display campaigns, chatbots branded for the event, etc.
Measuring these events (which are often a significant investment) is critical. Using previous event registration and attendance records as a benchmark, determine if your ABM-infused event strategy worked. Survey your customers and prospects on their experience at your event and determine. And don’t forget to set up a campaign to track the deals closed or influenced by the event.
If you’re ready to take your ABM to the next level no matter where you are in the journey, we’ve got you covered with our Crawl, Walk, Run Multi-Channel ABM Playbook. Check out our resource page for this ebook and more resources to meet you where you are and get you where you’re wanting to go.
