“We had a campaign where for every dollar we spent, we had a $34 return on investment. Around the same time, we also ran an acquisition campaign where we saw upwards of 85% account engagement among companies that never knew us before,” said Hannah Kranich.
And those were just some of the early ABM campaigns.
Hannah Kranich is the Executive Director of Demand Generation at Dow Jones, which publishes the world’s most trusted business news and financial information in a variety of media.
She is also a Terminus Rock Star customer.
I use ABM to drive revenue … and align teams on common goals.
“I run demand gen globally for three key business lines, Factiva, and APIs, our risk and compliance suite of products, and our newswire business. I’m tasked primarily with driving awareness, interest, consideration, and pipeline and revenue for those businesses,” said Hannah.
“I use ABM to drive pipeline and revenue. I also use ABM to establish common goals, objectives, and KPIs upon which marketing, sales, and our executive leadership can agree. This ensures everyone is chasing the same targets and stays aligned as they proceed through programs.”
Dow Jones turns to ABM
A couple of years ago, we started to expand our tech stack to enable us to do more data-driven decision-making and better aligned account planning and execution.
At the same time, we pivoted toward an ABM strategy. So, instead of fishing everywhere, we fish in the places where we know our target audience will be and where we’ll have the most success in addressing their pain points and challenges.
Why we chose Terminus for ABM
We brought Terminus on board about a year ago. They stood out from the crowd because they were able to meet our needs.
5 reasons we chose Terminus
- Terminus employs a consultative approach with our businesses – They took the time to understand our businesses and what we were trying to accomplish with ABM. Since then, they’ve been a great resource in terms of best practices, strategies that we might deploy, and ways to optimize the campaigns once they’re in market.
- Terminus supports a broad set of all our ABM channels – We currently leverage Terminus for display advertising, email signatures, and global tactics.
- Terminus can handle and optimize complex campaigns – Over the last year, Terminus helped us run incredibly complicated campaigns that measure different cohorts of companies. We were able to do a lot of A/B testing to see where we were winning and where we would need more attention.
- Terminus has a deep integration with our CRM system – We have Terminus deeply integrated into our Salesforce instance. It’s an extremely complicated CRM system, and they were able to parse out the distinct service lines for us. So, from an ROI perspective, it made our lives much easier in terms of analyzing the data and understanding what we were able to accomplish and what we might improve upon.
- Terminus has incredible Scorecard capabilities – We established scorecards for each of our different cohorts and compare them against each other, slicing and dicing the data in many ways. It used to take us months to get data organized for quarterly reviews, but with Terminus, we now do it quickly. The Terminus Scorecard feature also helps us compare different initiatives against one another to see which drive ROI and which might need optimization.
Dialing up ABM with Terminus
In the last year, we dove wholeheartedly into an ABM strategy, leveraging ABM in four ways:
- We’ve done a lot of targeted acquisition campaigns, both one to many and one to few.
- We’ve executed robust top, middle, and bottom of funnel initiatives.
- We’ve used ABM to increase customer retention.
- We have plans to use ABM to expand our cross sell, expansion, and win back efforts.
Our ABM strategy has helped us work closer with sales on campaign planning and execution, and we’ve driven impressive results in terms of pipeline and revenue that we can all see in a shared technology platform. Our life is so much easier from a data standpoint using Terminus because it’s deeply integrated with our CRM system. So, on the segmentation front as well as with ROI and scorecards, we’re able to see how diverse groups of companies have performed against our various campaign efforts. We have hundreds of different skews and different product lines, and we’re able to dig deep and see what the return on our advertising dollars has been.
Even with our organic efforts, Terminus has been revolutionary for our sales team. We have it deeply integrated into our Salesforce instance in terms of account insights, and all our company owners receive the weekly email. They love it. And for us as marketers, it makes our ABM initiatives transparent to them. It makes all our shared communications easier because we’re all looking at the same data.
Terminus drives big ABM wins
We’ve had some big wins with Terminus. Some of them came early on, which was exciting.
We had a campaign where for every dollar we spent, we had a $34 return on investment and $45 in terms of pipeline revenue.
Around the same time, we ran an acquisition campaign where we saw upwards of 85% account engagement among companies that never knew us before. It was overwhelming to us to be able to see that engagement on our site. I think at this point in the industry, we all need to be super, super customer obsessed.
My Advice to ABMers
In my career, I was fortunate enough to ring the closing bell at NASDAQ and do a brand takeover in Times Square. It was very Rock Star-like. There will be Rock Star moments in your ABM program when the light bulb goes off for the sales team and you’re like, yes, we all get it.
What advice would I give to ABMers to help light those bulbs?
Understand the pain points and challenges your target personas face and create a cohesive content journey for them. That includes the ads you create, the website experience, the content you provide to help them to meet the challenges that they’re facing. Use a tool like Terminus to coordinate and optimize your programs. And work with Sales throughout the process.
I’m Hannah Kranich, and I’m a Terminus Rock Star. You can follow Hannah on LinkedIn for more learnings and tips from a real ABM rock star HERE!
