Strategy & Planning Series Day 4: Data Fuels Account-Based Marketing And Sales Alignment

Published: November 20, 2015

SPS day4 placeitThursday’s Strategy & Planning Series sessions spotlighted the current growth of account-based marketing (ABM) and how B2B organizations are enhancing the way they incorporate webinars within their marketing initiatives — leveraging data and insights to meet business goals.

Seventy-two percent of B2B companies employing account-based marketing plan to increase their ABM efforts over the next 12 months, highlighting the value the discipline is bringing to B2B marketing initiatives. In the session The New Normal: Account-Based Selling Meets Account-Based Marketing, Demandbase highlighted how data is crucial to marketing and sales success.

“Marketers have to start thinking about the metrics that matter to sales,” said John Dering, Director of Marketing Programs at Demandbase, during the session. “This is because these are the metrics that will help sales teams do their job better.”

Dering ran through four steps to getting started with ABM:

Get the latest B2B Marketing News & Trends delivered directly to your inbox!
  • Aligning sales and marketing teams on a “philosophical” and operational level;
  • Identifying target accounts as prospects, current customers and partners;
  • Developing an ABM marketing plan around awareness, engagement and conversion; and
  • Measuring across the entire funnel, while also connecting everything to revenue.

Dering highlighted Plex, a manufacturing ERP online software company, which took a full-funnel approach to its ABM initiatives leveraging account-based data. This includes attracting prospects with account-based advertising, engaging prospects with website personalization and measuring via website analytics. The company saw a 74% increase year-over-year in marketing-generated pipeline opportunities.

“As marketers, there is some good news out there for us: with all these technologies, we have access to a lot of data,” Dering noted. “However we tend to measure the wrong things. The challenge is that we like to measure certain metrics that we’ve always been measuring, instead of measuring the metrics that matter.”

Create A Consistent Look For All Of Your Webinar Promotions

The email, landing page and other related content being used to drive webinar registration and attendance should have a uniform creative look. That was one tip offered by Mark Bornstein, VP of Corporate Marketing for ON24, during his presentation 7 Ways To Enhance Webinar Promotions In 2016.

“There needs to be a connective tissue between all of the content promoting a webinar,” Bornstein said. “Very often I sign up for a webinar and, when I get to the registration page, it doesn’t look the same as the email.”

He offered other tips driving webinar registration:

  1. Try promo email subject lines that offer change of the status quo;
  2. When crafting promo emails, one line is more important than three paragraphs;
  3. Optimize emails for mobile viewing;
  4. Try different subject lines and email types;
  5. Leverage history with previous campaign responders. “If they’ve attended an event or otherwise engaged with you previously, call that out,” Bornstein said;
  6. When promoting on social media, mix up the posting times and messages; and
  7. The day of the event is the best time to drop promotional emails.

When promoting multiple webinars in one email, he said you run the risk of people not attending all of the events. “The problem with multi-registration is that you can get people to sign up for a lot of webinars, but you can also have attendance drops off. If you can promote them individually, it is best to promote them individually.”

ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
B2B Marketing Exchange
B2B Marketing Exchange East
Campaign Optimization Series
Buyer Insights & Intelligence Series
Strategy & Planning Series