So you’ve heard about the benefits of account-based marketing (ABM). You’re ready to try it out—but then you look at the cost of ABM software. Not to mention the complexity involved in choosing, deploying, and configuring a solution, categorizing accounts, developing content…
Yowzah.
There’s an easier way to see whether ABM is right for your company—before you drop a year’s marketing budget on software. A programmatic ABM pilot is an easy and affordable alternative.
Take Me to the Pilot
To run a successful ABM program, you need cross-team buy-in. Most ABM efforts are funded out of the marketing budget, so of course that team will need to be on board. But one of the benefits of ABM is the insightful content that it delivers to high-value accounts—information that is best gathered from the sales team, who will also need to provide account information. And you’ll need to present ROI estimates, success statistics, and your project plan (including measurement criteria) to executive stakeholders.
What are your most likely roadblocks at this stage? Lack of time and money likely top the list. A pilot that focuses on programmatic ABM can allay both concerns.
Need to convince stakeholders? Make the case for ABM.
Get with the Program
Programmatic ABM requires minimal input from sales, little personalized content, and can easily be implemented with an affordable tool like
CompassABM. This type of ABM effort can be built around industry segmentation, product interest, pain point—any factor that enables a targeted message.
Ideally, you’ll already have content created for these segments, such as a set of industry or product pages. A simple ABM pilot will then—
- recognize the IP address of incoming site visitors,
- resolve those addresses to your list of target accounts, and
- direct the visitor to a relevant existing page.
What do you need from sales, then? Simply a list of targeted accounts, their designation within your chosen segmentation, and the name and contact info of any sales reps who want to be notified of account activity.
Take the Easy Route with CompassABM
Here’s where CompassABM comes in.
- Contact your Kentico Partner or in-house Kentico developer to determine how many unique monthly sessions your website receives on average for an entire year, choose the appropriate level of CompassABM, and set up the service.
- Your in-house developer or Partner will integrate the tool on the Kentico platform and complete the basic configurations. (If you don’t have a designated Kentico Partner or in-house developer, the award-winning team behind CompassABM can help with optional deployment and support services .)
- Populate the CompassABM database tool with the information you’ve collected from sales, as pointers to any custom content you want to surface (e.g., lightly customized banners that point to industry pages).
- When you’re ready to go live, simply deploy the pages to your production website and use the account preview links included in CompassABM to spot-check your banners and web pages.
- Sales reps can elect to receive real-time email alerts when targeted accounts visit your site. Comprehensive daily digest reports are also included.
- Depending on the method of IP purchase you choose, CompassABM allows you to view reports that reveal all the account traffic happening on your website, including many companies that you might not even be aware of. Your sales team can use these prospecting tools to discover additional organizations that you might want to target with your ABM program. Together, you can use CompassABM to manage content changes that they’d like to make for target accounts over time.
Voila, you’ve implemented ABM.
Add in Digital Ads
A programmatic pilot will need a bit more oomph on the digital marketing side to show optimal results. Targeted digital ads on networks like LinkedIn, Choozle, AdRoll, and other social media channels can help drive recognized accounts to your site. We also recommend a 6-week nurture email program to further encourage engagement. Build the series around whichever segmentation you’ve used in your ABM program (e.g., industry, application, product match).
Always Be Measuring
Finally, you’ll need to measure your pilot’s success so that you can determine whether ABM is right for your organization long-term—and whether and when it’s time to expand to more advanced ABM levels. We recommend a pre-pilot baseline and then a run of at least 12 weeks for your pilot before beginning measurements.
CompassABM enables you to leverage Google Analytics and reports to monitor your ABM activity. With these tools, you can use those measurement criteria you created in the buy-in stage to determine the results of your pilot. Adjust your programmatic delivery, expand to include lite and strategic levels, or continue to monitor your program—it’s up to you. And if your conclusion is that ABM isn’t the right move for your company at this time, no worries: As a SaaS solution, you can cancel your CompassABM service at the end of your contracted period, making your pilot virtually risk-free from a budgetary standpoint.
Want to learn more about CompassABM or need help getting your pilot off the ground?
Contact us to schedule a demo or get more information.