Why You Need an Account Based Marketing Agency?
Should I Hire an Account Based Marketing Agency?
Account based marketing (ABM) can be a very powerful strategy for B2B marketers targeting enterprise clients, but most companies don’t practice it well. Most rely on traditional B2B marketing tactics, in which prospects pass through numerous levels of qualification or nurturing prior to conversion. If the B2B marketer is successful in getting a marketing qualified lead (MQL), the sales team likely must parse through numerous opportunities to determine if each is a sales qualified lead (SQL). This traditional process can be costly to fill the top of the funnel and then nurture the opportunities though the middle of the funnel. A lot of time, effort, and money spent can lead to low conversion rates and low return on marketing investment.
Sales and marketing effectiveness and efficiency can be improved through strategic, well executed account based marketing. An account based marketing agency experienced in B2B strategy can help.
What is Account Based Marketing?
Account based marketing (ABM) is a business-to-business strategy that a marketer customizes to each key prospect in its target market. ABM is based on the premise that every enterprise account is unique: Different use cases, procurement practices, and buying criteria.
Rather than solely trying to cast a wide net for inbound leads, account based marketing focuses outbound efforts toward targeted, high-value ideal accounts, which should maximize conversions and ROI. ABM is most useful when the product, service, or solution being sold has a higher price and a longer, more complex buying cycle.
Because of the complexity, it is common for the potential client to have a buying committee of multiple influencers (personas) involved in the decision making process (e.g., members of procurement, operations, finance departments). With such a complex buying and selling process, it is logically beneficial for the seller’s marketing process to be personalized to each target account.
How an Account Based Marketing Agency Can Help
If the seller’s marketing team is under-resourced or inexperienced in customizing unique one-off campaigns, it may be beneficial to hire an account based marketing agency to facilitate the strategy and execution. An external ABM agency can help the sales and marketing better align their goals and collaborate more strategically. For each targeted account, the ABM agency may help in identifying, researching, and understanding the target account’s various buyer personas. The agency can help repurpose generic marketing assets and messaging into customized communication workflows. The agency can help leverage and customize existing case studies, white papers, videos, presentations, articles, and proposals for each persona in each account for each stage of the buyer’s journey.
The Account Based Marketing Process
A strong ABM strategy begins with defining the attributes that make the targeted account an ideal fit. Focusing on the traits and needs of these organizations will help the marketing team develop campaigns that leverage intentional person-to-person relationships and deploy effective messaging and placement. Because account based marketing is designed with each targeted client in mind, it can create a better customer experience, shorten the sales cycle, and increase the closing rate. An account based marketing agency can help prepare the targeted personas with thought leadership content and positioning tactics before the buyer is approached by the salesperson. As the selling cycle progresses, content can be modified and quickly delivered to each buyer persona based on the behavioral triggers in the ongoing engagement.
Benefits of Hiring Account Based Marketers
An experienced, knowledgeable, strategic account based marketing agency can execute the heavy lifting of content creation, customization, and delivery. Such an agency partner can research target markets and industries, ideal customer profiles and can deliver custom campaigns to drive sales. The best ABM agencies can research and expand one targeted campaign to reach another similar one, opening the opportunity for even greater increased revenue with little extra effort on the selling company’s part.
The success of ABM relies heavily on tracking buyer journey stages, optimizing conversion rates, and calculating customer acquisition costs (CAC). Skilled account based marketing companies like Nvent Marketing can provide reach, engagement, and conversion analytics so that future campaigns can be improved. I
Should I Hire an Account Based Marketing Agency?
If you’re still contemplating whether to hire an account based marketing agency, it may be worth the effort to get a complimentary consultation to learn more and consider the costs and benefits. Contact Nvent Marketing to get started.
Video Marketing, Quality, Brand Image
In video marketing, quality should align with your brand image.
We have a client considering how to start using video in her marketing. Starting now is smart thinking, as about 85% of businesses use video as a marketing tool.
Of those businesses that don’t use video, 59% planned to start this year. In parallel to more video content, there’s also more demand than ever.
In 2021, people watched 100+ minutes of online video per day. “The amount of time people spend viewing online video has grown rapidly across the world, at an average rate of 32% a year between 2013 and 2018, boosted by improvements in display sizes and quality of mobile devices, faster mobile data connections, and the spread of connected TV sets” –Zenith
Benefits of Video
Video can be search optimized so it can help with a site’s ranking. Plus, including a video on a landing page can boost the conversion rate by up to 80%.
Video can also be repurposed for other media so it is a great foundation for a content marketing strategy. For example, one video podcast can turn into 5-10 unique social media posts. Videos can be transcribed and turned into long-form blog posts and so much more. With so many options afterward, your best choice is to start with making videos now.
The Competition
On the downside, there’s a ton of video content noise online so it will get harder to compete for views. So effort should go into producing quality content that is relevant and interesting to your target audience. Although consistent uploads can be helpful, high-quality content that encourages engagement and adds value will have a better ROI.
YouTube, Facebook, and IG are the default platforms for video, but TikTok is rapidly on the rise. With all these different platforms, it’s important to understand the psychology of each platform and research what style of content works best for each. Being able to get your message across on all of the platforms and consistently adding value is crucial in this dynamic technological environment.
Live video is fast-growing and accounted for 13% of traffic in 2021. For produced videos: keep them short. 68% of people watch the complete video if it’s less than 60 seconds. Video marketing doesn’t have to be expensive, but the quality should align with your brand image.
Direct mail and mobile marketing lead business investments in local media advertising
Direct mail and mobile marketing lead business investments in local media advertising. This some encouraging news for North American print and direct mail service providers: In 2022, US local ad revenue is forecast to surpass the previously impressive rebound of 2021, with direct mail leading to capture more than a 20% piece of the pie. BIA Advisory Services forecasts overall local ad revenue to grow 10.1% year-over-year in 2022.
This will be the second consecutive period of year-over-year growth, considering that US direct mail ad revenue has declined -5.1% annually between 2015 and 2020 (source: IBIS World).
US non-political advertising mail volumes were down in 2020 as retail, leisure, beverage, and travel services paused or reduced their direct mail campaigns in the face of the pandemic.
Counterbalancing that commercial decline, 2020 was a record year in election campaign ad spending that included high volumes of political direct mail. Political mailings helped printers stem some of the lost commercial ad mail revenue in 2020. With minimal local elections in 2021, commercial mailings made up for the massive void left from 2020 political mailings.
Despite the numerous issues facing the USPS, there are still millions of local and regional brands confidently relying on printed mail’s higher response rates and lower customer acquisition costs.
marketing research, data, and facts
Research, data, and facts should guide your marketing decisions. Do you know someone making marketing decisions using their MBA? I don’t mean a master’s degree, but rather what I call Marketing By Anecdote.
What is Marketing by Anecdote?
An anecdote is a story, usually about one’s personal experience or account of an incident. Anecdotal evidence is a deduction from that story that isn’t necessarily true because it isn’t necessarily based on facts.
When a conclusion is made solely based on personal opinion and experience, the reality can be skewed. Facts and research will always be more reliable and consistent when making decisions and evaluating situations. Take action based on what you can trust, not based on how you feel.
Some examples
A business owner told me about his current marketing program, with $5k/month (most of his budget) on billboard ads: “I think the ads are working because two or three people per month say they saw my ad!” His anecdotal evidence tells him his marketing strategy, message, audience, budget, and CTA are fully optimized. No measurement, no analysis needed. Just evidence from an anecdote. Marketing By Anecdote.
Another business manager told me, “I don’t use social media for marketing because I personally don’t use Facebook for business and I don’t think my customers do either.” This is also a form of anecdotal evidence because he thinks his #customers behave as he does. Faulty logic. Would you really want to throw away your digital marketing budget based on personal bias? Consumers convert through a wide variety of platforms and eliminating one of them based on your own usage is just ignorant.
Facts don’t care about your feelings
Marketing decisions shouldn’t be based on anecdotes, hearsay, or what you surmise. Apply your personal opinion or belief on what to do, but add it on top of research, measurable data, and facts. Facts can make you money, while emotions can lead to a missed opportunity.
Facts don’t care about your feelings.
Content Marketing – Attract, Engage, and retain an Audience
The value of content marketing is underestimated. Most people don’t know how it directly affects a website’s Google search rankings, which in turn drives new visitors to your landing page.
Great content…
- Gets read, shared, liked, and linked. More links from trusted websites to your landing page gives you SEO authority (and higher rankings).
- Content that gets the most shares/linkes is typically deep, detailed, and research-based. Long-form articles with over 2000 words get more top ten positions in Google search engine rankings.
- Takes time and effort: The average blog post takes 3.5 hours to write. It is optimized for keywords and internal links and is easy to consume.
- Can go beyond the format of a blog post. It can be a video, podcast, infographic, ebook, or an “ultimate good to ___.”
- Is leverageable. A 45-minute webinar or 25-slide presentation could be segmented into sub-topics and serve as the base for potentially a half-dozen short-form blog posts.
70% of marketers say they prioritize content quality over quantity. Whether this actually happens can make a huge difference in a brand’s organic search ranking.
Read our article about Content marketing strategy – Get content rich
Does your business use video as a marketing tool?
We have a client considering how to start using video in her marketing. Starting now is smart thinking, as about 85% of businesses use video as a marketing tool.
Of those businesses that don’t use video, 59% plan to start this year. In parallel to more video content, there’s also more demand than ever.
In 2021, people will watch 100+ minutes of online video per day.
Video can be search optimized so it can help with a site’s ranking. Plus, including a video in a landing page can boost the conversion rate by up to 80%.
Video can also be repurposed for other media so it is a great foundation for a content marketing strategy.
On the downside, there’s a ton of video content noise online so it will get harder to compete for views. So effort should go into producing quality content that is relevant and interesting to your target audience.
For many reasons, we don’t recommend TikTok or Snapchat video as a marketing too. Despite the crowdedness, YouTube, Facebook, and IG are the default platforms for video.
Live video is fast-growing and will account for 13 % of traffic in 2021. For produced videos: keep them short. 68% of people watch the complete video if it’s less than 60 seconds.
Video marketing doesn’t have to be expensive, but the quality should align with your brand image.
Content marketing mastery – Repurpose and maximize your content
How does your brand regularly connect to your audiences? For most B2B marketers, the top 3 content channels are:
- newsletter.
- blog.
- social media content.
Most only deliver on 1-2 of these channels. And most content isn’t segmented by vertical, application or customer journey stage.
The result: open rates and CTRs decline due to topical irrelevance. Customers and prospects get the same info so neither group feels they get what they need and when.
For one client, we started creating great blog content, focusing on three themes published as a continuing series each quarter. We don’t dilute mindshare with anything but those topics.
The blog posts are published on the client’s website so strangers are attracted to it through organic search.
Certain excerpts are extracted, repurposed, and published on social sites with links to the client’s blog. All this is top-of-funnel content, shared broadly to social followers and web searchers.
Because we write so much content over time, we can then parse out the posts most relevant to select markets for certain applications and customer/prospect status. Now those segmented newsletter subscribers get content relevant to them.
No need to rewrite. Just segment, repurpose, retarget. Start with a broad spotlight. Re-aim with a laser beam.
Content marketing strategy – Get content rich!
Create a cohesive strategy around your content. Don’t just push out something new just because it’s new. Weave your content together into themes and make related threads. Publish your stories to specifically target audiences through the media they prefer at the times they prefer to consume them. Follow your leads as they flow through your funnel and give them relevant, useful information that inspires them to take action. Working on this strategy will bring you more trackable sales conversions and more effective business outcomes.
