Account Based Marketing Archives

ON24 Is Grilling Up Some Tasty ABM Insights On May 30

Posted on May 20, 2019 at 6:00 pm.

Marketers today know how to cook up some stellar content. The problem, though, is serving that content to the right audience at the right time. That’s why marketers are increasingly turning to account-based marketing, or ABM, as a tactic to get the right content to the right people at the right time.

But ABM isn’t easy to pull off. It requires a lot of resources and a lot of know-how. That’s why, on Thursday, May 30, we’re going to pull out the grill and serve up ABM insights at ON24 HQ in San Francisco, California. It’s an ABM BBQ and you’re invited.

How ON24 does ABM:

How ON24’s Bryn Powell Balances Personalization and Scale for ABM

A Quick and Dirty Guide to Launching an ABM Program

The Basics of Building an ABM Program with Webinars

5 Ways to Make ABM About Your Audience, Not Automation

Thursday’s event will run from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. and will feature BBQ, networking and a grill-side conversation between Joe Hyland, CMO of ON24, and Jeremy Collins, Vice President of Demand Generation at Aurea Software.

Here’s the official agenda for the ON24 ABM BBQ:

5:30 – 6 p.m.: Food, drinks and networking
6 – 6:45 p.m.: Grill-side chat with Aurea Software’s VP of Demand Generation, Jeremy Collins
6:45 p.m. to end: Cornhole, hula-hooping and more food

Sound like a good time to you? It does to us. If you’re interested in joining ON24 for our ABM BBQ, click this link.

Can’t make it or don’t live in the Bay Area? No worries. Here are three servings of fresh ABM tips you can use right now:

Tip 1: Talk to Sales. Talk to Sales. Talk to Sales.

Before you embark on your ABM journey, talk to your sales team. Sales can provide you with great insights into your target audience, help define the program’s success metrics (e.g., leads, conversions and opportunities) and help nurture a culture of cooperation.

Tip 2: Research and Document

The second step is always an important one. Do your due diligence and research the audience you wish to target with your ABM program. Develop personas, talk to account managers and document what you’ve discovered. Take special care to thoroughly understand the industry in question. Write down any jargon you come across and understand the context around it.

Tip 3: Provide Opportunities to Interact, Provide Feedback

Marketing touches today must provide a two-way conversation. That is, both the creator and the consumer need to be able to talk to one another and provide feedback. We think webinars and Target pages are fantastic tools for this very reason. Both tools offer you the opportunity to push out Q&As, polls and surveys. They also allow individual prospects to self-identify interest, industry and role — helping you to refine your messaging and your targeting.

Regardless of where you are in your ABM journey, we’re here to help. Stop by on ON24 HQ on May 30 for some great insights. Alternatively, discover how you can use webinars to fuel your ABM efforts with our on-demand webinar, “The ABM Content Challenge” or download our ebook, “The Webinerd’s Guide to Account-Based Marketing.”

ON24 Target: Taking Account-Based Marketing to Account-Based Engagement

Posted on February 18, 2019 at 10:00 pm.

Written by Michael Mayday

How can you get more engagement from your webinars? Learn the tips, tricks and tactics that make webinars work at Webinar World 2019.

Within five years, account-based marketing exploded onto the B2B marketing scene and has grown at an unprecedented rate. But marketers turning to the strategy are facing a two-fold problem. First, they’re having a hard time creating and driving engagement with personalized content. Second, practitioners are having a hard time applying ABM on a scale that drives real results.

(A Google Trends search for “Account Based Marketing” from 2009 to early 2019.)

These are two serious issues marketers need to solve if they wish to see success from ABM programs. According to a recent Forrester Report, 64 percent of surveyed B2B marketers in 2017 said they were either just starting, planning or not yet considering ABM. A year later, and 61 percent of respondents say they have a year of ABM experience under their belts but are still running into issues like pipeline attribution, revenue impact and scale.

This is a problem of engagement, or the lack thereof. At its heart, ABM is an engagement strategy, not a set of tactics. Unfortunately, most practitioners approach ABM as if it were a solution itself and not a means to an end.

Account-Based Marketing Must Become Account-Based Engagement

A good ABM program requires tight coordination between sales and marketing with a shared goal. Often, that goal should deepen relationships with existing clients or build trust with prospects.

But building trust requires a personal, human touch and timely, relevant content addressing a target account’s concerns. Creating such a personalized approach is difficult and time-consuming. It’s no wonder nearly 40 percent of Forrester respondents say content creation for specific accounts is the biggest ABM challenge they face. The next biggest challenge? Getting targeted professionals to actually engage with personalized content.

At ON24, we believe real engagement is key to any successful business. And we believe ABM, done right, is a fantastic strategy to drive engagement and results. To ease content personalization, and to help both sales and marketing scale ABM programs, we’re introducing ON24 Target.

How ON24 Target Drives Engagement, Deepens Relationships

ON24 Target is a personalized content solution designed to engage target accounts and deepen the relationship between your company and their business. It’s a holistic solution allowing teams to craft, distribute and measure the success of personalized content from a single system.

It’s an easy-to-use, scalable solution both marketing and sales can use. It makes personalization scalable and measurable by leveraging the content marketers already have with a platform they’re already familiar with. It’s so easy to use that a functional Target page can be created in less than 15 minutes.

A quick and easy-to-generate page provides marketers and salespersons with the time they need to focus on the needs of a persona or account.

Okay, So What Does ON24 Target Do In Practice?

In practice, ON24 Target provides marketers with the tools to craft account-specific landing pages filled with the content, messages and CTAs that have the greatest impact on an audience’s buying decision. Have a webinar, video or white paper that performs exceptionally well? Drag into your content page, customize it for your target account and show it off.

On the backend, it’s centralized, meaning marketers and salespersons can access their most engaging and high-performing assets — from webinars to videos and white papers — and use them to craft a page that resonates with a targeted persona. With a holistic content experience in place, marketers can evaluate asset performance and account engagement down to the individual level.

In essence, ON24 Target helps marketers to stop interrupting and start engaging on a one-to-one level. It enables teams with scarce resources to craft personalized content experiences and gain the insights they need to build lifetime customer relationships.

Keep an eye on this space as we walk you though ON24 Target’s features and uses — from personalization to full-fledged ABM targeting.

How Webinars Can Help You Unify Your Marketing…Really

Posted on February 13, 2019 at 5:00 pm.

Written by Michael Mayday

One of the favorite pastimes of marketers is to talk about how marketing is broken. It’s usually the opening slide of any new marketing technology’s pitch deck. I probably do it a lot too. But marketing is never truly broken, it’s just a constantly evolving field that often moves faster than our ability to keep up with the changes.

In many cases, the real issue with marketing is not our ability to adopt new technologies or concepts; it’s been our inability to break out of old thinking. We constantly apply new technologies to old structures. This is particularly true when it comes to the siloed approaches of inbound, outbound and now account-based marketing. Each of these areas is treated as a distinct field of expertise and technology. Some teams are literally built to support each unique function, in isolation, without any connection to the others.

Why Digital Is Different

The problem with this thinking is that it doesn’t account for the evolution of how content is delivered digitally. The idea of building a piece of content exclusively for an outbound email campaign is far too limiting. An inbound strategy built around luring people to your website, or towards unique CTAs, while still valuable, is one small part of what needs to be a much broader process.

Today, we are building digital experiences that can be leveraged across all marketing functions. Modern content delivery will often have a live phase (outbound), an “always on” or on-demand component (inbound) and will often be used to fuel ABM campaigns as well. Webinars are a perfect example of this concept. You may have a live webinar as part of your outbound strategy, then once the live date is over, that webinar becomes a valuable piece of on-demand content that can be accessed on websites and in Netflix-style content hubs to drive inbound touches. That on-demand webinar may also be used in nurture campaigns or as the CTA in paid advertising, so now we are back to outbound again. In some cases, the webinar may also be repackaged for ABM programs. The possibilities are endless.

Unite Around Webinar Reuse

This concept leaves you a choice: you can either pass these assets around for each team to use in a vacuum, or you can start to think of content delivery as a single campaign both leveraging and merging inbound, outbound and ABM programs. The benefit of doing the latter is that it forces your teams to start collaborating much more closely or dare I say, working as one team. Content creation and execution need to be cross-functional from the planning stages, not after a piece of content is created and used for a single purpose. What better way to merge the goals of editorial calendars, campaign plans and demand gen channels?

The benefits of this new way of thinking are many; by merging these sacred pillars of marketing, we get the opportunity to do campaign building that can be executed more broadly, more quickly and more effectively. And there is nothing broken about that.

To learn more about using webinars to drive cross-functional marketing watch “Webinar Marketing Predictions for 2019” here.

What’s New with the ON24 Platform? Personalized Digital Experiences.

Posted on December 6, 2018 at 1:00 pm.

Written by Michael Mayday

At ON24, we’re constantly working to improve both our platform and your experience with it. That’s why we’re always pushing out updates, issuing fixes and producing new features that you may or may not have noticed. To boost visibility around these new developments, and to get your feedback on our latest projects, we’re going to publish product updates every quarter on this blog. Everything, from new features to new categories to newsworthy milestones, will be made available here for you to digest as you see fit.

For our first product update, we’ll discuss major upgrades to our personalized engagement product, ON24 Target.

What’s ON24 Target?

ON24 Target helps build customized, engaging content experiences and is an ideal tool to scale account-based marketing efforts. It does so by guiding self-educated buyers to the most relevant content, helping you to accelerate purchase journeys and improve conversion rates.

What’s New with ON24 Target

New Tools for Better User Experience

To start, we’ve improved the overall workflow and navigation in ON24 Target so users can easily create custom content experiences. This includes new capabilities to the styling tab in the content experience build, which lets Target users easily design and customize each individual content experiences for brand consistency and accurate storytelling.

More Tools for More Scale

Have a hyper-targeted content experience you need to customize? Need to make a new banner fast? Try our new banner editing tool, which lets you create banners directly on the content experience builder – no more relying on in-house or agency design teams!

Make campaign tracking easier with our new campaign code tracking feature located in the attributes tab in the content experience builder. With the new campaign code field, you can now track metrics on each content piece within any content experience — whether it’s a webinar, video or .pdf. This feature also lets unique identifiers on each piece of content to track back to your marketing automation platform — making for easier content tracking and analysis.

Ongoing Engagement

See how your content is performing with attendees with our new content insights and ratings and comments features. Content insights present helpful metrics such as number of views and number of minutes viewed so that users can identify their best performing content and leverage it for other content experiences or programs. Ratings, comments and customizable CTAs ensure your audience remains engaged by giving them the opportunity to engage directly with your brand and content.

Actionable and Flexible Data

We’ve reimagined Target analytics altogether! We now have a brand-new analytics dashboard that includes new actionable data insights to inform and guide your ongoing program and optimize content.

As a celebration, we’re collecting new data points to make this the analytics dashboard shine. The new data includes: Page Views; Unique Visitors; Content Views; Average Engagement (mins); Inbound Engagement; the total number of times attendees have submitted or acted on your CTAs; and Experience Performance.

Finally, the analytics dashboard will also offer two new dashboard tile for you to use: content performance and engagement by role. The content performance tile displays your top-seven assets across all content experiences — giving you the opportunity to identify which content works and why. The engagement by role tile, similarly, gives you insights into the people engaging with your content experience by showing the top seven job titles and the average engagement minutes by title.

That’s all the product updates we have for you right now but keep an eye on this space for more ON24 product updates, how-to guides and webinar best practices. Until then, happy webinaring!

Want to learn how to get the most out of your webinar program? Register for Webinar World 2019 to learn the tricks of the trade from the world’s leading webinerds.

A Quick and Dirty Guide to Launching an ABM Program

Posted on July 16, 2018 at 4:00 am.

Written by Michael Mayday

This post was originally published on abmleadershipalliance.com.

B2B marketing has no shortage of techniques, methods, and strategies to use at a moment’s notice. Some are new, some are old, and some are finally just now getting their time in the spotlight.

Account-Based Marketing (ABM) belongs to the latter. As a concept, one which hyper-targets accounts likely to convert into revenue, it’s been around for a while — roughly 15 years or more. But, for many, it’s only just now taking off.

That’s because B2B marketing technologies have only just caught up with the concept. These new tools, in general, simplify the process of identifying possible accounts, targeting messaging to those accounts, and guiding the desired accounts through a company’s marketing funnel.

Still, the method stands on at least two core principles. First, identifying accounts with a high propensity to buy for targeting. Second, sales and marketing must coordinate to act as a cohesive unit. And that’s it. Simple principles, sure, but executing on them can be complicated.

Organizations, to simplify, need to plan their approach to ABM, understand which tools they should use and why, and prepare to experiment with the revived tactic.

Plan

The first step to execution is deciding if you should deploy an ABM program. Such programs, given their hyper-targeted nature, aren’t always a cost-efficient choice and are usually targeted towards deals approaching tens of thousands of dollars or more. Just be aware low-yield deals are not a good use of the time and resources needed in an ABM program.

As a part of aiming high, organizations need to have their ABM strategy in place well before execution. Teams, from marketing and sales to operations and customer service, will need to understand their role in the program and what the program is trying to achieve overall. Take the time to launch a small pilot program to get a better sense of what your teams will need to execute an ABM program. A pilot program will give you the opportunity to suss out ideal customer profiles, processes and more.

Tool up

The second step to running an ABM program is to tool up. Fortunately, today’s marketing technologies are sufficiently advanced enough to help identify, target and measure progress in ABM programs and more.

What should you look for in an ABM tool? For starters, flexibility. Those considering an ABM program should look for tools that provide value regardless of implementing a new method. Look for tools that provide a sturdy foundation to build your ABM program on — you’ll thank yourself later.

Organizations should also keep an eye out for tools that measure visitor engagement and interest — and we’re not talking about simple interactions like clicks. Tools that measure content engagement, prospective interaction across channels and more are invaluable for understanding the buyer’s journey. They’re also useful for measuring target interest, participation and progress for ABM programs.

Highly-specialized ABM solutions are great, but only when a program is mature enough to thoroughly enjoy and take advantage of their capabilities. Take the time to scout out some nice-to-have solutions you’d like to integrate when you feel your program is mature enough.

Improvise, adapt, overcome

The most detailed plan won’t survive contact with the battlefield. When it comes to ABM, you and your team will need to prepare for unexpected developments, regardless of whether they’re internal or external.

For example, while critical internal stakeholders may understand what’s going on with an ABM program, their broader team may not — meaning you have a communications problem. You can address that issue by broadening discussions around ABM. Alternatively, you might be taken aback that your program isn’t performing as expected — even when you’ve targeted key personnel on an account. Here, you may have gotten too specific, and forgot to include that account’s wider team members, from support to senior staff, in your targeting.

The point is: don’t expect perfection out of the gate. Be ready to adjust your hypothesis and broaden your experiments to see what works.

ABM programs are potentially huge in both production and results. As with any marketing technique, take the time to figure out if it’s right for you and how you can incorporate it into your marketing program — and be prepared to make adjustments. After all, for many, ABM is new and ripe for innovation.