The Basics of Building an ABM Program with Webinars

This post was originally published on heinzmarketing.com. Syndicated with permission.

We’re now four weeks into the Road to Webinar Success! After having covered Panel Webinars, Webinar Operations, and Internal Alignment, it’s time we shift our focus to using webinars to build an ABM program. With webinars driving your ABM program, you can create scalable, highly-personalized, highly-targeted, and engaging experiences for your target accounts. And all while thoughtfully measuring performance, qualifying leads and pushing those leads closer towards a purchase decision.

Why should you use webinars to build your ABM program?

Webinars are, potentially, one of the most engaging tools both sales and marketing have at their disposal. They can present high-value offers, be personalized to different personas across all stages of the sales cycle, are highly-interactive, and they allow you to easily gauge the level of interest and intent from those who attend.

With webinars in your ABM program, you have an opportunity to reach the entire buying center and tailor content for decision makers and influencers in a much more scalable way. Plus, they are an excellent way to spread your marketing messages to a large number of prospects, both on the day and with the on-demand version, making it possible to continue to share your content, ideas, and messages well-beyond the live webinar.

Give Your Audience a Highly-Personalized Experience At-Scale

Successful ABM relies on your ability to be highly relevant and highly personalized with each of your target accounts. With webinars, you have the ability to personalize your content in ways other formats just don’t support, and you can do so at scale. This is especially true for on-demand recordings where you can re-record or edit certain sections to align with your specific audience.

Get More Content to Your Target Accounts

Getting tailored content to prospects at the perfect time within their buyer’s journey is difficult enough. Adding in factors like email responsiveness, messaging points, and channel preference makes this task even harder. With a webinar platform, however, you can provide access to your downloadable assets like whitepapers, guides, product information, or case studies right within the webinar console itself.

You don’t have to deal with a handful of other factors that come into play when balancing email sends, targeted ads, and overall timing because now, the assets are right there in front of the prospect. All you need to worry about is getting them to watch.

Drive More Meaningful, Direct Engagement Among Target Accounts

Webinars provide a channel for two-way engagement, setting them apart from other mediums where communication is either one-way (videos and podcasts) or completely non-existent (whitepapers and their counterparts). Through webinars, presenters, moderators, salespeople, and consultants are enabled to make one-to-one connections on a far more efficient, authentic, and meaningful way, at-scale

Your webinars give attendees the ability to ask questions, respond to questions, or take polls, and they give your team the ability to engage back. The engagement is also immediate, unlike social media where comments and questions aren’t always responded to in a timely manner.

Gain Enhanced Engagement Metrics

While it’s nice seeing metrics like views, clicks, and downloads, those don’t do a great job of showcasing actual buyer intent. Webinar engagement metrics, on the other hand, show these as well as time spent watching, responses to questions asked, questions asked themselves, and surveys taken. Advanced webinar platforms also provide algorithmic engagement scores that summarize all activity into one, easy-to-understand number. These metrics can then be viewed on an individual contact level or can be aggregated for account-level views making it much easier to know where prospects are in the sales cycle

Stakeholders and roles

ABM, in general, is a cross-functional effort across your sales and marketing teams, so it’s important to ensure that both teams are aligned and working towards similar goals. Remember: Webinars aren’t just a marketing activity.

It’s especially helpful for at least one representative from sales to either act as a presenter or at least be available to answer any questions participants may have because sales teams are often grouped around verticals and industry segments.

Having such an approach allows a more seamless transition from a webinar to a sales conversation, as the person presenting can pick up the conversation directly with the customer.

More specifically, consider these roles and responsibilities as you conduct your ABM program with webinars:

• Marketing:

• Program Director: ABM Strategy and Approach, Target Account Alignment with Sales
• Webinar Manager: Webinar Strategy, Webinar Production, Tracking and Reporting
• Program Execution: Content Creation, Webinar Promotion
• Operations: Webinar Set-Up, Webinar Tracking

• Sales: Target Account Alignment with Marketing, Promotion, Follow-Up

Want more?

There’s so much more to learn about a webinar program’s role in an ABM strategy. Stay tuned, because in the next few weeks, we’ll revisit this topic to better understand the ins and outs of how to implement this kind of initiative in your own ABM efforts.