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I love account based marketing (ABM).

I have been leading ABM teams for some time now and find this incredibly satisfying. For me it's almost like a play. With a lot of individuals and teams able to start a unified campaign, there's a lot of preparation and planning, and – if done correctly – the results are incredible.

Like most companies, our team conducts Adobe ABM campaigns for larger companies where our business sizes are slightly larger and sales cycles are longer. Due to the larger volume of business and the longer sales cycle, we have found that a focused ABM approach leads to better performance from our marketing department. Now I want to give you an insight into Adobe's ABM strategy and how our teams are performing some of the most successful marketing efforts.

Step 1: Align which accounts are important

We spend a lot of time trying to figure out which accounts we should target with marketing and outbound efforts. There are several factors that could be a blog post, such as company-wide initiatives to open up a new market (industry, region). At its core, however, is how we align ourselves with accounts.

First, we use Mintigo to generate an account fit score for all potential customers in our database. Account-based marketing is all about the specific. Therefore, we intentionally do not want to market to accounts that we know do not fit our product. Our opportunity and profit rate conversion rate is not high enough to justify the effort and budget.

After we have enabled the technology to run through the accounts for the first time, we conduct a manual peeling test every quarter in collaboration with SDRs and sales teams. This ensures that we are in line and stay in line all year round. We also regularly adjust lists when accounts change account results, become open opportunities and should therefore be removed from pipeline building campaigns, etc. This is then automatically transferred to advertising accounts via ABM Essentials.

Step 2: match the digital media to the accounts

As soon as we have adjusted ourselves to account targeting, we adapt our digital media accordingly. This is usually associated with a high budget for LinkedIn ads, as LinkedIn can show ads for certain accounts. We run different types of campaigns:

• Retargeting – Retargeting only for our target accounts allows us to invest more per account.
• Personas – Show relevant content for some of the personas we sell to, such as: B. Marketing operations, generation of demand and marketing manager. This helps to increase the click rate.
• Standard – A generic direct response campaign that tests a large amount of new content and optimizes it for maximum ROI.
• Campaigns – Promoting campaigns that we may conduct on the market, e.g. B. Events.

In addition to LinkedIn, we also use Demandbase for display advertising. One way we use display advertising is to open up opportunities. Our goal in these efforts is to support sales in building the purchasing committee and to reach a consensus between them.

Step 3: Implement ABM-specific activities

As soon as we have adapted our digital media, we implement ABM-specific activities. The biggest and most important in terms of business impact is direct mail, and we use Alyce for most of our direct mail. What I love about Alyce is that every prospect receives a personal gift that is important to them. It's greener than traditional direct mail, and the gift is only exchanged when the meeting is booked, which improves the channel's ROI.

The sales development team is an incredibly important team at Adobe. We not only equipped our sales development team with direct mail, but also carried out "platform-based outbound", i. H. Marketing Fund, and software managed to support smart outbound efforts across certain platforms such as Bombora and G2Crowd. We are already doing this for our inbound efforts, but are taking an account view approach for our ABM.

Step 4: Measure the impact of ABM-specific measures

I believe that the purpose of marketing is to grow a company. Therefore, I am firmly convinced that marketing can be measured by revenue. Of course, we use Bizible to track and optimize multi-touch attributions, including all of our ABM efforts. This is so important because our sales cycle is much longer than some of our efforts for SMEs or inbound marketing. It was therefore extremely helpful to demonstrate the value that ABM delivers internally using quality measurements.

Some of the key ABM-related reports we have created with Bizible include marketing-qualified contacts, marketing-qualified accounts, opportunities / pipeline, win rates and deal sizes, and sales by channel and campaign.

Bring everything together

ABM is not an inexpensive marketing movement. It cannot exist on its own, so we carry out all of our ABM in close coordination with the inbound marketing teams. This includes content marketing, web experiences, SEO leads and much more to ensure that we achieve the maximum ROI of our marketing activities.

I hope you learned something new today. I would like to learn something from you so If you're ready to share your powerful ABM secrets with others, please comment below.

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