A different guide to ABM for small B2B companies (Part 2 of 2)

Step 4: Field marketing activities

If you have a field marketing team, you should start planning relevant activities. Remember when I asked you to list your target accounts by geography/region? Your activities should focus on the region where the most promising target accounts are.

Some activities I have seen work are:

• local industry trade shows: local chapters of national associations usually have their own quarterly events. Sometimes these events have higher potential than the national shows.
• VIP/private events at trade show: you can arrange special receptions or private tours where you invite your target accounts.
• workshops: you can offer hands-on workshops tailored to the specific needs and challenges of your target accounts.
• breakfast events: call them seminars, call them gatherings or get-togethers. You can use them to gather multiple target accounts under the same roof.
• training sessions: you can conduct training sessions on your product or on something adjacent to it. A few years ago I did a Hubspot training session with a target account that wanted to make the switch from Salesforce: completely unrelated to what I was selling, but very effective for relationship building.
• on-site visits: self-explanatory. You can tell them you’re in town and ask to meet for a coffee.
• Live events / live webinars: great co-branded marketing campaigns. When you are running an initiative with another company, it has the added benefit of sending signals to the company’s competitors, partners and other potential customers in the same space: after all you are the person they are partnering with.
• Networking events. If you prefer more informal settings, you can also arrange meetups or even happy hours.

At the end of the year, your field team should sketch the plan of action for the following year, with the must-attend events and some other key activities. At the end of every quarter, they will review the past performance and use it to plan their initiatives for the upcoming quarter.

Step 5: Account-based digital advertising

Chances are, you’re not big enough to have a full-fledged field marketing team.

In that case, most of your budget will be allocated to online advertising. And while I do think this is a sensible approach, I also believe you as a marketing leader should be very careful about the role of online ads in your marketing mix.

I have already mentioned that the single dumbest thing B2B companies do “crank up their marketing” is increasing their performance marketing budget to run more ads more often, thinking that this will result in better outcomes and more leads. It never really does.

Let me stress this again: online ads are not the solution to your go-to-market problems. This is especially true in ABM. Online ads are just one piece of the puzzle in a multichannel approach that includes a strong social media presence, a solid multimedia activity (including audio and video productions), and multiple prospect touchpoints driven by multiple people– especially salespeople. And, as we all know by now, a ton of high-quality content.

Your primary job here is to convey to your CEO and CFO the message that ads are something that must happen in parallel to all these other activities, both online and offline. If the rest is not happening, your ABM ads are really just a waste of company money.

OK, now that we have cleared this up, let’s talk about ads.

Set up retargeting

The first thing you do is set up retargeting ads. I have already written a good primer here, go check it out.

The main objective is to engage with the very people who have already expressed some interest in you: you don’t yet know who they are, but they exist and they are the easiest audience you can engage with.

“But Simone”, you may ask, “we are doing ABM. We need to do hyper-targeted advertising, and retargeting is not”.

I’m glad you asked. Here’s my all-time favorite trick.

LinkedIn allows you to set up retargeting audiences based on how they engage with your brand, and then refine them using their advanced firmographic data.

For example, you can set up a retargeting audience based on those who visit your website and further refine it by targeting only those who also happen to be, say, marketing leaders working in real estate companies in the Boston metro area.

This achieves two things:

1. you are able to create hyper targeted audiences, and therefore serve them hyper relevant ads that will perform better than your usual ad campaigns.
2. you are effectively saving money by not retargeting your entire web traffic: you are just serving ads to the most relevant subset of your website visitors.

I have made a video on how to set up your first retargeting campaign. Check it out and let me know if you have any questions.

Set up bottom-funnel ads

Some of your target audience will be more ready to convert than others. The first thing you want to do is to capture that existing demand.

The best place to do this is Google. Identify all the most relevant keywords in your space and start creating campaigns based on the ones that show the highest intent: those keywords will lead to conversion, so make sure you set up clear and functioning landing pages that have a clear and functioning CTA.

In my experience the most common CTA is a Hubspot contact form so they can book a meeting with sales. I personally have mixed feelings about contact forms, as enterprise customers usually don’t convert right away– but you do you.

If you’re like me and have noticed that it takes a few touchpoints before scoring a conversion, you might want to convert them to a proxy metric: if your sales cycle is very long and has many touchpoints, you can have your ICP convert to a lower-threshold activity that you know will lead to a transaction, like a demo or a free trial. The trick is to have them convert to something valuable. (subscribing to a newsletter doesn’t count).

If the conversion event is relevant to your ideal buyer, the leads you generate will be higher-quality compared to something generic like a basic Hubspot contact form you put on every single landing page.

Set up mid-funnel ads

One of the most fascinating behaviours I have observed over the years is the confused expression that appears on the CEO's face when I tell them we should scale back some of their bottom-funnel, conversion ads and reinvest the money in mid-funnel and retargeting ads.

The idea is that if some of your ads are not promoting a demo request, then you’re wasting your money.

Not sure exactly why that is but no, gentlemen: this is not how B2B ads work.

In fact, if all your ads are using “get a demo” as your CTA, then you’re doing more harm than good. Think about it. Your buyer journey is long, and the interactions your ideal prospect has with your brand must be multiple and diverse in order for them to be:

• aware of the problem
• aware of the solution
• ready to invest in the solution
• convinced that you are their solution of choice

For each of these stages your ads should have a different offer: your demo ad won’t work for folks who are not even aware of the pain points you are trying to solve for.

Successful B2B ad strategies are the ones that focus on delivering content or incentives. Here are some examples that I see work all the time:

• Webinars (or “live sessions”, as everyone calls them now): they are the most effective way to build brand affinity, cement your authority in the space, and warm your leads all at the same time. Just try to deliver real value.
• Industry reports/white papers/ “State of the Union” articles, with in-depth analysis and interviews with top industry people.
• Case studies: this is self explanatory.
• Ebooks/pdfs/how-to-guides: they are probably the easier to produce and can still be incredibly valuable.
• Subscribing to a five-email sequence delivering value: a bit controversial but it’s by far my favourite tactic. It’s like downloading a pdf, but unlike downloading a pdf, you know whether they have opened your email or clicked on a link.
• Cheat sheets/templates
• ROI calculators
• Free software tools
• Targeted newsletters: they can work, too, though people can only read so many newsletters during the day.

A note about top-funnel ads

In my experience, you should probably not run top-funnel, cold ads against an ABM list of less than 1.000 contacts.

Or, let me put it another way. Unless your content marketing team is very sophisticated and your content vault is hyper-targeted and highly segmented (I bet it’s not), your top-funnel will look a whole lot like your mid-funnel. At your scale, this is not a bad thing. Run your campaign and focus on reach, then retarget aggressively using firmographic data to filter out the individuals who don’t qualify.

Step 6: Further personalization

If your budget allows, I strongly recommend you invest in tools that:

1. gather customer data from different sources, and
2. offer a way to segment these customers to maximise personalisation

To achieve point (1), you can use software solutions that go by the name of Customer Data Platforms (CDP). CDPs pull customer data from multiple sources, they clean it and combine it to create a single customer profile. This is extremely useful for longer buying journeys, where your customer data is scattered across your ad platform, CRM and email tools.

An important note: using a CRM like Hubspot is great but it doesn’t solve the main issue of collecting second and third party data, or data across different platforms (desktop vs. mobile, for example) or ecosystems (app vs. browser, to name one). CDPs tend to solve this issue. They are also very expensive.

I only have direct experience with one tool: Segment (whose marketing I have not been particularly impressed with). It works great. Another tool I have heard amazing things of is mParticle. If you test it, let me know. Otherwise, go for Demandbase, I mentioned it earlier when I discussed data gathering.

To achieve point (2), you can use dedicated software tools or simpler segmentation.

Tools like Optimizely allow you to edit the content that appears on your website to appeal to specific segments of your audience, based on the data in your CDP. I guarantee you this is a lot of work but it’s incredibly effective.

You can also use the insights from your CDP to personalize your messaging throughout the buyer journey. If your buying committee is made of four personas, you can create four versions of your eBook, and then funnel them into four different funnels: this would shape your email nurturing strategy, or the offer in your retargeting ads.

Investing in these software tools is not mandatory, and you can do a lot just by looking at customer behaviour and segmenting accordingly. However, in ABM personalization is the name of the game, so as a marketing leader you should do everything you can to be as relevant as possible to the person you are trying to sell to.

This marks the end of the second and last part of this deep-dive.

ABM requires some effort and discipline, but it is a valuable alternative to targeted advertising, and it is an extremely effective way to contribute to pipeline and revenue.

I hope you have learned something. Has this guide taught something valuable? Do you do ABM differently?

I value your opinion and feedback, and I encourage you to let me know what you think: you can easily reach out to me via email.

And if you haven't done it yet, you can subscribe to my newsletter. Every month I do a deep dive like this one. It's free, you should probably check it out.