10 Effective Account-Based Marketing Tactics For Modern B2B Marketers

what's going on everybody and welcome to today's episode of learning from the pros joining me today is Brandon Alysa glue sharing his top 10 tips for ABM advertising he is uh an ABM practitioner and he has just started a new consultancy called insights to ignite Brandon welcome glad to have you yeah hi Sylvia excited to be here and excited to dig into some ABM tips why don't we just kick off to the audience uh to the ad conv verision Community here and just kind of give a quick background on on yourself and kind of your

experience with ABM and and kind of how you've gone to this point yeah it's really been a an interesting Road as many marketers started off as an attorney few years ago before getting into content with places like Bleacher Report and eventually getting over to agencies and analytics and SEO and all that great stuff before moving over to the paid side and then kind of learning we can drive all the leads we want but if they're not the right leads it doesn't matter and the best way to find the right leads the right accounts account based

marketing go after the people you need kick us off with the first tip Brandon yeah along those lines of finding the right people is you need to keep in mind that you need to play the long game I know a lot of folks love to talk about that marketing but we've all been in those meetings where we need a shot and arm for pipeline right now we got to get these quarters numbers up that's not what abm's for ABM is all about creating engagement with the right accounts so start with things like education let them

get to know who you are it's much more like a dating process than anything else uh I found in marketing and just running a bunch of Google ads hoping to collect a bunch of demand generation so the big takeaway here is stop running demo ads at accounts that don't know who you are have never gauged with you they're not going to bite and they're not going to marry you right away away pretty good tip I'm I'm just thinking you know maybe people listening to this are like you know Brandon that sounds great but I I

need pipeline yesterday how can I play the long game how long is long enough you know kind of how do you think about that yeah and that's where a good account scoring system uh will help you identify accounts that are properly in market right now are closer in that buying cycle a lot of times you can look at the activities that they're taking that past opportunities took before becoming an opportunity before saying yes to the demo request and that's where you can say okay these people have been on our website a ton uh they're opening

our emails they clicked these ads now we know that these are the wants to go on Target right now with those demo requests so of course there'll always be somebody that generally is engaging with you already so go ahead put them at the bottom of the funnel try to hit them you know over with those value props and that urgency to get them into a demo call today uh but otherwise yeah long game make sure that your targets are set as far as these are the people we want to understand who we are before we

start asking them to demo that's awesome just to break that out a little bit for everyone listening let's say you have a list of 100 counts right and you identified through whatever tool you're using 20 of them are in Market they're already on your website maybe they requested a demo start there launch your ABM program there in terms of trying to get those accounts over the threshold so that they actually can turn into pipeline before you start to action against the other 80 that have never been to your website maybe they don't even know who

you are they've never had any interaction with you before yeah absolutely and of skipping bit down into a different tip and I'm just going to go ahead and shoehorn it in right here if that's all right yeah that's where we have the kind of dosier of information that we're going to hand off to sales we're going to take all of that uh the ads that they've clicked the sites that they or the the certain pages on your website that they've really read or or shared around as well as any emails or opening or anything they

might have even sent to you in a chat and take that put that in a DOA for your sales team so now when it's time for them to do their Outreach and you are pairing that with onetoone messaging to really get that demo request or get that uh next big meeting out of the way you can personalize it even more so you know what they like you know what their paying points are Hammer them with that in a personalized way uh when you get to that bottom of the funnel so you can get those demo

requests and open up those opportunities nice that's awesome so would you say having a third-party tool for ABM is is necessary to to to activate against this it's not necessary but it certainly helps so there's uh a lot of good Buzz out there about Scrappy ABM is one company in particular that I follow that they're really about getting you started in your ABM program and you don't need to buy the big expensive Tech stack right away and he's not wrong it's Mason Cosby you know a lot of good content over there uh but when you

are getting deep into these situations and deep in your ABM and you're trying to scale up having that type of tech that could take all that data process it and make it easy to report and share with sales what's going on and also run your targeted ads for you uh in most cases it's definitely a time saer and it's definitely going to save you a lot of headaches and a lot of manual work yeah and it probably makes a lot of sense like if you can't get early traction already proof of concept don't feel like

you need to just jump right in lock in with a 12-month contract with you know most of these platforms or 12 Monon contracts it's like get your MVP off the ground essentially get traction then take it to the next level right y have something to show your CFO before you go asking for tens and maybe even hundreds of thousands of dollars to get off the ground but when you do have it and it's connected to your CRM and Linkedin and everything else it does make things fly a lot faster that's great I just want to

recap Point number two there so tip number two was to create that dossier of information so essentially you know your accounts are consuming certain types of content on your site you know that they're interested in certain things if there are already in the sales process maybe they've mentioned certain things they're interested in overcoming essentially you're creating this dossier of information to arm your salesperson to then go ahead and engage the prospect with the most relevant content and at the same time you can now use that information in your ads so this is where it gets

a little bit more of a manual process than the fact that you will have to create these ads that have a message that is strictly for them but if you're working on a big deal that you're trying to close that little bit of extra effort can go a long way towards getting your foot the door and hopefully land expand and do all those great things with abs this this comes into now we're talking about acceleration campaign specifically from a paid perspective so now it's like you know you know you got Microsoft in pipeline hypothetically and

they voiced these you know just uh adding on to that one of the things that we found works really well is when you're running acceleration campaigns what we like to do is we like to do objection campaigns and social proof campaigns so what we do is we work closely with sales we say hey what are the top 10 objections that are coming up from these list of accounts that we have as an open up one of the biggest challenges though we've run into is like audience size so typically what we do is we if the

deal isn't large enough to Target individually we'll Target a list of open opportunities and we'll ask for like those shared common pain points and objections and then what we do from there is we create ads and content specifically addressing each objection and then we'll measure the engagement and response rate of the ads click for each objection so it's kind of it's kind of meta cuz it's like you know price is an objection and it's like we'll run these ads like basically overcoming that specific objection so it's like you and I are on a sales call

maybe we have a call booked on Monday but then you're on LinkedIn and you see this ad saying like concerned about price here's six reasons why you know blah blah blah you should justify this investment or like it's a social proof campaigns where it's basically like in feed and it's like those Folks at ad conversion are amazing you know or like uh so on and so forth and kind of like you know kind of instilling into that acceleration play yeah absolutely that's that's a great point I like that strategy especially with the top 10 objections

I'm I'm going to steal that go for it h tip number three and I think we'll we'll jump back into it as far as where I was looking at before but make sure you're going deeper with these so you're playing the long game and you're really getting deep into with your Dosa of information you got there because when people clicked on certain ads you knew that you needed to go down that path with them so you kind of have your your broad your education your Ed awareness ads at the top and now you start to

narrow in on the pain points that they select make sure you're giving them to the right page to help them go further into their own story so just as they're getting to know you like we talked about before with you're not asking them to get married right away you're not asking them for that demo request when they don't know your name you're getting to know them so all of this leads into that dossier at the end but at in the middle in that nice place where where they're still kind of figuring out what they want

to know about you make sure that your ads are Dynamic enough in the sense that you're looking at it every week or so to make sure you are coming up with the right ideas the right content that's going to keep them engaging further I love that so essentially what you're doing I almost think of it as like you're creating this buffet and you have this buffet with all of these different meals pieces of content that you feel would be most helpful to these accounts based on where they are right now essentially in the buyer's Journey

as as best as you can segment based on what you're seeing in your CRM and then from there they can choose right oh maybe I'm interested in this piece of content let me dive deeper there and then that then informs the dossier that you put later on so it's almost like you're pushing this content out so that one you get the benefit of brand awareness and nurture right and you're educating these folks but then in a meta way they're creating your Outreach later on because based on the things that they're engaging with your sales team

in a perfect world would then Outreach to them and kind of follow up with more like context and personalization exactly and this is why it's nice to have that Tech stack to keep all dis organized because as you can guess it gets convoluted very quickly but there's a lot to keep up on but that's why when you work ABM properly and you really get into where their pain points are you can see a lot of traction I love that uh just one tip for everyone listening if you're if you're thinking to yourself how am I

going to do this I don't have a Tech Tool you know I don't want to invest in that like just simple way is use linkedin's demographic reporting so if you're targeting your list of accounts through linkedin's demographic reports you can see which companies have been exposed to Impressions which ones are actually engaging and then if you can take it a step further and then you can leverage like a thirdparty data connector to be able to pull the demographic data from LinkedIn through the API you get so many more insights because when you report through the

demographic support on LinkedIn ative platform you're limited to the amount of Impressions by a company but when you pull the data through the API I mean it allows you to go I've seen as low as like two Impressions per account and then you can also see the engagement by account as well and it's a really cool way to kind of get away around those limitations following up on that I think in the next place I would go is this all kind of gets to a thing I like to call the so what and that's where

when you're looking through the data and you're trying to figure out what it all means one of the things that when I worked at an agency people would just show reports like okay our traffic went up why and you know this keyword ranks wherever third they never gave the so what and that's what you could do with ABM I think better than most other methods out there is really lay out what that means uh for your target audience so not just the functionality or we'll save your engineering team 20 hours a week what does that

mean like and somebody out there uh can say well that's great but I already have an engineering team that I pay this much money to be there so it's not really doing anything for me what is the actual outcome that's going to help my company or me in that case maybe it's I'm going to get promoted because I'm bringing more to the table now so that's really something to go along with the drilling in uh going deeper playing the long game make sure you're getting to the so what and the outcome that we're hoping to

hit for them yeah my brain immediately goes to this is the long game and we live in an impatient world you know where we want to we want to see traction we want to see progress rightfully so you know if you're investing thousands of dollars into this program if you're not setting up these leading indicators across your funnel it's like so what we got an impression on this account I don't care but if you can tie it to look this is part of our funnel and this is part of the journey and like we're moving

these groups of companies and users of these companies and now they're here and then they're here and I can almost imagine like as you do this enough eventually you'll start to make these inferences and correlations where it's like well I noticed like for example when I used to run performance at metadata and like I help build the programmatic program like we noticed like once a certain amount of companies get a certain level of exposure in terms of Impressions the likelihood of an influenced opportunity being created was like you know 50x if you set up that

funnel properly and you have those different Milestones then you're able to tie it to the so what right yeah exactly and that's where another great part of this is we can always AB test with any AD campaign and you always should uh but in particular you can really drill in it's drilling down into that seniority entitle people really need to take the time to think about what their messaging is going to be across their accounts by verticals by segments whatever you might be doing uh but the big thing is okay we have account a and

they are in this particular vertical so we know we're going to talk about uh that particular functionality that we have but make sure then you are then drilling down to we're going to talk to our SE Suite like this we're going to talk to the directors like this and our managers are going to get this message and now we know that managers are worried about moving up to directors directors may be moving up to seite seite wants to show that they know how to grow a company uh from 10 million to 100 million or whatever

it might be so make sure that you're matching your messaging to those personas and what their actual desired outcomes are or what matching their motiv ations and there's a lot that can be said for finding that messaging through the testing so to combine a bit of these two points is we're drilling down into these titles we're drilling down into these personas and we've created this messaging Matrix based off that but now make sure we're running two to three different variations of that message so maybe they don't really care about motivation or maybe somebody doesn't really

care about being a director but they want to be able to finish their job well uh at the end of the day and not have to work all night so you just got to figure out what the right message is for each group and it's a great way to be able to test them to have a learning that goes along with it like you were just talking about with the so what it's a bit of a different take on that Brandon I hear what you're saying but I'm just thinking about like what about the person

listening to this where they're they're like you know I I want to I would love to in a perfect world to be able to create this unique experience by job title or seniority but the company that I'm going after is just not large enough to be able to use a job TI title filter according to LinkedIn standards well there's a couple different directions you can go there uh you brought up earlier about like your top 10 objections by verticals that'd be a great place to start uh you could definitely run those ads see what connects

um but the other thing I would say is maybe that account isn't really qualified for this approach if it's such a small company that they don't have that they don't have enough people to where we could drill down to these different seniority levels and hit them the right messaging then I have to wonder if they can afford uh your offering because if you're running ABM chances are you're running a high ticket item uh and you probably should be if that's the case otherwise I'm not sure abm's the proper way to go anyways uh so if

they don't have enough employees to consider filtering down to I would reconsider whether that account should be in your approach to start with if the company isn't that large it's like essentially it's not true ABM where it's strategic and it's part of a larger initiative and you're going out hunting for whales essentially is kind of where my brain goes right like we're not just hunting sharks here we're hunting whales and it justifies all of this operational work the content that goes into this so on and so forth and if you're on the flip side of

that where you're like you don't have a large enough account list or company size to do this level of differentiation around the audiences and the filtering and the criteria then really that's not ABM that's just more targeted advertising because now you're you're filtering it down even further where it's not just anybody it's people at these accounts that you know are great which is totally great and you should do it but for what we're talking about here true ABM from a strategic standpoint you need those larger companies to be able to do this yeah I mean

if we could fit them into a one to many Campaign which borderlines on targeted demand generation there's a lot of people love to talk about what qualifies as this or that It ultimately doesn't matter because good marketing is just good marketing but if you're going to put in all that effort in ABM and the the investment financially that usually comes with that I'd make sure that the people that we're targeting are indeed those whales got you do you have this is a very case-by casee question but if you had to say in your experience like

what's a large enough ACV generally speaking that somebody's listening to this right now and they're like hm does strategic ABM is it a fight is it a road that I should go down what would you say is like just generally speaking if you have an ACV greater than this it's something you should consider I'd probably go around $20,000 and that's that's a benchmark I've seen put out there uh but a different way I was thinking about this um I recently posted about this on LinkedIn was if your contract requires a CFO sign off then you

probably need ABM because that means that you're at least going to have to Target that CFO and get him on board because he's not going to sign he or she is not going to sign a contract from a company they've never heard of without quite a bit of okay so what and there we go going back to the so what and more than likely you as a manager whoever you might be you've got somebody else in your department you got to get on board so there's another uh instance of specific messaging we have to get

and more than likely there's going to be an operations uh Team whether it's marketing or rev or sales offs whatever we want to call it so now we're talking three different messages already so that's usually a good sign that we need ABM is if a CFOs to sign off on it I love that that's awesome uh so just to recap the five tips we've gone through so far tip number one play the long game tip number two create that dossier of information tip number three go deeper tip number four so what and tip number five

drill into the seniority or title then we also have the you don't need fancy Tech and I kind of snuck that one in there on you but it doesn't hurt one thing i' I'd love to add to the go deeper part that I didn't bring up before if that's all right that's where you really want to get into those insights to create the right content just like we were talking about right before we jumped on if you don't have the right content none of this matters we can run all the best ads in the world

they won't get you over the hump when those people get to your website and look for that content based off of the needs that they have so make sure you're looking at those insights putting together again that so what creating that content that really allows you to go deeper then continue drilling into that pain set aside time every week to ideate and create and this is one that I have always struggled with I've had to uh put in calendar blocking recently that that's helped I don't always stick to it and then I mess up my

whole week but it's so easy to be chasing you know those leads and trying to get everything going that if you can just set aside an hour and I found Friday afternoons are usually when nobody else is around and I could take that time to do it to look at those insights and just let my brain start clicking off of what I'm seeing uh just start you know putting down the 50 taglines you like you hear them saying bad men oh we need you to come up with a list of 50 taglines for whatever burger

restaurant it was I can't remember that way you can have this list of things to go to when it's time to start testing a little bit more and really find out what's working so if you're testing with your AB testing you need to have the ideas to try I love this so much this is a top topc near and dear to my heart uh around experimentation yeah uh th% adding on to that for your experiments you should be documenting them somewhere I I always tell people you know it's it'll feel like you're moving slower but

you end up moving faster in the long run because everyone else is repeating the same mistakes they made six months ago and they just forgot about so you'll continue to stack on your success and build on your wins uh while other people are just kind of in this constant Loop of ASAP and they never actually get anywhere so absolutely get in the habit I love that tip of just spending time to think and ideate and review data so many applications for that not even just from like an ABM ads perspective or just running ads but

like as a founder and a business leader or like a manager or like whatever your function is spending time to really think and idate and and marinate on like the core problem I think is something that like a lot of lot people do and adding on to this even more because it's so near and dear to my heart is get in the habit of asking yourself really good questions because if you ask a great question you'll get a great answer so for I'll just give people one in the sense of like the entrepreneurial space it's

like what has to happen in the next six months in order to kill the company what a great question right or like if we had to grow 100% through um word of mouth and referrals and close down our website how would we operate like great questions like that just your brain just goes and just Sparks so many ideas and and on that note around like that scheduled time Frid a maybe having a list of questions you know like to think through or like things to look at when you're going through your review process I think

could just make it even more productive yeah that's a great point also around the documenting everything uh that's huge in ABM and I'm now wishing I'd put that in as a tip but it's not necessarily just ABM in general it's such a time timesaver when you can be like hey here's the link I sent before or per my last email we'll leave that part out usually but this is the process sales guy or sales gal yeah let's go and everybody listening who's like oh what what tech do you use like to to document these experiments

and they're already over complicating in their mind like whatever whatever works you know like if it's a piece of paper or a notes on your your iPhone or a Google doc like keep it simple it's better to do something consistently bad than uh great a few times personally I always use Google Docs and I use the heading set or you can set it where normal text or a heading and that way I just create the big ones with headings you can easily jump around on the left with a table of contents it's saved me a

lot of time and obviously searchable helped using templates to really help accelerate all of this so if we're going to take that time to drill in these personas to figure out these pain points and test all this stuff you need to have something that you can just rip off copy place it in display I and go uh and one of the biggest shortcuts I found uh through a little bit of pain my myself was asking the designer to give me the templates myself so I could pop them in canva and just try a bunch of

different messaging it's a super simple step it's not something that's going to set me aside as some giant scholar uh but it is will save you a ton of time so design templates are key to doing all of this testing get a design template created and then from there you can iterate essentially right so you can adjust the copy of the headline on the creative you can make those minor tweaks but you've got the 90% of the work done essentially yeah in addition to that too right like if you're going after these list of accounts

you're going to be by definition in a smaller audience size in terms of linkedin's Def like standards so that means you're going to rack up a higher frequency faster meaning you're going to need to refresh your creative faster which by having these design templates you can stay ahead of AD fatigue uh even easier the 10th and final tip going to be a little bit of a shocker but don't skip Google ads and it's not that we're necessarily of course retargeting campaigns all that great stuff you can kind of Target the companies you want on there

but that's not really what I'm looking for here customer questions Prospect questions those types of things that they're definitely going to put into Google to find out the answer to are what can be huge uh later on because then now you're showing up to answer all of their questions you're not just the guy who's running a display ad at them talking about their paino when they go to Google their paino you're there giving them an answer and the best part about a lot of these questions they're cheap nobody's worried about going after these types of

keywords uh great example from my time at thought industry is we would we sold an LMS well there was a new thing that came out that was an lxp so the learning management system versus I think a learning experience platform something like that but point being sales folks were constantly getting this questions we decided to capture uh salesperson's answer to it transcribe it put it in a blog and start sending it out via ABM and run and it did so well that we started running a Google ads campaign for it because lxp versus LMS that

keyword was like Pennies on the dollar it was so cheap compared to you know our Target keywords that would be like $75 a click so you now you're getting into your you're getting your target audience with a question they're going to answer and of course not account uh that lands on that blog page is going to be in your target but that's not a bad thing anyways it's you're still going to have some demand generation efforts going on so it's a way to kind of bridge that gap between the two and and really cast a

widen it so just to run that back because it's so important what you just said and such a different way to put a lens on Google ads because most people when we're thinking about Google ads we are thinking High intent so in the example you gave I would be bidding on like best learning management platform right and I'd be paying $70 a clip for it uh rightfully so what you're saying here is you've identified some key questions that are always coming up in the sales process that then inspired content that your team created and then

from there you were having such a good job organically from that content already just answering those questions that it then led to the Insight of like hey what if we actually put some money behind this and covered it from a paid search perspective and then that was a huge unlock and the the benefit is it's a unique way cuz the problem with search is two people can search the same thing and you're still going to pay the same price Google doesn't discriminate you're going to pay the same for the intern as you are the CEO

and it's it is what it is the cool thing about this approach is it's a way for you to get in front of the right person because a specific kind of person is going to search that thing and then in addition to that it's uh dramatically cheaper right than your high intent keywords I'm curious on this did you see a good enough search volume or did you not care because you were like hey this is if someone searches this they're worth it yeah and that's that's something where I really try to drill into when I'm

finding the right insights like I was saying before to ignite that customer growth is it's not just about finding search volume it's about finding the search volume that matters so like you said anybody could be searching that particular question but if you know if a hundred people are searching for that other question that you pay a lot for and only five are searching for this one that five is my target audience anyways so it really worked out well on that front and it drove a ton of leads I believe the next closest campaign as far

as cost per lead was 123% higher so it was by far our best performer so just to recap these 10 golden nuggets of tips I don't want to call it tips anymore golden nuggets is number one play the long game number two put together that dossier of information so that you can serve different content to the opportunities that matter number three go deeper dynamically offer the content to these accounts based on the things that are resonating number four so what always asking yourself so what connecting what you're doing to the key outcomes that they're leading

to number five is to drill into the personas and titles and the seniority so you get a level deeper and then from there the next point is to test your different value propositions and then from there you don't need any fancy Tech next set aside time to id8 ideally an hour a week on Fridays is what you found work best for you but whatever that works for you as the listener uh next up is to use design templates to accelerate uh your campaign iterations and then from there do not sleep on Google ads and uh

approach it in a different perspective in terms of covering those key questions that your accounts are searching for Brandon thank you so much for being here if people want to connect with you where can they find you yeah LinkedIn uh Brandon Alysa glue you get find me under my name here I'm also launching a consultancy insights to ignite it'll be an email course to really help you figure out how to find those right insights build the right content and then distribute it whether it's s paid or ABF guys check out Brandon connect with them on

LinkedIn uh definitely check out his consultancy as soon as he launches and Brandon thank you again for being here I can't wait for people to hear this yeah absolutely s thank you