martech

Rule 5: Pick Tools That Enable Your Strategy – Not the Other Way Around

Rule 4: Design Your Stack to Support Omnichannel Marketing

Rule 3: Take Advantage of Technologies That Support More Than One Channel

Rule 2: Give Your Marketing Team Final Say Over Their Tools

Rule 1: Keep Your Tech Stack Clean

Welcome back to MarTech 2020: 5 Rules for Managing Your Technology and Strategy. In part one of our series, we saw that the average marketing technology stack may actually be smaller than we might think. In fact, 90% of the marketers we surveyed use fewer than 10 MarTech tools, while most use fewer than five (Figure 1), and two-thirds of our respondents spend less than $100,000 a year on marketing tech (Figure 2).

A Brief Introduction

Marketing technology has done nothing but expand for the past decade. Now in 2020, Chief MarTech’s annual Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic lists more than 7,000 tools across 24 different categories. That is a staggering number of options that has as much potential to overwhelm the people using it as empower them. 

When is enough, enough? Where is the line between building a tech stack that enables your team to do great marketing and throwing a bunch of shiny things on top of each other until they just get in the way of clear strategy and effective multichannel marketing?

How do you integrate offline and online marketing to engage customers in the real world when much of the tech stack is focused only on digital marketing?

Those are the questions we wanted to answer in our MarTech 2020 survey (click here to see the full results). In the responses, we found a real marketing landscape that makes a lot more sense than the out-of-control MarTech super graphics we’ve all seen.

It turns out that most marketers value focus and efficiency in their technology stacks. Rather than building leaning towers of digital interdependency, the marketers who responded to this survey are opting for efficient, focused marketing tech stacks that enable them to market better not just online, but offline as well.

Today’s Marketing Tech Stack

Despite an explosion of new technologies, we found that marketing tech stacks remain small and focused. Marketers are avoiding too many technical investments and are more likely to use stacks that are lean:

1. Most marketers use fewer than five pieces of technology in their tech stacks, and 90% keep it under 10 total tools.

2. Marketers use tools that support multiple channels more than tools that are used for a single channel.

3. The marketing team controls these tools, not the IT department, with 68% of marketing departments responsible for MarTech procurement and oversight.

4. Marketers use the tools in their tech stacks monthly, and very few tools go unused.

5. Most companies use MarTech to support both digital and offline marketing.

The key to an effective marketing technology strategy is keeping your tech stack small, but robust enough to engage customers and prospects both online and offline. Efficient, nimble tech stacks allow marketers to focus on their customers and seamlessly engage them wherever they may be.

Based on this data, we’ve identified five rules that we’ll highlight over the next 6 weeks that marketers can follow to build technology systems that empower marketing departments to operate at peak efficiency, leaving more time for creativity.

Executing Your ABM Strategy

Welcome to the exciting conclusion of our six-part Account-Based Marketing (ABM) series!

To recap the series thus far, we’ve touched on the basics of ABM like aligning your sales and marketing teams, identifying target accounts, doing thorough research, and creating great content.

In part six, it’s finally time to put it all together and execute your strategy. Here’s how to do it in four easy to follow steps.

Let’s get started.

1. Identify Online Habits for Ideal Engagement

The first step is to identify where your stakeholders spend the bulk of their time online and the ways they like to view content. To illustrate this, we’ll base our example around an ABM approach to social media.

Once you have their habits and preferences identified — for instance, a preference for Facebook vs. Instagram — it’s time to carefully coordinate your messaging across key touchpoints. This means a multi-faceted approach.

For example, you might get the ball rolling by demonstrating value through social media engagement. In this scenario, you’d find groups and conversations decision makers from your target accounts are participating in. You’d then join the conversation, ideally with some relevant content your team has created.

Hopefully this would lead to a more direct dialogue — after you’ve established yourself, you can further the conversation via direct messages on social media. This is a great strategy, particularly when supplemented by more traditional means of approach, like personalized email outreach.

2. Build Out Customized Channels for Engagement

Having an attractive and convenient means for deeper engagement is crucial to building your relationship with those in control of target accounts.

This “means for deeper engagement” most effectively takes the form of a multi-channel approach to promotion such as:

• Building custom landing pages tailored to the needs, questions, and concerns of accounts
• Offering gifts for engagement and interaction (e.g. prizes, swag, and discount codes) while utilizing dimensional mail and PURLs
• Distribute content such as blog articles across channels that are relevant to each account (e.g. website, social media, and emails)
• Creating ad campaigns and social ads to target different factors such as location, skill, and job title
• Inviting contacts to (physical or digital) events and asking attendees to invite their colleagues

3. Forge Strong Relationships with Buying Committees

Here’s an obvious statement: swaying the buyer is the most important part of making the sale.

So how do we do that? Buyers rarely fall for glitz and superficial offerings, which means you need to take the right approach.

The right approach is basically comprised of the following:

• A focus on educational, value-add pieces
• Hyper-personalized content
• One-to-one (not one-to-many) communications
• Hosting events and webinars that speak to your target buyers

4. Measure Success and Plan for Your Next ABM Campaign

Once you’ve launched, the execution isn’t complete. You’ll need to look back on your efforts and evaluate their success. Remember, ABM is a long-term strategy, not a quick one-off.

You’ll want to turn to easily interpreted metrics for our evaluation separated into three categories: awareness, engagement and relationships.

The best ways to measure awareness is by evaluating things like website visits, social media mentions, and social shares.

To measure engagement, you’ll assess website behaviors like page visits, number of return visits, time spent on site, content downloads, product demos, and email sign-ups/response rate.

Finally, you’ll want to look at your relationships. To put numbers on what appears to be an intangible, take a look at things like the number of decision-makers reached, meetings set, proposals submitted, trial sign-ups, etc.

A Final Note On ABM

Over the course of our six-part series, we hope one thing has stood out above all others: the importance of relationships.

That’s really what ABM is all about — relationships founded on providing opportunity. Above all, ABM is about meaningful connection to create mutual success.

We hope you’re enjoyed this series. For more information on Strata and launching your own ABM strategy, contact us to see what we can do for you.

Killer Content in 4 Easy Steps

Welcome to part 5 of our Account Based Marketing (ABM) series. In our previous blogs, we’ve touched on the basics of ABM, such as aligning your sales and marketing teams, identifying target accounts and doing thorough research.

This week, we’ll be moving towards the creative side of your ABM strategy — creating well-written and useful content. We’re going to take you through a 4-step process that’ll help you develop the kind of content that’ll drive your ABM strategy and connect you with your audience.

It’s hard to stress this point enough: it’s both difficult and crucial to actively engage your potential buyers, but like most of us, your buyer is constantly inundated with ads, emails, and not to mention, social notifications. As a marketer, it’s your job to cut through that noise and offer value, particularly when it comes to an ABM strategy.

Here’s how to create killer (and scalable) content to support your ABM strategy.

Step 1: Do Your Research

If you’ve been keeping up with our ABM series, you should’ve noticed a pattern by now — an ABM strategy relies heavily on research. That’s because the best ABM strategy is focused on personalization.

In the same way, the best ABM content is also personalized. This means that the more personal and relevant your content is, the more likely your target buyer will engage with you.

So, how do you create content that engages them? Ask yourself a few key questions:

• Who are your key personas?
• What do they care about?
• Where do they consume information?
• When do different types of content work best?

Step 2: Draw from Past Content

We never have as much time or resources as we’d like to. That’s why it’s so important to make the most of your hard work in the past to maximize your output in the future.

Here’s what we mean by that in the context of your ABM strategy: recycle your content. There is absolutely nothing wrong with picking and choosing pieces of relevant content to dust off and repurpose as part of your ABM strategy.

The key is not to waste time reinventing the wheel. Evaluate your existing content and figure out where it falls in your strategy. Go through it, find a couple core pieces of reworkable content and identify where you need to fill in the gaps with more research or fresh content.

It’s about working smarter, not harder- let’s stick to this cliché.

Step 3: Personalize, Personalize, Personalize

Before your content goes out the door, make sure that it’s as relevant to your audience as possible. For example, it’s important to include things like industry relevant examples and terminology.

Another important facet of personalization is the tone you use and making sure to change it with context. For instance, your tone may change from casual when addressing a perceived peer to more professional when addressing a member of your target account’s executive team.

The most important thing is that you decide what speaks most to the person with whom you’re trying to connect to.

Step 4: Create Your Game Plan

Once you have your content created, determine who gets what by identifying which content speaks directly to your target account’s needs. 

Referencing back to step 1 — the research you did to develop engaging content— determine the best way to get that content to your audience and act.

Creating great content can be tough, but it doesn’t have to be a monumental struggle. By researching your audience, mining existing content, personalizing your materials and delivering your offering in an effective way, you can make valuable content that resonates with your target accounts.

Check back next Thursday for the conclusion to our ABM series – How to Execute Your ABM Strategy. And of course, if you’re ready to start your ABM program and would like to see how we can help, contact us to learn more.

A Deep Dive into Data Discovery

Welcome to part 4 of our Account Based Marketing (ABM) series.

So far, we’ve taken a look at the basics of ABM, how to align your sales and marketing teams ahead of your ABM campaign, and how to choose your target accounts.

In this installment, we’ll be taking a deep dive into data discovery — the importance of data to your ABM strategy, how to collect it, and why data hygiene is so crucial.

Let’s get started.

Why Good Data Is So Important

Good data is arguably the most important part of developing your ABM strategy, specifically when choosing your target accounts — it’s a B2B marketer’s best tool to identify the decision-makers ready to buy now.

In the next few paragraphs, we’re going to be discussing how to collect and utilize data from outside sources, but it’s important to note that plenty of data can be gathered internally from team members and existing data in your CRM.

3 Steps to Using Data For Choosing Targets

Step 1: Use Internet Data

One of the best ways to identify a target account is by gathering internet data. By using IP addresses and third-party cookies, we can look into online behaviors, such as search engine queries, repeat website visits and content downloads.

Step 2: Identify Net-New Prospects Through Audience Mirroring

As you begin to research and discover potential target accounts, you’ll begin to notice similarities in the types of businesses that come onto your radar. This can be a valuable research tool in helping you identify trends and patterns to build criteria for likely target accounts, ultimately speeding up your identification process and boosting your results.

Some places you’ll likely notice similarities include:

• Revenue
• Location
• Departments
• Employee Responsibilities
• Employee Roles
• Budgets

Step 3: Researching the Individual

By now, you’ve narrowed down a pool of prospects into a group of true target accounts. Now let’s not blow all your hard work with a sloppy ending — it’s time to bring it home with by researching your point of contact.

Figure out who you need to reach out to. Once you have it ball parked (department, level of seniority, etc.) start looking at who the ideal point of contact might be. Some of the specific details you’re after are:

• Job title
• Tenure
• Decision-making hierarchy
• Account affiliation
• Activity/engagement history
• Skills and proficiencies
• Experience with your category
• Personal information (hobbies, family, likes dislikes)

Identifying Weaknesses and Maintaining Data Hygiene

It’s important to recognize areas where you may have insufficient data. This is a good opportunity to partner with other companies who have access to quality data and work together.

It’s also crucially important not to be cavalier in your choices when it comes to third-party data acquisition — choose your third-party vendors wisely to ensure that data is well-informed and accurate

Moving onto hygiene: once you have data, you need to maintain it. While we all know that good data is important, accudata.com offers these statistics to put the true cost of bad data into perspective:

• Corrupted and inaccurate data costs US businesses approximately 3.1 trillion dollars each year.
• Nearly 40% of all sales/donor leads include some form of corrupted data, making them either difficult to use or simply useless.
• There is a 25% rate of consumer data decay annually, requiring consistent vetting.

The bottom line here: make sure you acquire good data and maintain its integrity through best practices.

ABM is all about specificity, whether that’s in delegating roles, establishing goals, or doing research. An ABM strategy can be intimidating, but the rewards are worth it. Make it easy on yourself by starting with great data.

Looking to broaden your knowledge on Account Based Marketing? Check back next Thursday for our final ABM blog focusing on how to execute your campaign.

Think you’re ready to start your ABM program now? Contact us to see what Strata can do for you.