And this came with its share of challenges. First, our primary buyer continued to be IT, however our primary target for this new campaign is a new buyer target which sometimes reports up to IT, the big data, analytics group. Second, competitors were already “landed” in the same large enterprises we were targeting for acquisition, however we segmented renewal data to refine the account list and Sales were pretty sure we had opportunity there, so we also surfaced visit data to narrow down list.

The campaign goal was to drive awareness and demand to gain a foothold into acquisition accounts to win a greater share of the market. We also had to prepare content, key selling points for the new buyer target persona. The team decided to use the digital marketing transforation iniative underway, which quickly became a clear differentiator for existing commercial campaign process and a new way to develop the buyer journey and “test” drive predictive activitaions to increasse awareness and demand at scale. This campaign became the “Data Science DMT Pilot.”

The Data Science DMT Pilot is ABM operating at high performance peak levels. Along with an alliance partner and Sales we identified a customer to champion our solution is more used in a high performance use case and is successful in their enterprise. With that champion our Data Science DMT Pilot uses a process we colloborated to define and executes a series of marketing campaigns and events that support the customers use cases and allows us to open up into the new buyer target community at that enterprise.

Budget for content development for each program was allocated @$125k, marketing expertise, and custom program development and funding underway with internal agencies, CoEs and external agencies. The program established us as not just a IT provider/vendor, but a partner that ensures success of underserved data science and analytics audiences. This was a key focus for the solution offering. This positioning, along with a clear journey-based ABM strategic framework, was easy to communicate and activations and bill of materials were clearly spelled out early in the campaign to make a very tight launch timeframe.

The marketing team also aligned with Sales and alliances with a fully integrated set of marketing and sales activities including:
• A custom multi-page personalized web experience using personalization and a new Adobe Experience Manager template.
• New content for each journey stage (awareness, consideration, evaluation/purchase)
• Fully-integrated and highly targeted media outreach (digital, social, paid search)
• Comprehensive nurturing efforts including marketing automation emails and social and programmatic retargeting.
• Integrated Sales and Channel outreach activities.
• Alliance partner support + joint training and sales and marketing activities.
• Release of our First Account Dashboard to deliver real-time customer and account insights and measurement results.

The Data Science DMT Pilot was initially developed to promote “hunter/gatherer initiatives” which are custom but longer running campaigns with tailored content and messaging and targeting focused at new acquisition audiences developed specifically for the enterprise. It was discovered that a more robust program could drive significantly more value (for us and the customer), as long as there was thoughtfull and data enriched customer account targeting. After developing the program template and process, the Account Based Marketer works with a sales sponsor to the target segment accounts to create the specific offer and campaign program.

Critically important to the successful execution of the program is alignment with Sales and (you can add the Alliance Program manager) and a sponsor identified in the account. Program, campaign and account activity is reported and available through Account Based dashboards supporting sales management and marketing management involved in the program. Each component of the program is its own campaign and the reporting tracks engagement, marketing influence on existing pipeline, marketing sourced pipeline, database growth, and services, revenue won.

The ABM Marketing Manager takes the lead and develops the strategy with Sales. Sales helps to identify the aquisition contacts or executive sponor in the target account through the entire development and deployment process. After identifying the acquisition targets, the ABM Marketing Manager;

1. Offers ABM template as an integrated campaign targeting acquisition accounts with vetted contacts that can influence within their organization.
2. Schedules and executes a -90-min Acquisition Hunter Workshop to develop segmentation and buyers journey.
3. Works with an agency partner to develop custom content with a bill of materials personalized to the account/segment use cases with persona tracks based on detailed buyers journey.
4. Develops the marketing program and presents it to sales/executives/alliance stakeholders.
5. Establishes the program budget and secures budget approval.
6. Executes the marketing program, via standard marketing processes and tools.
7. Requests and self-service access to account based reporting to provide feedback to sales and stakeholders.
8. Post mortem to optimize the program.

The DMT Pilot framework has been very successful. It delivers the benefits of Account Based Marketing and increases oppportunities and pipeline. Since the DMT Pilot campaign Sales has tools to better leverage training and access to additional contacts in the account to continue with success to land in the account, penetrate new areas of the customer’s business, whether that be lines of business (Analytics, Finance, IT, Security, etc.), establishing new executive relationships, and/or engaging with new divisions or sites.

The Data Science DMT Pilot impact is measured as follows: revenue growth, database growth, executive and line of business engagement, and ABM activity. To date, the program is working. When Data Science DMT Pilot template is deployed, there is a 27% year-over-year growth in acquisition accounts.

To watch the way I created and deployed the campaign, submit the form below for the instant tutorial.

The post Scaling and Optimizing Account Based Marketing #2 appeared first on Lisa Schwartz.

With every technological shift that has happened in the past, there has been a transfer of wealth, roles, and disintermediation. The one significant difference in what happened before was the barriers to entry. For example, during the internet revolution, there were large barriers to entry and creation of wealth. Like the introduction of the internet, the smart phone with the application (apps) revolution, both had barriers to entry and subsequent wealth transfers. If you knew how to code and you were able to get VC funding, you were able to build apps and other tools that eventually disrupted all the business levels.

How can Marketing participate in this AI revolution? The one thing about this AI revolution that has not gone before us is that there are much less barriers to entry. You do not need to know coding. You may need someone or teams to build applications, but in a few months, there will be many companies that will help you with this according to Microsoft. Microsoft announced in January 2023, the third phase of this partnership, including the general availability of Azure OpenAI Service which will fuel developer support.[2] The barriers to entry are much lower, you need less money, less specialized skills, and you’ll need creativity and an open mind, and we know Marketers have plenty of that.

Marketing teams can now harness the ability of AI apps like ChatGPT, Midjourney, Bard and others to create marketing content, videos, graphics (both 2D and 3D), chatbot assist, visual assets, grammar correction, multiple derivative assets from videos and images, product, category or social post titles and names, SEO, proofreading, plagiarism checking, analogy creation, keyword discovery, summary and abstract creation, topic outlines and web scraping, and this is to name a few of the applications marketing can use AI assist tools to help develop and create.

So, how do we prepare ourselves, how do we build strategy and models to help us prepare and further modernize our marketing organization to compete effectively with today’s marketing departments that are not augmenting AI. How do we use ChatGPT and convert it to modern marketing best practices that are actionable and achievable?

This industry is moving a lot faster than anything that has come before. The changes are really big. A Facebook “year ago” memory popped up on my Facebook wall. And it was a DALL·E photo I created, from Night Café app which is text to image creation. You simply write a prompt and get an image. For example, when I first used DALL·E, it was amazing to create art this way. DALL·E is an AI system that can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language. This Facebook memory image was only a year ago and in that time text to image has just exploded. Today, DALL·E can do more images in less time more easily and with advanced graphics. Many of the post images I am using today are all generated by Midjourney.

ChatGPT can handle a single task, like “code a website.” But then you need a human to take action with the code. Autonomous agents, on the other hand, multitask all at once: code a website → publish it → debug it → add code….and voila. Despite a few brace attempts (AutoGPT, Multi-On, & others), I haven’t seen anything actually useful yet besides simpler ones like Code Interpreter. Now Amazon is taking a stab at agents. In late July 2023, they announced that agents would be integrated inside Bedrock, their service that lets businesses access AI models like Claude and SDXL. The goal is to give businesses agents that can answer questions about their data and execute tasks. Why it matters: We’re early, but this is the first legit recognition that agents could be very useful to marketing teams and processes.

AI technology has been around for quite some time. However, in recent months, AI has generated a lot of buzz and has become accessible and democratized for consumer use with tools promoted such as ChatGPT, DALL·E , Midjourney, etc. AI is artificial intelligence which collects and organizes information quickly and efficiently. However, with AI, there are limitations, and the technology is still in its infancy. We have heard that ChatGPT makes mistakes if you ask it cognitive questions and there are imperfections throughout the use cases. What is important is to be able to see AI technology for what it is at its current stage. For example, Tome AI was not great when it first came out. Now it is a terrific way to make presentations. This tool is really getting better and better, in just a matter of months. AutoGPT is becoming another tool which allows you to experiment with tasks and collections.

It is easy to feel overwhelmed and not know where to start. We are still early and some of the tools have limitations. What I want to do is empower marketing teams to use AI tools and make AI accessible by showing you methods and frameworks to use AI in marketing. I call it “co-piloting.”  With these co-pilots, you can gain strategic insights, streamline workflows, develop frameworks and standard operation procedures (SOPs), perform competitor and market analysis, support marketing operations and compliance and more.

Each marketing team can become a micro-creator of AI apps for their marketing purposes. Imagine simpler video creation and scripting, 3D environment creation, creating podcasts, connect TV motion video ads. And even small marketing teams can do this alongside the bigger companies that create and manage the AI generative ecosystem. Your marketing team can be early innovators.

So, what is our role in marketing, how do we use these tools? To solve efficiencies (or the lack thereof) AI in marketing is perfect for those use cases and will be the number one driver in Marketing use of AI. This will foster human and AI collaboration to make marketing teams more efficient by complementing human expertise, as a copilot.

Previous types of artificial intelligence used in marketing required extensive developer resources or specialists in the category to help Marketing use and acquire and manage tools, for example, that used machine learning and propensity modeling learning assistance where high value priority objectives were identified as gaining insights into website visitor intelligence, dynamic audience refresh and execution optimization refresh for reporting, as well as other use cases.  These platforms (insourced or outsourced) are in the domain of expensive, annual ARR licensing within a few large SaaS digital experience and software platforms. ChatGPT democratizes the amount of data science understanding needed to get basic marketing functions completed and it costs next to nothing, for now. AI tools can function very similarly using the next best action – content recommendations, behavior-based optimization, develop creative trackers, author engagement funnels, and automate knowledge work. The technical potential to automate the application of expertise is increasing. The capabilities of generative AI could automate a broader range of marketing activities sooner and this could increase the productivity of the marketing process and scale programs.

Before I show you how to use ChatGPT, let us take a quick look at a traditional marketing system. It typically involves understanding your category, target market, developing personas, understanding the customer journey, developing your offer, creating your unique value proposition, marketing messaging, opt-in strategy, opt-in copy, landing page copy. And then there is all the content you need to market your offer.

Phew, that is a lot to cover, and it can take weeks, if not months, to gather and organize all the necessary information. With ChatGPT it can take a day or days.

Excited to see how? Let us crack it open! It starts with Quality Prompts. The secret sauce behind the strategy is the two types of prompts I will introduce you to.

1. Foundational Prompts that generate the [placeholder output] you will use to be able to generate marketing strategy, messaging, and content at scale, faster than you have ever dreamed possible.
2. Advanced Marketing Prompts generate output at scale and quality.

What makes these prompts unique is the ‘prompt output’ approach I use. This means you take prompt outputs from the foundational prompts and simply cut and paste them into the appropriate placeholder.

This article will focus on the foundational prompts. Be sure to bookmark and come back and visit my site to get additional information on these prompts and the advanced marketing prompts to take your marketing team to the next level with AI.

To get started prompting, and if you do not yet have a ChatGPT account, head over to https://chat.openai.com/ and sign up. It is free. Or you can get the ChatGPT4 for $20/month (at the time of this writing) which gives you additional functionality. I would recommend upgrading to Plus after you have a chance to use the tool.

Step 1: Understand the Prompt Structure
Before using ChatGPT understand that there is a structure I apply to ChatGPT prompting. The structure has several parts and steps overall and I have been testing and experimenting to come up with this approach.

It involves:

1/Setting the scene: so that AI can understand the goal of the prompt and what role we want the chat to assume.

2/providing context and background: so ChatGPT knows what to produce.

3/Intent and purpose of the chat: why is AI doing the task, i.e.: why are we writing product descriptions (enable sales, sell, describe?) so that the response will give us more of we ask it.

4/ Instructions:  this is where you can get highly creative, give it personality, tone, length, modifiers, it is an important part of the prompt.

5/Offer and what you receive back: lists, bullet points, code, headlines/sub-headlines/content block, so you can control the output.

Step 2: Load the Prompt (these are the instructions like what a manager would give to an individual contributor or a subordinate to do the work or a task).

Load the completed prompt provided in my article here. This prompt has been designed to generate structured copy, complete with attention-grabbing headlines, for every section of your opt-in page.

Step 3: Fill in the Placeholder Text

The foundational prompt is a pre-written piece of text with placeholder text included. Your job is to fill in the placeholder text with relevant information to create a personalized prompt for your organization. Once you have filled in the placeholder text, you can run the prompt and record the output.

Now, the output from this prompt is designed to help you understand your target market better, as well as produce the OUTPUTS we need for future prompts. We recommend you read the response to the prompt carefully, as you will learn so much about your target market here.

Step 4: Filling in the Placeholders

To create the personalized prompt, you will need to fill in the following placeholders:

Please enter what you do: This is where you will need to provide a brief description of your business and the services or products you offer. Be sure to be as specific and detailed as possible.

In this case, we simply paste the NICHE OUTPUT into the designated placeholder in the prompt where it says [enter your NICHE OUTPUT from your AI ChatGPT prompt program template here]

And then you paste the OFFER OVERVIEW OUTPUT from your AI ChatGPT prompt program template into the designated placeholder.

Step 5: Recording the Output

Once you have filled in the placeholders, it’s time to run the prompt and record the output. The output you receive will be the foundation for the advanced marketing prompts later in the course, so it is essential to ensure the quality of your output is of a high standard. Keep regenerating the response until you like what you see.

Step 6: Outputs You Will Record From This Prompt

Once you have run the prompt and are happy with the response, record the following outputs to your worksheet:

     * Target Market Output

     * Core Problems Output

     * Emotional Impact Output

     * Desired Outcomes Output

Congratulations! You have completed a foundational prompt for defining your target market. By following these effortless steps, you are on your way to creating an effective marketing strategy that is tailored to your business. Remember, taking your time and providing detailed information for the placeholders is key to getting the best possible output.

Do not be left behind. Adoption is likely to be faster in modern marketing departments, where the use of tools and experiments with good data collection are present. This enhances the adoption of automation and where automation occurs earlier in marketing departments.

Follow me at lisa-schwartz.com where I will provide the next steps to foundational prompts and get you on your way to advanced marketing prompts.

[1] PwC, Global Artificial Intelligence Study: Sizing the prize.

[2] Microsoft, Modernize your apps and accelerate business growth with AI

The post Is Marketing changing fast enough? Get ready to use AI prompting to copilot your marketing team. appeared first on Lisa Schwartz.

Usually the reply contains the tactics that drove the marketing strategy, for example, we did a unique contextual ad campaign and had high reach metrics, or we had a great set of event experiences that drove opportunities to close. However, the best answer to the question is not always the tactics or channels used in the preceding campaign that made up your growth strategy.

The conversation instead should surround the actual growth strategy, not the campaign strategy or the channel or tactics mix. For example, you can say you netted 11 more customers rather than increasing reach by 15%. Here’s a few other ways to respond to this question.

1. The 11 new customers did not cost any money.
2. We now have an “expand strategy” with the 11 customers landed. [read: unlike paid spend]
3. We focus on these conversion projcts and not just on reach or volume metrics alone.
4. Paid traffic is now more optimized and efficient when improving conversion rates.

Sometimes more volume, tactics, channels, activity…activity…activity…isn’t actually amounting to growth marketing success.

The post Creating Growth Efficiencies appeared first on Lisa Schwartz.

B2B marketing and sales has changed dramatically over the past couple of years. For many B2B companies, account based marketing or ABM has emerged as a critical go to market strategy.  As ABM continues to grow, marketers are trying to determine how to best add ABM into their program mix and existing tech stack to quickly demonstrate value and results.

Many ABM vendors today offer an all-in-one ABM platform however this approach carries some significant risks. These platforms are often overkill, overpriced or go a mile wide an inch deep in critical functional areas. They often force a rip and replace of your existing marketing, sales and advertising tech infrastructure that disrupts your current process. There is a better way to add ABM capabilities that are best-in-class and have key functional areas and capabilities to fit seamlessly into your existing technology platform as well as the tools.

Best practices suggest that ABM should enable B2B marketers to do four things:

1. adapt their current market and sales process
2. use existing data and programs and adapt ABM, thereby protecting their existing technology investment
3. add only the best-in-class ABM capabilities needed
4. all marketers to achieve global account scale

ABM should provide three core best-in-class solutions. ABM advertising website analytics and ABM sales insights solutions should help answer key ABM questions for your brand team’s, demand teams, and sales teams. ABM advertising should be used in a cost-effective manner to highly target and engage individual buyers and entire buying groups at target accounts who either have never ever engaged with your brand or reach target prospects that unable to be reached through traditional channels such as marketing, sales emails, and phone calls.

ABM advertising, if done right, allows you to target specific companies across global regions and GEOs. Find an ABM vendor to help you deliver global account reach (if global ABM is in the strategy), and coverage.  In that way the vendor can source data from all major data providers and serve ads to all major media buying platform or DSPs globally.  Another key area is to get your message in front of exactly the right buyers at your target accounts.

Once your ABM campaigns are launched, you can view the insights and include your sales teams on engaged buying groups from your global target accounts. You can also assess the efficiencies of the ABM campaigns in terms of measuring  finally unlike your competition we don’t charge a premium on your media costs that gives you a lower of cost per account reached, and cost per engaged buyer.

Many brands start with two primary ABM advertising programs. ABM with cookie based targeting, which helps you engage buyers at target accounts using their buyer personas such as seniority and job function. Second, ABM with IP targeting which allows you to engage accounts in markets such as the specific territory or countries where data privacy regulations do not allow targeting of individual buyers.

It’s also important to optimize your ABM campaigns. Check your analytics for unique information on incoming buyers to can see what specific ad messages or website pages caught the buyer interests and which products or a solution was of interest to them.  Identify and report on accounts beyond typical IP based approaches and deliver actionable information to your SDR and sales teams on a periodic basis of how the buyer committees or contacts are performing in the funnel.  This will allow your SDRs to better prioritize their sales outreach and understand which buyers to target and know the specific product or solution of interest to them before reaching out to them and using that precious outreach time and quota.

There are three key outcomes you can expect from deploying well thought out ABM solutions.

1. Your sales team will know exactly which accounts to focus on every week
2. You should see faster movement of your existing pipeline
3. You will be under consideration at companies that have not even heard of your brand before.

Now is the time to complement your traditional demand generation and develop an ABM strategy that is sure to put your revenue on track to perform better and meet KPIs faster.

The post ABM – Account Based Marketing Best Practices appeared first on Lisa Schwartz.

Unfortunately, though, when we build audiences like this, what do we really know about them? What insights and analytics provide the best ROI? We have the following clues to work with:

1. Keyword searched
2. Page on the webiste the user visited

Sure, we get the benefit of running ads to people that didn’t convert, but we struggle to gain any additional valuable audience insights.

The Retargeting Dream Team

First, we should talk about retargeting platforms. There are so many retargeting technologies, but I’ve found my dream team by combining these three retargeting channels:

1. Google AdWords Remarketing (this applies in ANY business)
2. Facebook Custom Audiences (this may not apply in all businesses)
3. Twitter Tailored Audiences
4. Adroll (suppress Google, more on that later)

With Google, you have access to the Google Display Network (GDN), so your ads can be seen almost anywhere around the web. With Facebook, you’ll catch those folks when they log into Facebook for the 12th time today, and with Twitter, you’ll catch them as they pop on to rant about how late the train is. In short, there are very few places that your ads won’t reach your prospects. Now let’s dig in with an example of how to use this Dream Team to it’s fullest using social audiences.

Original Audiences

My favorite feature of social media ads is the ability to create small, tight segments of like-minded groups, and to craft messaging strictly for them. In the B2B space, no platform does this better than LinkedIn Ads, so I’ll use an example from it.

Imagine you sell software that is used by both CEOs and Finance decision makers. You’re a savvy marketer, so you understand that the CEO and Finance folks care about different things. The CEO may care about quick access to data to gain the confidence of her board, while a Finance Director may place more value on the convenience of quickly checking the status of the company’s Accounts Payable.

If you’re sending both audiences to the same landing page, that would mean you would be retargeting them as one audience, right? Thankfully, no! There’s a way around this.

Creating Persona-based Audiences

In the above example, we may have an audience targeting CEOs and another targeting Finance professionals with a director-and-above seniority. Even if you send both personas to the same landing page, you can keep them separate in your retargeting audiences.

First, you have to find a defining characteristic in the ad URLs.  You need to get into the practice of of utm-tagging URLs, and one of the methods I use is to get the audience into the URL is to utilize the Google Analytics utm_campaign parameter to describe the audience.

For example, if I had a campaign in LinkedIn targeting our finance professionals, I might name that campaign:

Finance Job Function | Director+Seniority | US

Then I can insert this exact campaign name into my utm_campaign parameter, and voila! You now have audience descriptors in your URL that can serve to separate your retargeting audiences–more on that soon.

Useful Tip on Audience Building from UTM and how to code your UTM

As an aside, using this does open you up to competitors being able to gain insights into your marketing if they click on one of your ads. If this is of concern to you, I combat this by obscuring the exact targeting. Although your LinkedIn campaign might be named as above official, when it comes time to populate your utm_campaign parameter, you could simply use something like the following examples:

• Finance
• FinEx (for finance execs)
• FEUS (finance execs United States)

You would then have something in the URL that helps you identify your audience in your analytics reports, and now you’ve got everything you need to create ridiculously powerful retargeting audiences.

Ridiculously-Powerful Retargeting Audiences

1. Go into your retargeting platform(s) of choice (I’d recommend at least AdWords and Adroll to start)
2. Go into the retargeting audience creation flow
   Create one around each persona (CEOs and Finance, in this case)
   Use the rule for ‘URL Contains’ to include the unifying descriptor from your utm_campaign parameter (for our example, we might have ‘URL contains = Finance’)For AdWords, I’ve had mixed luck with this logic, and have had much better results having Google Analytics create these audiences, and then passing them into AdWords for use.
3. Create your first round of ads in each platform
   Note, each platform has a minimum audience size of the cookie pool, so you may not be eligible to run ads yet until your persona-based social ads have run for a while. For this reason, it’s important to get these audiences set up as soon as possible so those audiences are being built
4. As an added bonus, as you get more advanced, you can graduate your audience into deeper, more qualified audiences further down the funnel (i.e. First round of ads push to a whitepaper, and once they’ve interacted, graduate them to a new offer pushing a webinar, or sales consultation)The net effect of this is now you can create messaging separately for each of your buyer personas, and see the increased efficiency that accompanies your smart messaging strategy.

The post Building B2B Targeted Powerful Marketing Channels and Retargeting Audiences That Work appeared first on Lisa Schwartz.

The first step is to actually analyze your customer base particularly your best customers.  Ultimately what you’re trying to do is find more prospects that look like your best customers.  Get with your ops team or with your finance team and get a list of the top 20 or the top 25% of customers in terms of the revenue they bring to your business, for example, the retention rate of their profitability.  Once you have that list of top 20% of your customers now the trick is to figure out what is it about those customers that separates them from everybody else. There’s a variety of tools that you could use for this (we’ll update you in a later post); and you’ll need to map characteristics like their revenue base, their industry base, their demographic characteristics, the technologies they have installed, etc.  In fact, this is one of the biggest “aha” moments is to discover that your best customers actually have one or two specific technologies that perhaps work really well with your product and that helps indicate who a best customer is so whatever that list of characteristics is that comes out.

Step 2 is to identify more companies that look like those customers who have the same kinds of attributes, the same revenue base, the same employee size, the same technologies installed and that step two is to go identify who those companies are that look like your best customers.  However, you not only want to focus on companies, but you should also focus on the stakeholder chain of contacts that exist at those companies. For example, if you sell into the sales team or you sell into the marketing team you want to find out who were the contacts within the sales department or within the marketing department at those companies that look like your best customers.  The trick here is you might do that and what you might find out is you have a list of 3,000 companies and 10,000 contacts at those at those companies that look like your best customers and while that’s a great list to start prospecting into it might not be the list you want to do a really comprehensive account based marketing program towards.  Instead, you might want to pair down your account based marketing programs (to consider costs/budgets) and do something that’s more personalized more specialized at a sub-segment of that list. A pilot program is always great to start with. Easier to set up and limits the metrics of success to measure.

The next step, Step 3, is to first expand your insights and your understanding of those target accounts and the sub-segments.  Gather account intelligence, for example, find out if the company just had a funding event recently that might indicate that they would move up higher in the list.  Did the company just have a recent executive move within the department that you sell to, or do they have a new chief sales officer or new chief marketing officer or new CTO. Within the contacts you want to find out things like what’s their responsibility, how do they actually structure the organization, perhaps, an org chart to really start to hone in on who the right contacts at those accounts are.  Once you do that and you have intelligence about the account and you have intelligence about all of the context within those accounts now you’re able to go to the next step.

Step 4 is to rank your target accounts and rank your target contacts.  You can do this within a variety of tools (we’ll update you in a later post) and determine who is most likely to buy or engage based on all of this information.  You might get something like a five-star rating so of all your 3,000 target companies rate them on a scale of 1 to 5 and then within those companies you want to rate your contacts also on a scale of 1 to 5 so that you can start to hone in on who are the 3 to 6 max at the 500 companies that I want to start with first and then I want to expand beyond that.  Start with your top targets build out an account based strategy there, test it, and then refine it.  As you get bigger and bigger then you’ll be ready to engage.

In Step 5, it is important to make sure that your sales team, marketing team and, customer success team are aligned around those target accounts and around the plays that you’re going to use against those target accounts.  It could be plays or tactics like email campaigns, direct mail campaigns, phone call campaigns, and ad retargeting. There’s a variety of different ways to build your account based marketing strategy but the key is that if you haven’t done steps one through four and you have great data to figure out who your best customers are and who your prospects are that look like those best customers and how to rank those prospects and those contacts based on data so that you can go after them effectively,  if none of that is in place then it doesn’t matter how great your engagement is your account based marketing strategy is.  You will fall short if the steps are not completed.  I hope your found this primer helpful to get your account based marketing strategy off show great year.

In the next post, we’ll review the tools most commonly used by companies looking to implement these five steps to begin their ABM strategy or improve and optimize on the account marketing based programs currently running.

The post Account-Based Marketing: 5 Steps to Get Started appeared first on Lisa Schwartz.

After completing the initial steps to select the account based marketing contacts the next step is to implement the account based marketing campaign to get in front of those contacts and engage with them and generate some interest in your company.

Let’s say the objective that marketing and sales agreed to was to create air cover for sales.  This means creating some awareness to make sure that your targeted account audience knows your product or service offering and how you can help them and then that would help then the sales side of the house that was doing some personalized and very specific outreach to warm up those prospects.

In a few campaigns where we had these objectives we started with re-targeting ads and display ads because those are a quick way to generate some awareness.  We put together a series of ads that people would cycle through based on their engagement with the previous ad. We included a direct mail piece where we again identified the key decision-makers based on some engagement.   Both on the marketing side and the sales side targets were sent some sort of small gift initially to get in front of them remain in front of them and reinforced the brand’s value proposition.  Everything was really coordinated and strategically timed so that they were all building upon each other.

There were some challenges implementing the strategy.  These buyers were new to us and there was a new audience and so not only were they not familiar with our brand, but they also weren’t familiar with  our solution and so we shifted our strategy away from how to market and sell better to these segmented buyers to just educating them around the value of solution.  One effective way that we found to doing that was leveraging Facebook advertising where we could target by company name, first name, last name and email address to be able to get in front of the right people.

So, how do we measure this.  If the campaign is going well then the sales team is experiencing really better open rates better responses and more meeting set because we’ve laid the foundation to establish our brand as the leading solution.

The SDR team identified fifty or so good fit companies that would be an ideal prospect for the segment data set.  The company size was small, between 100-500 employees and they preferably sold technology products and outreach is based on personas.   They had several personas; heads of sales, head of marketing, business demand generation, sales ops and inside sales and then we also had one for the SDR role.  Each one of those buying persona has had about eight to ten emails per sequence for each call cadence.   If  multiple opens were seen on an email they would know that that lead is really interested and they deserve more calls than a lead who hadn’t opened emails.  Based on job title,  so ahead of sales it’s going to get more calls in an SDR that would be a better place to start.  The higher up in the org chart someone is the closer they are to a decision maker.

Trigger alerts were sent to notify SDRs about projects at other companies that’ll fall into the wheelhouse. So company XYZ has expressed interest in investing in a new “brand” tool a trigger would be sent and then SDR would send the decision makers a note and reflect their place in org chart.  SDR would phone verified email address.  This is actionable data and actionable leads.

After doing additional researching on target accounts and realizing that most of them are in the segment of  technology providers, we found a conference that was related to the segment and technology and so we wanted to capitalize on the opportunity to get in front of so many of our target accounts.  At the event was a dinner and a panel discussions – we had four panelists and we loosely guided the questions in the beginning part of the event was moderated by the CEO and CTO and the last part of the event was a question-and-answer to give our attendees the opportunity to interact directly with the panelists.

Some other ideas the sales teams used, was to follow up and network after the show. At the show to get in front of the the decision-makers we wanted to get the general feedback and provided post event evaluation forms that we laid out on the tables for the guests. 86% of those who responded said that they were satisfied with the event and they would attend another event hosted by us and of those people half of them responded that they would like direct follow-up from us.

The surprising conclusion was not only was it just understanding our brand but they were referencing certain components of the outreach whether it was a direct mail piece of whether it was oh I got like a really great email on a phone call from you.  It was a reaffirmation of yes this can work and it’s not just single threaded  like an email or website visit or a phone call.  It’s really having multiple, orchestrated touch points and that realization having people tell us that they recognize that was refreshing if not surprising.

For More information on how to best evolve your campaign strategy – connect with us.

The post How to Create Awareness and Leads using an Account-Based Marketing Strategy appeared first on Lisa Schwartz.

Here’s the way that worked and how you can use these same tactics to support your ABM industries strategy in your org.

Personalizing content helps sales teams to better differentiate their offerings versus their competitors, which is why it’s so important for marketing teams to provide it.

There’s broad-based content, tailored content, and personalized content. You have to decide which segment of accounts you’re trying to do what with. And there are different ways of delivering that outcome.

For example, one way that my former company personalizes is through Uberflip content portals. They send a custom content portal to prospects with a personalized message.

The key is, use your tiers and segments to learn where you want to personalize more.

If you’re doing one-to-one ABM, then the personalization is in your own hands. You can personalize it as much as you need if you’ve got the intelligence on those accounts.

When you go to “one-to-many,” it’s difficult to apply personalization en masse. You can do it to a degree. For example, if all of a set of accounts on your list have Salesforce, you can mention it. Or if all those people like golf, you can add that info, but still you’re alienating people.

So how do you get started on content marketing for ABM. Here’s 3 best ways to start.

Start by building three to five personas that represent your target account tiers (or roles) and thinking about their job needs and content requirements. For example:

#1: Tier 1: buyers within your target accounts. These are your primary decision makers. Think about the challenges and opportunities associated with their job. What problems are they trying to solve? How do they make decisions? Where do they consume information?

#2: Tier 2: influencers within your target accounts. These people may not have purchasing authority, but they do influence the vendor selection and buying process. What do you know about the influencer’s job? What is their role relative to the buyer? What specific challenges are they addressing? How might they inform the process?

# 3: Tier 3: known experts in your target industries. How do these people establish themselves as industry leaders? What are they talking/writing about? Where do they share ideas? How can you increase their influence?

Engage each of these tiers with content developed for them. Then persoalize content based on persona. To tie this into an integrated campaign, personalize your website for these target accounts.

To further engage prospects at target accounts, nurture them to increase enagements and expand your content story line. Invite them to local events and send out engaging new content.

Check out the article for the other details.

The post The Best 3 Ways to Develop Content for Account Based Marketing appeared first on Lisa Schwartz.

1. A-wareness.
2. R-esearch and Evaluation.
3. C-onsideration and Decision.

For this blueprint, let’s keep it simple. We’re going to create content for each of the three phases above. As you get better at creating content, as you get a more sophisticated sales approach in place overtime, you may want to get more granular in the steps that you’re creating content for.  However, in the beginning, keep it simple to get started in that we’ll focus on awareness, research/evaluation and consideration/decision phases, so three phases of content in the buyers journey.  We’ll create content for each phase to match the buyer needs at each stage and when I say “buyers”, I mean our avatar’s needs at each step to pull them into your sales funnel, and each stage reflects a different need.

The needs of the prospects and awareness stage are different than the needs of the prospect when they are trying to make a consider a solution and make a decision; your job is to connect the solution to their need to you. So your job is to connect the solution to their need to you, so through the course of your content the solution to whatever need or challenge that they have should be connected to your business ultimately. So, we use the ARC, the three simplest stages and significant phases of the buyers journey to start our content mapping strategy and planning.

Don’t boil the ocean in this beginning exercise and try to create all of this perfect content. Start with keeping it simple and developing content for those three phases and then again if you want to create more elaborate system later, that’s fine, right now start we’re going to start with the three. Here we go.

Awareness Buyer Stage Content Framework

The awareness phase in your content helps your prospect identify the problem that they have. Some prospects aren’t even aware of the problem that they have, others may have an idea of having a problem, but they don’t really know how to define it.  Other prospects don’t really know the language of it, but they know that there’s something there.  Your content will identify what that problem is and define the problem, giving the prospect language for it and empathizing with them about the problem by showing other businesses that also have similar problems.

Consider helping the prospect identify that there is a solution to that problem, and that people have identified this problem just as they have, and they have worked through it and found a solution. And then you want to leave them wanting more, the idea behind this initial piece of content is that “I’ve become more aware of my problem, I’ve become more clear that I have a problem, I’m also clear now that other people, maybe my competitors, my peers have found this solution.”

After your prospect consumes the content, they should be left wanting more. You want them to be left desiring and knowing what that solution is, how are other people are overcoming that problem and how can they do the same. As content at the awareness stage you should speak to prospects at a high level, you should speak to their goals, to their problems and the needs of a high level, we want to speak to essentially as high-level as we can related to the content that we’re creating. As an example, if I were creating content for marketing and marketing services, I’m primarily going to be speaking to the goals of revenue growth, business growth and things like that and speaking to the problems and needs related to that, so we’re going to speak at a pretty high level with this content.

Research and Evaluation Buyer Stage Content Framework

Once a prospect is aware of their problem and they are aware of a solution, they start searching for more information and solutions to their problems. This is the evaluation phase. In the evaluation phase we want to create content that helps them diagnose how the problem is impacting them. Here is what that problem is doing to you, here’s the impact that it’s having on you and your business that could be in financial terms, it could be time wasted, and it could be missing their goals and subjects like that.

While you are creating the content, help them clearly see that solutions can apply to them. That there is an answer for them, and then in doing so, you’re establishing your authority and the fact that you are a source of solutions.

We’re not putting this content out there just to be nice, we’re putting this content out there to pull people through the sales process and to give us the best chance at closing people on doing business with us, so we want our content to establish authority and establish who we are as a source of solutions.

Evaluation content should assist them in taking their first step towards a solution. Content that will help them diagnose the problem that they have, benchmark maybe against other competitors or peers. Again speaking in marketing terms you’re generating leads that X dollars per lead or you’re only generating X number of leads per salesperson on your staff and your competitors are getting 30% more than that.

Benchmarking is a very powerful way of getting somebody to realize that they need to solve a problem, also tools like checklists and blueprints, things that can help them start taking action towards this solution and various tools. Interactive tools work great. You see them of course in the marketing world and all kinds of different forms, it could be little pieces of software, it could be little calculators, I just saw great mortgage versus buy versus rent kind of financial calculator for people considering buying a home, that kind of online tool like that.

There are all kinds of things that you can offer here in this evaluation phase, but the idea is that you’re getting them were engaged in starting to find a solution for their problem and to really identify and acknowledge that they do have a problem that needs to be solved.

And Finally, the Consideration and Decision Buyer Stage Content Framework

At this point in the buyers journey, your content will be addressing a prospect who has decided that they have a problem and it needs to be solved. This content address the consideration and decision phase where you are trying to create urgency for them to find a solution and you’re trying to put timelines in place and move them towards actually sitting down with you and signing a deal.

The content will promote how to evaluate solutions, and you’re clearly not going to be the only solution in town, and they are going to come across competitive options while doing their research, so you want to give them content that helps them evaluate those solutions obviously in a way that’s favorable towards you. Steer them towards your solution as the obvious solution to their problems by establishing credibility, by establishing their expertise in your authority, you want to steer them towards you as the obvious solution to their problems. Ideally they go through this process of consuming your content and say wow! They’ll say to themselves “If I’m lucky enough to be able to work with this company, this is who I want to work with”; they really know their stuff that is the ideal outcome from having them go through all of your content.

Your content at the decision phase is a system in investing in a solution, testimonials, referenced clients, case studies, offering them some sort of one-on-one complementary consultation or discounted consultation, phone calls, demos; these are all things that help during the decision-making process phase 3 of our content.

Back of the sales funnel here; know, like, trust, try, buy and attention and interest, desire, action will essentially consolidated down awareness, evaluation and decision and creating online content for each of those phases. So that is our content strategy; we’re going to create content for each of those phases, we’re going to be focused very specifically on a single avatar and we’re going to create messaging that is directed specifically to that avatar, the challenges that they have, the goals that they have, the language that they use so that our content is going to be as effective as possible for that ideal prospect.

Again I encourage you in this process, keep it simple. Your first version of this; we should have one piece of content for each of those three phases, that’s it and of course you’re going to look at those three phases and think there is several other pieces of content I should have absolutely, but let’s get you out the door with three pieces of content one for each phase and then you can continue to build on top of that foundation as you go along.

Next up, let’s look at Avatar Development, so we speak to the right type of buyer with personalized content.

The post The Content Creation Framework – ARC of the Content Machine appeared first on Lisa Schwartz.

Many businesses use video marketing to grow their brand and generate awareness about products and services. Video marketing not only helps to provide content to prospects and customers but can also be a great way to convey customer case studies, testimonials and product demos when your buyers journey further into their decision to buy your product.

One easy and free way for business to start video marketing is to promote their videos by either uploading their video to video sharing sites like YouTube, or embedding the YouTube video on their own website. The promotional benefits that YouTube provide have great reach and can be quite good for search engine optimization (SEO) of key terms and products.

There’s been a lot of discussion around YouTube’s growth since its inception. According to Lifewire, YouTube is one of the largest search engines, topping both Yahoo and Bing. Your marketing efforts should contain some video marketing, and getting videos posted onto YouTube are one of the easiest ways to get started in video promotion.

The benefits of using video marketing include:

• Ability to create content in a new format
• Passively or actively connect with your target market in a shorter time span than a traditional demo or lead meeting
• Improves SEO and gives your target market can get a better sense of your company’s culture
• Enhances knowledge and presence of products and services before face-to-face introductions
• Increases reach, engagement and impressions long-term

There are several ways your B2B organizations can create demand and awareness using video marketing. For example, you can use video marketing to show product demonstrations and provide customer testimonials about your service or use cases. You can also create a community around your services and products.

Other opportunities for video marketing include:
• Demonstrate expertise
• Show the brand’s personality
• Leverage events
• Solve problems for customers

Here’s a few goals for video marketing to determine your optimization and success path. There’re of course the usual goals to tie into these insights, such as downloads or engagements with your websites, conversions, sign-ups and of course opportunities and new customer creation. You’ll need to make sure there is tracking enabled to be able to follow through the customer journey and apply end to end analytics to measure both leading and lagging indicators in your funnel. Check with your marketing operations team to make sure the tagging and attribution is enabled to measure and track conversions from your video marketing.

So, let’s get started with video marketing.

If you don’t already have a YouTube account and want to start from scratch go and set up a new Gmail account. Create a Gmail (and therefore an associated YouTube account) with your principal Search Term (or close to your product name) as User Name. However, you should be using your corporate social posting account to support brand as well as keep within branding guidelines, so check in with the communications marketing team and share your plans to use the YouTube channel. This way you’re aligned to your corporate brand guidelines of promoting and creating videos for your brand, product or service you want to promote.

If your product category is large enough then you might consider working with your marketing team and determine if it might be a better strategy to also create YouTube Channels with your principal search term (category name) where possible. If this opportunity is available, you’ll want to set up your Channel’s name, Description and tags to reflect what you are promoting. The reason for that being that your video is linked to from your YouTube Channel, that link will carry more weight when your channel has a niche specific name and the more related content in your Channel’s description. This provides additional benefits for search engine optimization (SEO). You’re using your channel for SEO as its own web page, which is what it is.

The same applies to YouTube Playlists – one channel can have multiple Playlists – another chance for SEO within the Playlist name.

This still applies with recent changes in YouTube that allow you multiple Channels under one account. PLUS, you can now have an ‘Associated Website’ for each of your allowed 50 channels.

Also, in that section you’ll discover a way to have multiple ‘associated’ web sites linked to one channel!

Here’s a few more video marketing and YouTube tips:

1. In your Channel you can also add links to your website, Facebook page, Twitter account etc. – and you should! And vice versa – it’s all links that provide additional SEO value.
2. Ready to add Channel artwork and a Profile pic? Upload those images with your ‘search term(s)’ in the file names and consider adding meta data (as mentioned in #19 and #22)
3. Your profile image will automatically generate when you create a new channel. Helpful website graphics tool to use if you do not in-house resources or know your way around Photoshop is Canva.com.
4. Subscribe to a few Channels that are in your product or service keyword list (yes, even your competition!) to give your Channel more relevancy.
5. If you are creating a Channel to promote one type of product or do reviews then yes, get your keyword in there. The alternative long-term strategy is to come up with a ‘brand’ name that viewers will recognize as a trusted source of information e.g. “your org” reviews but it makes more sense to have each channel niche specific.
   So the difference (Channel Name) would be either: ‘VPN services’ (if that is what you are promoting) to ‘Symantec SSL’ to be a bit more memorable or ‘private networking’ which would allow you the scope to promote all VPN stuff.
6. Then create multiple Playlists, each focusing on a different VPN feature/product.
   BIG TIP! When uploading your video to your Channel set it as ‘Private’ or ‘Unlisted’ until you get all the stuff below in place and THEN make it Public…
7. Place your http: link near or at the beginning of your Description. e.g. ‘Your Keyword’ Find out more now: http://xxxxxxxxxxx – that means in the first 2 or 3 lines of your Description. This is NOT the most effective way to get the click however as the ‘About’ section under your video will change/swap over to the ‘Share’ tab when the video finishes – so have a 15 second ‘outro’ image!
   The ‘Click the link beneath this video’ method is not the only way to get a click and provide a Call to Action (CTA). Annotations linked to your Channel’s ‘Associated Website’ are the way to go! Especially ‘Spotlight’ annotations around a shiny ‘Call To Action’ button (or a ‘Lower Third’) you’ve included inside your video. You can use ‘Cards’ – similar to Annotations and they also show up in Mobile devices
8. Try and get your search term/keyword phrase into your Title twice. But make it readable i.e. not spammy looking. Use the ‘Pipe’ option e.g. My Main Search Term | More Text (Search Term #2)
9. Don’t use a bit.ly or short link – use a real URL e.g. http://mysite.com/searchterm or buy a domain with your keyword in the name e.g. www.mykeyword.info and have that set as your ‘Associated Website’. I also prefer not to use those ‘tinyurl’ type redirect services like bit.ly. Google has started to penalize them anyway.
   Yes, you could use redirect links and that might be risky for SEO. YouTube does NOT like redirects and you risk getting your channel suspended or your account banned for Associated Website links.
10. Add lots of good relevant SEO text to your video Description (500 words+) and…
11. …get that link in there again, in the middle and near the end.
12. Make it easily readable: spaces, paragraphs, bullet points = easy to read.
13. Don’t just stuff it with keywords.
14. Title your Description (under the first sentence that contains your link) with the Title of your video, which is obviously keyword optimized.
15. Use LSI terms (i.e. similar related keywords) in your Description – write it like an article.
16. Put your main + 4 other related keywords at the end of your description as ‘bullet points’.
17. Link to your various Social Media stuff in your Description.
18. Optional: Link to a high PR (page rank) site in your description e.g. Wikipedia or similar i.e. to a high PR keyword related page.
19. Want to know what your competition uses as keywords/tags? In the old days you could see them but, in theory, not anymore. So, go to their video page and ‘View Source’ – now find this: <meta name=”keywords” content = and this is where you’ll find the ‘tags’ your competitor uses. The first few anyway.
20. If the list of keywords ends in …. then that means there are more to see. So, while viewing their videos source code click CTRL F (PC) or COMMAND F (Mac). Now a small search bar appears top right of your screen. Type “keywords” into that search box. You’ll see 1 of 2 appear. The first is the abbreviated list the second shows ALL their keywords (tags).
21. You can also use the ‘Grease Monkey’ Add On for Firefox combined with a JavaScript recipe to discover all those ‘hidden’ tags too.
22. Don’t just copy all their keywords (tags), pick and choose the best ones that relate to your video and add some of your own. Your main tag should be the search term you are targeting.
23. Tags. Make the first your targeted Keyword Phrase and then break that down into individual words e.g. “best VPN”, “VPN”, “Best”, ”fast” – no need to add loads of extraneous stuff i.e. “VPN technology” as that search term is not what we are trying to optimize this video ‘page’ for – it just muddies the waters and tells Google and YouTube we are trying too hard (Remember, Panda and Penguin? Google doesn’t like us overdoing it – this applies to your description too!)

The post B2B Video Marketing Simplified appeared first on Lisa Schwartz.