Account-based marketing (ABM) initiatives feature personalized outreach to contacts at target accounts. As such, the engagement each target account has with your account-specific campaigns is a key measurement in tracking your ABM success and identifying continuous improvement opportunities.
As you deploy your ABM plays, you need answers to your most pressing questions regarding campaign performance. Below, you’ll see how engagement analytics can not only measure your ABM effectiveness, but provide insight on how to continuously improve.
Metrics, Analytics & Insights
Metrics, analytics and insights are related terms, and they are often mistakenly used interchangeably. In fact, they are very different.
Metrics are lagging indicators — raw data points that inform you of what happened. Analytics compare metrics over time, and among other things, allow you to identify trends. Finally, insights are developed by combining metrics and analytics together, advising you of strengths to leverage and opportunities to improve, and how best to take action.
With the proper revenue tech stack, your team will have the tools they need to measure, analyze and better action your ABM initiatives. And, to increase your ABM success and identify opportunities to improve, it’s important to answer to the following ABM questions.
Ten Questions to Ask of Your ABM Initiative
How often is each target account being engaged?
The lifeblood of your ABM initiative is your list of target accounts. Measuring engagement provides a window into your progress. Identify which accounts are receiving the most attention and which accounts are being left behind.
Who is engaging with our ABM campaigns?
Not all account engagement is created equal. Make certain you’re connecting and engaging with the right personas within an account’s buying committee and/or purchasing influencers.
How are accounts being touched by both marketing and sales teams?
You want to guide and facilitate an account along its buying journey. However, doing so requires the right outreach from the right team at the right time. Your marketing and sales teams need to march forward in lock-step. Ensure each pulls their weight at the right time.
Which accounts need more outreach from marketing to better empower the sales team?
Prospective customers do not want to be sold. Rather, they’re more interested in acquiring solutions to their greatest challenges and opportunities. As a result, sales teams shouldn’t interject themselves into the process too early. Use engagement data to inform marketing which target accounts need more top-of-funnel engagement.
Which accounts are highly engaged by marketing but lacking sufficient follow-up from sales?
Marketing engages and generates buying interest, but they’re dependent on the sales team to follow up and further progress deals, eventually leading to closed/won. Identify the accounts that need follow up from your sales team..
Which accounts are showing buying signals and progressing through the buyer journey?
Examine the common denominators among the accounts that are progressing and determine what might be best borrowed from one account campaign and implemented with another, lagging account campaign.
What does account engagement look like across stages of the buyer journey?
Ascertain whether engagement differs at different stages of the account’s buyer journey. Where you see engagement has declined, dig a little deeper into both your personalized content as well as your outreach activities.
How successful is our current ABM strategy?
Your revenue team should have access to clear, transparent data to evaluate the effectiveness of your ABM strategy. Take engagement data and the progress of your various accounts and map them back to the goals of your ABM strategy.
How effective are we at optimizing our ABM investments?
ABM motions are resource-intensive, with respect to both time and budget investment. Conduct periodic reviews on both successes and failures. Use engagement analytics to determine which of your ABM tactics and activities are resulting in the things your CMO, CRO and CEO care most about — sales pipeline, opportunities, sales revenue, increased average deal size and sales funnel velocity.
What immediate actions will improve our ABM results?
You can’t afford to let your accounts grow stale or warm contacts to get cold. Identify your target accounts that have hit roadblocks and aren’t progressing. Action plan around the best content, media and activities that can re-engage and get the account(s) moving again!
Execute on Your ABM Plan
By evaluating your ABM motion with engagement analytics from the onset, you will be able to identify both strengths to leverage and opportunities for improvement early. As you’ll have specific goals for your target accounts, look for engagement patterns that have led, and are leading, to your desired outcomes. Establish benchmarks for your data, and look for opportunities to ideate and experiment to continually raise the bar higher and drive campaign return on investment (ROI).
For more information on using engagement analytics to improve upon your ABM strategies, download the ebook 7 Steps to Building a Winning Account-Based Marketing Strategy.
