Account Based Marketing (ABM) comes to solve one of the most excruciating pains in the corporate reality, the misalignment between marketing and sales.
What is Account Based Marketing?
Account-based marketing (ABM) is a new paradign in B2B marketing strategy, with a customer experience-centric approach requiring a higher collaboration between sales and marketing teams, targeting specific buying groups inside carefully selected accounts and using innovative technology and data.
The basic idea behind it is to generate a coordinated and personalized account-based experience for key stakeholders, or buying groups, within each account.
This higher level of collaboration required is definitely one of the most trickiest aspects of ABM and needs a mindset change to achieve it. Marketers should shift their way of thinking from massive, random individuals to specific personas and buying groups or for sales people to trust marketing technology and data to make sales decisions, to mention some.
Why Account Based Marketing is important?
B2B marketing teams works on a lead-based inbound marketing model, driving awareness and engaging the largest number of potential individual leads, then nurturing those leads and guiding them down the funnel toward sales.
Account Based Marketing is not designed to eliminate this, but to complement the go-to-market, helping the marketer to keep in mind that scaling is not always the best fit to target strategic, large or tier 1, tier 2 accounts.
Some benefits of Account Based Marketing
Since we are designing activities to specific accounts, we should be able now to drive attributed revenue. We are also contributing to the alignment of the most important customer-facing actors of the company; sales and marketing teams. And we are also providing a better customer experience and increasing the likelihood of boost revenue, by increasing cross-sell and upsell (incremental revenue) or by discovering new market segments or verticals (new revenue).
Execution and Tactics
Account Scoring: involves the analysis and evaluation of the accounts to be considered in the plan, a common language and an alignment of priorities. The criteria can be based on multiple factors like high yielding accounts, quick wins, strategic importance, clients with the competitors… Then you can group them in diferent Tiers or segments.
Identifying Personas and Buying Groups: Working close with the Account Manager or Account Lead will help to identify key personas like the decision-maker, the sponsor or influencer, the guru or the nefarious “no-noway-notime-nomoney”.
Define the best tactics for each Tier: in-person programs, sales outreachs, direct and personalized emails, dedicated events, appointment setting, content syndication… Once you have a solid understanding of the accounts, you can even engage them with personalized content in multiple channels in consistent and complementary touchpoints.
Measure, analyze and iterate. Know what is working and how this accounts are performing is key to iterate your model and look constantly for improvements.
While ABM is not a new way to target tiered accounts, it is in its practice. Tools and data now make it scalable and let us focus on whole lifecycle marketing for key accounts, providing a superior account-based experience to leads by automatically delivering relevant messages. Today’s buyers demand personalized content and engagement and customer experience is a major competitive differentiator.
Social media marketing looks simple. My product is fantastic, indeed; a tweet will suffice to go viral and I will be soon in the next edition cover of BusinessWeek.
However, the reality will come to hit you right in your believes and your one post probably won’t go viral.
But a good strategy and a consistent, iterative improvement process may in fact drive traffic, generate leads, and even sell through social media. You might not be in the “30 under 30´s” of Wired, but you can build a successful company off the back of your social efforts.
So I’ve compiled a set of actionable Resources for Business in Social Media Platforms available to help you in your way.
Instagram for Business Blog
This is the place to get started and updated with all the content and news for your business IG account. You will find here all the advertising and sell, including the documentation for your developers team to connect and use the data.
The #1 platform for discovery and real time conversations offers a powerful, impactful, and unique advertising platform. Don´t miss the resources that Twitter had collected for Business to help them increase the base and engagement of their followers.
A month of Tweets Template from Twitter for Business site.
The professional network comes with great features to make your business grow, from tools to build relationships, find talent or prospect new leads.
A fantastic Business Owner´s Guide for Linkedin is available, here.
Visit the Linkedin for Small Business site for all resources and features, here.
The Keyword – Google Ads Blog
All Hail Google Adwords! Under the headline “Make every marketing dollar count” the ubiquitous and omniscient Google brings to all the mortals the tricks, tips and latest updates of the Google Ads platform. The content is organized chronologically and not categorized at all so it´s difficult access the content. Ranks poorly in this article SEO.
A marketing technology stack is a suite of technologies that marketers leverage to conduct and improve their marketing activities. The purpose of all MarTech is to simplify processes, measure the impact of marketing activities and drive more efficient spending.
Because marketers won´t find the perfect all-in-one solution, the best approach is to find a combo with the best solutions available to address specific marketing problems, or a marketing stack.
Marketing technology is now one of the largest portions of a company’s total marketing budget (26% on average according to Gartner).
The fact that the market has been populated recently with thousand of choices is probably causing the stress in some CMO´s, worried sick to stay ahead of it competitors or more often to understand what is going on.
The ability to back up the marketing team’s actions with data is often enough evidence to defend internally a growing budget for the department.
To help them here is my top marketing technology vendors for each category:
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Product Intelligence and Feedback
Customer Onboarding
Automation
Interoperability
Localization
Analytics
SEO
Customer Lyfecycle Communications
Content Marketing
Website Conversion
Collaboration
Digital Assets
Customer Relationship Management
I am not usually in the mood to talk about CRM solutions and this is no special occasion. Mostly used to support the sales force in B2B business, the CRM is no sweet treat for any marketer. The input and therefore the value of the data often comes from the salesperson feedback. If the sales team is not disciplined enough, your CRM won´t be useful at all. Also probably because the magnitude (in money, time and pain) of the projects involving deploying or migrating a CRM, I will only give you here the 2019 selection of Gartner about that. Good Luck.
Product Intelligence and Feedback
Amplitude.com enables the teams asking the questions, building the experiences, and deciding what’s next with the data and analytics they need. The platform will allow your team to better convert, engage, and retain customers. Gain a deeper understanding of how customers experience your digital products, ship product improvements faster, measure impact, and visualize user journeys and personalize product experiences to drive engagement, conversion, and loyalty. Free Version Available.
Riddle Allows your team to gather feedback from your users with 15 quiz, poll, and survey interactive formats. Qualify and segment leads based on quiz responses. Email quiz results to each quiz taker. Offers multiple integrations and templates. Free 14-days trial.
Formstack is an intuitive online form builder that allows your team to create powerful forms, automate workflows, streamline your document generation, payment collection, gather customer data, and automate your day-to-day tasks. Free 14-days trial.
Satismeter allows your team to discover customer pains in key touch-points and track how you improve over time: gather feedback from new customers during onboarding, measure satisfaction with parts of your service, gauge your overall customer experience, learn what is unique about your service and judge if you’re ready to scale.Free Version Available.
Brandwatch is a powerful market intelligence solutions that provides historical and real-time consumer data, to protect your brand and never miss a negative post, monitor conversation about your brand online and discover what your customers think, benchmark your performance and brand awareness against all of your competitors, survey billions across the globe, instantly with fast, real-time and reliable results, build a data-driven culture and understand consumers at every touchpoint or find your next opportunity by predicting consumer needs and spotting trends. . While writting this realized that Brandwatch is the owner of Buzzsumo (See Content Marketing, below).
Customer Onboarding
WalkMe is a Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) with multiple layers of data collection and analysis of the user journey, in-app step-by-step guidance and help users to complete complex business processes. Gives your team the control to change content, design, placement, and functionality of each step of the on-screen guidance.
Automation
Phantombuster.com allows your team to automate web data collection, build amazing workflows and chain actions for the most used social media platforms. It comes with predefined templates and a very good knowledge base and tutorials. Free Version Available.
Marketo by Adobe allows your team to streamline, automate, and measure marketing tasks and workflows. Marketing automation enables many modern marketing practices, including lead generation, segmentation, lead nurturing and scoring, relationship marketing, cross-sell and upsell, retention, return on investment (ROI) measurement, and account-based marketing. Marketo is better suited to B2B marketers who already have an established MarTech stack and expect to be able to customize their platform.
Hubspot offers a full stack of software for marketing, sales, and customer service, with a free CRM at its core. It´s a modular solution that can also be bundled together. The digital marketing module comes with some nice features of worklow automation, lead conversion, content management, social media streams and analytics. Free Version Available.
Interoperability
Segment.com collects user events from your web & mobile apps and provides a complete data toolkit to marketing, product and engineering teams. For a marketer user, Segment unify customer’s touch points across platforms and channels, enabling personalized, consistent, and real-time customer experiences. Free Version Available.
Localization
DeepL.com By far the best online translation service I´ve found. The translator is free and it has a version for developers that connects your application to DeepL PRO REST API to automate the translation process. Free Version Available.
Smartling.com is a Translation Management System reduces the time and cost spent on translation and localization to deliver culturally relevant brand experiences. They have developed integrations to connect to CMS, code repository, and marketing automation tools.
Analytics
Google Marketing Platform It’s hard to beat Google Analytics in terms of flexibility and value. Google Marketing Platform brings together DoubleClick Digital Marketing and the Google Analytics 360 Suite to help your team plan, buy, measure and optimize digital media and customer experiences in one place. Free Version Available.
Kissmetrics.io is a Customer Engagement Automation solution both for SaaS and eCommerce businesses. Is a powerful web analytics tool that delivers key insights and user interaction. They have compared their solution against Google Analytics highlighting that the data is tied to a person (not a visitor), see the full customer journey across devices, discover drop-off points…
Crazy Egg lets your team see exactly what visitors are doing on your website. Your team can use Crazy Egg Analytics to understand the customer journey with Snapshots, Heatmaps and Recordings. It also comes with A/B Testing Tools. Free 30-day trial.
Metricool offers a simple dashboard to review metrics, plan content publishing and manage online ad campaigns. Free Version Available.
SEO
Moz Pro centers around improving your rankings and search engine visibility. This will allow your team to crawl, measure and audit any website, highlight technical issues and inform content strategy. Free 30-day trial.
SEMrush finds long tail keywords and phrase matches. You also can monitor your competitors’ inbound links and other market relevant information, SEO, Content, Market Research, Advertising, SMM & SERM. Free Version Available.
Customer Lyfecycle Communications
Customer.io helps your mobile or desktop application to configure event based segmentation and marketing and send personalized emails. Requires and REST.API integration with the code of your app but the results are fantastic and simple to set up different campaigns based on the behaviour your customers are showing.
Content Marketing
BuzzSumo Content Marketing cost less and generate 3x more leads than traditional marketing. With BuzzSumo your team can use advanced content insights to generate ideas, create high-performing content, monitor performance and identify influencers. Free 7-days trial.
TubeBuddy is a browser extension and mobile app that integrates directly into YouTube to help you run your channel with ease. Provides keyword research, best practices walktrough to rank higher, A/B Testing and Analytics. YourTube is the second largest search engine (Forbes).
Anchor.fm is an all-in-one platform where you can create, distribute, and monetize your podcasts from any device. Anchor submits your RSS feed automatically to all major listening platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify… Free Version Available.
Unbounce.com While websites are great for information and exploration, they’re duds at turning traffic into revenue. Landing pages allows the marketer to have a focused content instead of a site full of distractions. The term “conversion rate” is generally used to signify the % of visitors that turn into customers. The average conversion rate is lower than 3% globally. Unbounce provides Landing Pages, Pop-Ups and Sticky Bars to present relevant offers and convert visitors into buyers. It comes with a ton of templates to design and publish witout the need of a dedicated developer. No free version. Free 14-days trial.
Collab
Trello uses boards, lists, and cards to enable teams to organize and prioritize projects. The butler funtionality allows you to automate some actions in your workflow. Free Version Available.
Microsoft Teams it is just simply fantastic. The apple of Satya´s eye is getting a lot of attention during the COV-19 Pandemic. It comes with a lot of collaboration features and add-ins with other market applications. Free Version Available.
Digital Assets
Canva is very useful solutuin with drag-and-drop features and professional layouts to design graphics for all your content and formats: Invitations, Headers, Profile Pictures, Posts images… You can also apply filters, use fonts and a big stock of pictures for your designs. Free Version Available.
Freepik.com is a huge collection of digital resources (Images, PSD, EPS, Vectors, Tutorials, Templates, Icons…) many of them free to use under attribution licences.
Adobe Stock is a stock photo service offered by Adobe that is fully integrated into Creative Cloud platform. It provides a seamless workflow for designers, since you can browse, test edit and use professional stock photos in your designs directly in any editing app.
Check my post about The Rise of Digital Assets, here.
A marketing technology stack is a suite of technologies that marketers leverage to conduct and improve their marketing activities. The purpose of all MarTech is to simplify processes, measure the impact of marketing activities and drive more efficient spending.
Because marketers won´t find the perfect all-in-one solution, the best approach is to find a combo with the best solutions available to address specific marketing problems, or a marketing stack.
Marketing technology is now one of the largest portions of a company’s total marketing budget (26% on average according to Gartner).
The fact that the market has been populated recently with thousand of choices is probably causing the stress in some CMO´s, worried sick to stay ahead of it competitors or more often to understand what is going on.
The ability to back up the marketing team’s actions with data is often enough evidence to defend internally a growing budget for the department.
To help them here is my top marketing technology vendors for each category:
Customer Relationship Management
I am not usually in the mood to talk about CRM solutions and this is no special occasion. Mostly used to support the sales force in B2B business, the CRM is no sweet treat for any marketer. The input and therefore the value of the data often comes from the salesperson feedback. If the sales team is not disciplined enough, your CRM won´t be useful at all. Also probably because the magnitude (in money, time and pain) of the projects involving deploying or migrating a CRM, I will only give you here the 2019 selection of Gartner about that. Good Luck.
Product Intelligence and Feedback
Amplitude.com enables the teams asking the questions, building the experiences, and deciding what’s next with the data and analytics they need. The platform will allow your team to better convert, engage, and retain customers. Gain a deeper understanding of how customers experience your digital products, ship product improvements faster, measure impact, and visualize user journeys and personalize product experiences to drive engagement, conversion, and loyalty. Free Version Available.
Riddle Allows your team to gather feedback from your users with 15 quiz, poll, and survey interactive formats. Qualify and segment leads based on quiz responses. Email quiz results to each quiz taker. Offers multiple integrations and templates. Free 14-days trial.
Formstack is an intuitive online form builder that allows your team to create powerful forms, automate workflows, streamline your document generation, payment collection, gather customer data, and automate your day-to-day tasks. Free 14-days trial.
Satismeter allows your team to discover customer pains in key touch-points and track how you improve over time: gather feedback from new customers during onboarding, measure satisfaction with parts of your service, gauge your overall customer experience, learn what is unique about your service and judge if you’re ready to scale.Free Version Available.
Customer Onboarding
WalkMe is a Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) with multiple layers of data collection and analysis of the user journey, in-app step-by-step guidance and help users to complete complex business processes. Gives your team the control to change content, design, placement, and functionality of each step of the on-screen guidance.
Automation
Phantombuster.com allows your team to automate web data collection, build amazing workflows and chain actions for the most used social media platforms. It comes with predefined templates and a very good knowledge base and tutorials. Free Version Available.
Marketo by Adobe allows your team to streamline, automate, and measure marketing tasks and workflows. Marketing automation enables many modern marketing practices, including lead generation, segmentation, lead nurturing and scoring, relationship marketing, cross-sell and upsell, retention, return on investment (ROI) measurement, and account-based marketing. Marketo is better suited to B2B marketers who already have an established MarTech stack and expect to be able to customize their platform.
Hubspot offers a full stack of software for marketing, sales, and customer service, with a free CRM at its core. It´s a modular solution that can also be bundled together. The digital marketing module comes with some nice features of worklow automation, lead conversion, content management, social media streams and analytics. Free Version Available.
Interoperability
Segment.com collects user events from your web & mobile apps and provides a complete data toolkit to marketing, product and engineering teams. For a marketer user, Segment unify customer’s touch points across platforms and channels, enabling personalized, consistent, and real-time customer experiences. Free Version Available.
Localization
DeepL.com By far the best online translation service I´ve found. The translator is free and it has a version for developers that connects your application to DeepL PRO REST API to automate the translation process. Free Version Available.
Smartling.com is a Translation Management System reduces the time and cost spent on translation and localization to deliver culturally relevant brand experiences. They have developed integrations to connect to CMS, code repository, and marketing automation tools.
Analytics
Google Marketing Platform It’s hard to beat Google Analytics in terms of flexibility and value. Google Marketing Platform brings together DoubleClick Digital Marketing and the Google Analytics 360 Suite to help your team plan, buy, measure and optimize digital media and customer experiences in one place. Free Version Available.
Crazy Egg lets your team see exactly what visitors are doing on your website. Your team can use Crazy Egg Analytics to understand the customer journey with Snapshots, Heatmaps and Recordings. It also comes with A/B Testing Tools. Free 30-day trial.
Metricool offers a simple dashboard to review metrics, plan content publishing and manage online ad campaigns. Free Version Available.
SEO
Moz Pro centers around improving your rankings and search engine visibility. This will allow your team to crawl, measure and audit any website, highlight technical issues and inform content strategy. Free 30-day trial.
SEMrush finds long tail keywords and phrase matches. You also can monitor your competitors’ inbound links and other market relevant information, SEO, Content, Market Research, Advertising, SMM & SERM. Free Version Available.
Customer Lyfecycle Communications
Customer.io helps your mobile or desktop application to configure event based segmentation and marketing and send personalized emails. Requires and REST.API integration with the code of your app but the results are fantastic and simple to set up different campaigns based on the behaviour your customers are showing.
Content Marketing
BuzzSumo Content Marketing cost less and generate 3x more leads than traditional marketing. With BuzzSumo your team can use advanced content insights to generate ideas, create high-performing content, monitor performance and identify influencers. Free 7-days trial.
Unbounce.com While websites are great for information and exploration, they’re duds at turning traffic into revenue. Landing pages allows the marketer to have a focused content instead of a site full of distractions. The term “conversion rate” is generally used to signify the % of visitors that turn into customers. The average conversion rate is lower than 3% globally. Unbounce provides Landing Pages, Pop-Ups and Sticky Bars to present relevant offers and convert visitors into buyers. It comes with a ton of templates to design and publish witout the need of a dedicated developer. No free version. Free 14-days trial.
Collab
Trello uses boards, lists, and cards to enable teams to organize and prioritize projects. The butler funtionality allows you to automate some actions in your workflow. Free Version Available.
Microsoft Teams it is just simply fantastic. The apple of Satya´s eye is getting a lot of attention during the COV-19 Pandemic. It comes with a lot of collaboration features and add-ins with other market applications. Free Version Available.
Here is a selection of the projects I made for the course. It consists of a new mobile application for recent graduates that Linkedin was hypothetically launching. The projects for the course required an end to end approach from the basic conception to the launch plan. It was an exhausting but fantastic learning experience.
SKETCHES AND MOCKUPS – LINKEDIN GRADS
SKETCHES AND MOCKUPS USER STORY #1 – LINKEDIN GRADS
SKETCHES AND MOCKUPS USER STORY #2 – LINKEDIN GRADS
STORYBOARD – LINKEDIN GRADS
Here the storyboard, describing the situation in which one of the user personas we defined are solving the problem they have using our App. It was designed with THEPLOT (https://theplot.io/)
PROTOTYPE – LINKEDIN GRADS
Here the Prototype showing a basic dynamic of usage. It was designed with FIGMA (https://www.figma.com)
McElroy later became Secretary of Defense and helped found NASA. He also influenced two young entrepreneurs called Bill Hewlett and David Packard while lecturing at Stanford University.
“The Mother of All Demos is a name given retrospectively to Douglas Engelbart’s December 9, 1968, demonstration of experimental computer technologies that are now commonplace. The live demonstration featured the introduction of the computer mouse, video conferencing, teleconferencing, hypertext, word processing, hypermedia, object addressing and dynamic file linking, bootstrapping, and a collaborative real-time editor.” Amazing.
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