Why Understanding your Customer’s Pain Point is Crucial in ABM Strategy?

 In my last post around account based marketing (#ABM), I talked about importance of content and how can one measure it. In this post, I intend to take a step back and discuss about how crucial understanding your customer’s or prospect’s pain points is for your ABM strategy.

For our messages to be relevant, it must literally shout out the solution to the pain points or problem statement that the respective account is facing. So, now the question is - How would you know the problem statements or pain points for your target accounts?

For existing accounts, talk to the customer success manager or account manager who interacts with the client on a timely basis. A good account manager would list down what’s bugging the client – it could be issue in the product or process or SLAs/ delay in service or cost etc. It’d also be wise to refer customer satisfaction survey reports too. If you were to cross-sell to an unhappy client, then know that any promise about the product might not go well with them unless you solve for existing issues.

For new accounts, this information is with sales, inside sales and marketing team who do prospecting, account mining and secondary research activities. They know what product/ solution that account is already using and for how long, issues that they might have faced with existing service provider. Social profiling of key decision makers in the account would reveal any issues that client was vocal about, it might also provide clues to key drivers for the decision makers in the account.

For practical ease, below template can help document things to create appropriate ABM strategy:

While some problem statements could be generic, some could be very unique. Solutions to unique problem statements can best be done in one on one conversation by one to one email, phone call, message etc.

Broad problem statements for all decision makers can be grouped at an account level and should be used in your account based marketing promotions and campaigns on appropriate channels for that respective account. Since you’re talking about solutions to your prospect’s pain points in your ads and content, it’s bound to do well as compared to generic messages. Why? Because they see you as a problem solver instead of a company that always talks about itself.

If you don’t know the customer’s pain points, then you’re missing a key aspect of ABM strategy and then you’re limited to traditional approach which is to advertise your product’s best features and problems it solves for in account based marketing campaigns.

Hope you find this post useful !

Importance of "Content" in Account Based Marketing & Why utm_content is NOT optional

#Content is undoubtedly the most under-rated area in #marketing. Its importance is felt very strongly in areas such as account based marketing or #ABM & search engine optimization or #SEO.

My post would be limited to #ABM.

During my learning days, I remember a statement by a wise man – ‘You need to write down the content strategy on a piece of paper, no matter how good your memory skills are’. And, it is so apt!

In Account based marketing where personalization is the key, we look for industry specific content to make our message more relevant. There could be 2 scenarios, either there’s too much content or there’s too little. Where we have too much content, we can decide on the basis of created date or past performance. In case of too little, we need to identify the gaps or areas that require content. In fact, in both cases, mapping the content with buying stage can help streamline & prioritize. A simple 2X2 grid can perhaps explain in a better way:

	Awareness	Consideration	Action
Industry 1 (eg. Healthcare)	Eg. Healthcare solution video; Healthcare solution infographic etc.	Eg. Healthcare Client case study1 (April 2019) Healthcare Client case study2 (Dec 2020)	Eg. Comparison sheet with other Healthcare solution providers; Personalized proposals / offers related etc.
Industry 2

It’s quite normal to have blank cells in above grid & the onus to fill blank cells is not just on content team, it’s equally divided between:

1. Solutions/ Product Team: Because they’re domain experts & know much more than anyone else, its strength/ weakness etc.
2. Sales Team: Because they understand the client like no one else does, they know client is not looking for rhetoric & most importantly any customized proposal going from them would have higher chances of deal closure.
3. Customer Success Team: Because they know what’s bugging a client and they’re your friends to get client approved customer testimonials and success stories.
4. Content Team: Because they’re the experts in how to write the content in the most impactful way
5. Digital Team: Because they know what type of content might work well across different channels
6. Design Team: Because they know how best can they complement a powerful message in such a way that it leaves an impact in the minds of the customer. A good content may go waste if not presented well!
7. PR/Communications Team: Because they’d help in the press releases around deal wins, new offerings and more branding around it.

Now that we know where it is difficult to push a personalized messaging in account based marketing, you identify what do I have. Again, it’s a 2X2 grid that can help:

FORMAT	Solution 1	Solution 2
Custom Proposal
Whitepaper	x
Case Study	x	x
Online Brochure	x
Physical Brochure
PowerPoint
Blog	x	x
Q&A	x
Article	x	x
Report	x
Email	x
Social Media Post	x	x
Video	x
Image Ad		x
Text Ad		x
Infographic	x	x
Website Landing Page
Webinar		x
Podcast		x

Note that depending upon the company & industry there could be more content format types too (eg. a whatsapp text/ 6-sec clip / .gif around product features and so on).

So far, we talked about checking content readiness but what if we’ve everything with us and we’re doing account based marketing campaigns. How do we track if it’s and what’s working?

The analytical side of my brain always wondered why do we usually not care about tracking a content performance. Is it difficult? Or Is it not necessary? When I learnt google analytics during early part of my career, I got fascinated by the fact that we’ve technologies that can track no. of times a page is viewed, which device & browser was used, what was the location and so on. Then later as I learnt I found that it is also possible to track the visit history of known (& opt in) prospects and have a timeline of what content was viewed, downloaded & shared. We can even score/ rate a prospect basis content. Finally, see how much money a content type has got us.

Yes, you CAN quantify a content performance!

utm_content is your #friend and it’s NOT optional. I prefer and highly recommend using utm_content in all URLs of the company’s website because then you can see which type of content lead to most business for your organization.

• Use web analytics tools such as Google analytics to see visit analytics. Social platforms such as LinkedIn also allow you to see how much viral a content is.
• Use your marketing automation platforms to see what content a #CIO or a #CFO clicked on before converting/ submitting the lead
• Use your CRM to see how much business a particular content has generated; whether videos gave more business or it was the physical brochure, you can track it all.

Yes, it’s that easy! But it requires a #disciplined approach. Quite often it gets missed because of either #urgency to post/ launch or a #lackadaisical attitude of people concerned. Rule of thumb is – whenever you’re loaded with work and there’s an urgency, just #pause for a moment and re-check all points in the checklist before you use that landing page link anywhere. Involving your marketing analytics colleague in the process would be a good idea too.

Hope you find this post useful !

Website Page Load Time: Factors impacting and Tips to improve

In today’s digital age, a website (whether B2B or B2C) is an indispensable part of any organization.

Your website is nothing but a sales person. The better it is, the more business it can give. An informative website, a fast website is akin to a knowledgeable and responsive sales person.

Often businesses invest a lot of time and efforts in building a good looking website with great content but neglect paying too much attention to speed at which it should load. If your website takes ages to load then it’s imperative to attract too much bounce. And an impatient millennial might just switch to your competitor’s website without even the quality of content and offer your website might be running. As a result you lose potential revenue.

Acc. to Google (https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-resources/data-measurement/mobile-page-speed-new-industry-benchmarks/), the probability of bounce increases 32% as the page loads from 1 to 3 sec.

Not just bounce rate, page speed is one of the most important ranking factor by Google.

Studies show that:

• A one-second delay in page load time yields: a) 11% fewer page views b) 16% decrease in customer satisfaction & c) 7% loss in conversions (Link: https://www.crazyegg.com/blog/speed-up-your-website/ 
• 47% of consumers expect websites to load in two seconds or less — and 40% will abandon a page that takes three or more seconds (Link: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/loading-time/ )
• 79% of customers said they would not return to a site with poor performance (Link: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/speed-is-a-killer/ ). In this same survey, 52% of shoppers said that quick page loading is important to their site loyalty and 44% said they tell their friends about poor site experiences
• 53% of mobile users leave a site that takes longer than three seconds to load (Link: https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-resources/data-measurement/mobile-page-speed-new-industry-benchmarks/ )
• Page load time is one of the key ranking factors as well, google penalizes those sites that take too much time to load thereby leading to loss in our keyword ranks which means our website link might not even show up on the first page of search results. (Link: https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2018/01/22/google-speed-update )

Let’s look at some of the factors that affects page load:

• How heavy your page is: The more files you have to load on a page, the longer it will take to load
• No. of plugins or third party scripts you’ve added in your website: If your website is on wordpress then you must be using plugins for various functionalities. The plugins that make a lot of database queries and require a lot of assets to load will slow down your load time.
• Whether your website is hosted on a dedicated or shared server: A shared server can cost you less but will lead to high load time as it has to accommodate for all other websites too. A server dedicated to your website will have a complete control of your resources and will load your site quicker.
• Server location: In an overseas server, the connection must go through many different open networks, so they should consume more time to access
• Browser version: Older browser versions might not be compatible with new features or assets that you modern website has so they may take time to load eventually leading to high page load time

How can you improve website load time

1. Optimize your website images
2. Remove unnecessary or unused third party codes & plugins
3. If possible, go for dedicated hosting
4. Use CDN (content delivery network) - A CDN (Content Delivery Network) is a highly-distributed platform of servers that helps minimize delays in loading web page content by reducing the physical distance between the server and the user. This. helps users around the world view the same high-quality content without slow loading time (source: https://www.akamai.com/us/en/cdn/what-is-a-cdn.jsp)
5. Prefer local country host providers

Remember, your goal should be to achieve load time of 0.5 seconds or less.

Keep optimizing !

Digital Marketing Strategies for Start-ups

With both competitors and potential customers constantly online, digital marketing is the only way to stay ahead. A big part of marketing strategy is digital. Any business can compete with any competitor regardless of size with a solid digital marketing strategy.

As a starting point, here are some research activities to get you started with your small business digital marketing plan:

1. Customer profiles (or personas) – which types of customers visit your site and then convert to lead or sale? How does this differ compared to other traditional channels? We believe that businesses of all sizes should have target personas or “pen portraits” of 2 to 3 customer types.
2. Customer search behaviour research – determine how your prospects search as explored in the Reach section – understanding the volume and type of customer intent is vital where you are looking to grab more share of search when people search for your products or services
3. Competitor research – You can run a profitable site without considering competitors, but a review as part of planning will definitely give you ideas and is essential to spot weaknesses and opportunities as part of SWOT analysis. 
4. Influencer, partner and intermediary research – which types of people and other sites will influence your audience as they look for your type or product and service? This is often neglected, but partnerships and certain types of influencers6 can be a great source of low cost, quality traffic.
5. Current business effectiveness – mine your sales data

Consumers and businesses alike are almost always online and to be able to reach them and observe their behaviour where they spend the most time digital marketing strategy comes handy. It’s the series of actions that are going to help to achieve goal(s) using online marketing. 

Several low cost digital marketing strategies for the start-ups are listed below:

A. SEARCH MARKETING

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a key to every website. The start-ups must know the keywords where the website must rank on top 3 organic results. In case it’s an e-commerce, it will require paid search marketing activities to bring product in front of the consumers.

B. MARKETING FUNNEL CREATION

Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) should be used for understanding why visitors are not ‘converting’ into customers, and then improving messaging or value proposition to increase this rate of conversions which can be done by understanding visitors and their objections.

• The most successful businesses have an effective marketing funnel in place. This includes mapping out a customer’s journey from a complete stranger to a lead, and then putting certain strategies in place that will encourage them to move through this funnel.
• Landing Page Optimization: The landing page of any startup is one of the crucial factors in generating the lead about the product and then ultimately making the business out of it by selling those products. Landing page must be good enough to compel visitors to get converted into customers.
• Internal Pages Optimization: There are free and cheaper solutions for optimizing internal pages for conversion. Free plugins can be used for capturing emails and then leveraging affordable services like MailChimp for drip campaigns. 
• Using free tools like Google Analytics to monitor visitor’s paths to the website and once they are on it, finding opportunities to create a more user-friendly experience. Optimizing forms on website to build a stronger inbound lead funnel. Finding cheap and reliable cart services to sell products directly through site. 

C. CONTENT MARKETING

Content marketing is one of the most overlooked investments in launching a startup, which can be done by engaging in industry research and formulating unique selling propositions. 

• Visually stimulating content, with appealing imagery and minimal words score a lot when it comes to websites. However, that cannot diminish the power of captivating words, and they are as good as the pictures.
• One of the most important steps to an effective content marketing strategy is the content promotion. Amplify it as much as possible. Leverage social media profiles, email industry experts, reach out to LinkedIn groups or industry forums, and contribute to other popular sites that target consumers might visit. 

D. E-MAIL MARKETING

E-mail marketing is now becoming one of the best digital marketing weapons which will not only help startup to promote its brand but will also help in generating lead to make business for the brand.

E. SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

Social media is one of the most cost effective ways to market startup.  In addition to providing a platform for growing brand, it offers an easy medium for promotion and customer service opportunities. It is a way to build brand voice. This can be done on a frequent and consistent pace. Find and share customer related information. 

• Many social media platforms and search engines have the feature of showing paid ads on their platform which any start-up can easily afford as most of these paid ads starts with a minimum budget of $10. You can also further increase the budget according to requirement to gain much better reach among target audience.
• There are a number of different social opportunities that one can invest in all of which have merit depending on the industry and unique selling proposition. 
• Facebook is steadily becoming a pay-to-play platform, and to see any engagement, investment on Facebook posts promotion can be done. 
• While Twitter still provides a good amount of organic engagement, the microblogging platform also has paid solutions for businesses, with one being sponsored tweet. By providing a sponsored tweet, higher engagement will most likely occur with followers (and others).
• LinkedIn has a number of extremely valuable paid features, including a Sales Navigator that makes finding leads and contacts seamless. 
• One of the biggest benefits of social media for business is using it to increase website traffic. Not only does social media help direct people to website, but the more social media shares received, the higher search ranking will be. 

F. MULTI-CHANNEL STRATEGY

A digital marketing strategy should always be multi channelled in nature, to track and analyse every channel. It helps in covering every possible segment of your target audience. Blogs give interest and opinion for viewers, hence helping them choose between alternatives. YouTube podcasts help consumers by informing them about the products.

Running a startup on a shoestring budget is hard enough. Keeping marketing costs down while capitalizing on successful digital opportunities, one will be able to improve brands visibility without sacrificing a large budget.

Hope you find it useful !

ACCOUNT BASED MARKETING - A DIGITAL PERSPECTIVE

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a B2B strategy that concentrates sales and marketing resources on a clearly defined set of target accounts within a market and employs personalised campaigns designed to resonate with each account & its key decision makers to achieve mutually agreed business goals and objectives.

Please note that my post would be limited to digital medium only from execution perspective. However, the ABM concept broadly remains same & offline ABM activities that you might be doing already can be added in step 3. 

5 Step approach for ABM:

5 Step Approach for ABM

STEP 1: Select Target Accounts

The primary step is to find out who exactly you would like to reach out to. This steps requires an elaborate discussion between sales and marketing teams. Some could be high worth accounts, existing accounts, strategic accounts and so on. The step not only includes identifying target accounts for your business but also the exact departments (job function & seniority) and decision makers within those departments.

STEP 2: Define Objective (or goals)

If you would like to avoid any confrontation with the CEO in future then make sure the objectives/ goals are identified & mutually discussed with the top management well before initiating any account specific outreach activity. 

The objectives can be as follows:

a. Secure more meetings with senior management

b. Close a higher percentage of large deals

c. Drive faster sales cycle time

d. Grow revenue within existing accounts

e. Promote higher customer loyalty

STEP 3: Identify Digital Channels

Well, here i am only focusing on digital channels but please make sure all your offline activities are in sync with digital promotions (eg. physical meeting after a digital campaign; geo-targeted ads before physical events etc.). 

Identifying right digital channels is a no-brainer, some of the key channels that can be leveraged are: 

a. LinkedIn (obviously the best) - There're plethora of options available such as LinkedIn ABM, LinkedIn Remarketing, LinkedIn Sponsored InMails, Spotlight and Text ads. Do make use of new features such as 1 click lead gen, LinkedIn contact retargeting & website retargeting. Do not forget to integrate Eloqua (if you've Eloqua as marketing automation platform) with LinkedIn.

b. Email (the cheapest) - This requires database or list of email addresses of contacts within your target accounts.

c. Account targeted display ads on ad networks (may require high investments but can be targeted to account and job-seniority levels). Key service providers are: Demandbase, Vendemore, 6 Sense, Kwanzoo, DMPs such as Oracle Bluekai etc.

d. DMPs (the costlier but more targeted) - Create segments and reach out to them via search, display, email, mobile etc.

e. Account re-targeting: Reach out to accounts who've been to your website again & to opt-in contacts (make sure they're double opt-in for specific geos such as Canada & European region). Most of the service providers mentioned in point c. have the account remarketing capabilities as well. Specifically for contact level retargeting, you can use AdRoll CRM re-targeting, Google customer match, Twitter tailored audience & Facebook custom audience.

STEP 4: Personalise Content

Leverage IP based and cookie based personalization technologies to serve relevant and appropriate content to your target audience & (or accounts). It is not wise (esp. in today's world) to serve same content to all website visitors. Segment visitors on the basis of company name or a particular action taken in your website and make the experience more personalized. Example, audience spending more than x minutes on a particular section of the website or downloading content about specific products and services can be shown a more relevant content. 

You can make use of Demandbase, Oracle Maxymiser, Google optimize etc. to serve personalized content across website (Demandbase & Kwanzoo can also help personalize banner ads served on ad networks to specific accounts/ industries). There's a rise in Artificial intelligence based website personalization as well (eg. Demandbase site customization). It'll be interesting to see how advertisers can leverage AI based personalization with ABM.

STEP 5: Enable Sales

Whatever ABM activities you've taken up, make sure all of them are aligned to objectives discussed in step 2. Enable sales team by showing results of all ABM activities by preparing an account level pre & post type of reporting. It's vital to have a strong analytics platform within your organization to get to this type of reporting. Google & Adobe analytics are two most widely used platforms, recently there's a rise in predictive intelligence based analytics tools as well (eg. 6Sense). 

Marketing team should ensure that sales receive timely website activity report done both at an account level and at individual level along with campaign specific reporting. Some organizations prefer to show a dashboard (instead of excel report) using Qlik, Google data studio, Klipfolio etc. 

Well that's it ! Make sure you've a project plan with timelines before you initiate any of the above.

Benefits of ABM

It won't be apt for me to say the rhetoric that ABM will get you: Better & Clear ROI; Tight & Close alignment between sales & marketing; Optimise spends & Efficient tracking of goals. My advise is - Do it and find out how ABM is working for your company.

Happy ABMing !!

Buyer Journey: Mapping Digital Channels & Metrics

My previous post on "Measuring the effectiveness of paid digital campaigns" inspired me to write this post. In fact, i encounter this question from my colleagues a lot that - What is an ideal channel mix for a digital campaign? Well, my answer to them is that it all depends on the campaign objective & the attributes of your target audience. It may not be necessary that all individuals in your target audience are in same phase of their buyer journey or not all might be progressing in a similar way. Some of them might be already aware of your brand, some might be considering other brand options just because they read a negative review about your brand and a fraction of your target audience could be on the verge of buying from your brand and are waiting for that final trigger. And hence, it may not be appropriate to just consider one or two ad units/channels for your digital campaign.

To answer the question on an ideal channel mix for a digital campaign, one should have the capability to segment the audience on the basis of where they're in their respective buying journey & then map various digital channels and their respective ad formats to those segments. On the basis of my experience & learning, i've created an illustration that maps channels & their respective formats with various phases of customer buying journey (Awareness, Consideration, Purchase & Engage).

Digital Channels: Buyer journey

NOTE: You may use channels mentioned in 'Purchase' phase in 'Consideration' phase as well, the illustration above is a subjective view on what formats work best in which phase. Regardless of the channel, the messaging used on these channels plays a crucial role & must align with users in respective phases for eg. a discount code migh work well for audience in consideration & purchase phase.

Now, once the campaign is over you might want to measure its performance. In my previous post - Measuring the effectiveness of paid digital campaigns i mentioned key metrics that should be considered for measuring the overall success of a digital campaign. In addition to that you might also be required to report digital metrics for customer buying phases. I prepared below table that lists down channel wise key metrics for each buying phase:

Digital Metrics: Buying cycle

Hope you find this information useful. i will look forward for your feedbacks in comments section below.

Measuring the Effectiveness of Paid Digital Campaigns

How do you measure the effectiveness of a digital campaign? Is it sufficient to evaluate campaign performance on the basis of campaign metrics alone?

We often boast about no. of impressions served & video views garnered but when it comes to measuring the effectiveness of any digital campaign, digital marketers need to don sales hat. Why? Because every impression cost advertisers a good amount of money and it is unfair as well as illogical if we fail to report the return on ad spend (ROAS).

A successful digital campaign not only depends on efficient targeting and optimization but also on good quality content, conversion friendly page and efficient tracking. Hence, it's important that an end of the campaign report contains both digital campaign metrics as well as content performance metrics (such as avg. time on page & bounce rate). In order to evaluate campaign performance, it's absolutely critical that marketing and sales tools talk with each other.  There are plethora of campaign metrics available for advertisers to report but according to me two key metrics that really matter are sales & impressions per sales (or impressions per profit) & this is applicable for awareness and lead generation type campaigns. 

While many may contest that a brand awareness campaign should not have sales as a metric but just pause on that thought and think - Would you not like to know how many ad impressions resulted in $1 profit in my business? An awareness driven or engagement driven campaign ultimately impact the bottom line of your company.

I prepared a sample template that can be used to measure effectiveness of any paid digital campaign:

Paid-Campaign-Analysis-Template

Please note that i have knowingly not added various optimization related metrics such as cost per click, cpm, cost per lead etc., simply because we need to track them on a daily basis - this above template is more ideal for an end of the campaign reporting (however, you can still calculate these metrics using this template). Also, if you know the Profit margins of sales achieved through this campaign i would urge you to also report Impressions per profit figure for your respective products.

Feel free to add / tweak this template as per your business needs. I would love to get your feedback in the comments section.