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Target Account Marketing:

Delivering on the Promise of Account-Based Marketing

Introduction

B2B marketing can be a tough sell. The rise of digital content on the internet changed the B2B buying process dramatically, which affects B2B marketers in two, critical ways: • It has created Buyer 2.0—a more agile, informed business buyer with ready-access to online information about vendors and their products and services. This buyer doesn’t have to rely on the vendor to provide the information they’re looking for during early evaluation—they can remain anonymous while they do their research. • Buying has always been a committee-based effort in the B2B world. In the last 4 years, that team has increased by 40%, includes cross-functional members who have immediate access to information. With this access, these stakeholders are more empowered and anonymous buyers. It means they don’t need to identify themselves as prospects until they’re ready to initiate the selling conversation.

What’s the “tough sell” for B2B marketers? One challenge is finding a way to effectively reach this more-informed set of finite stakeholders within a company. With the explosion of digital content, marketers have had to adjust their strategies and create online programs to target a broader set of business stakeholders within the same target companies who can access information whenever and wherever they like—all without you ever knowing it. Another, equally important challenge is getting the right messages and offers to these stakeholders throughout their Buyer 2.0 purchasing process—from awareness to engagement, through conversion and ongoing retention.

What B2B marketers don’t know could hurt them. For years, B2B marketers took a “spray and pray” approach, attempting to generate as many marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) as possible, then hoping to convert a few to actual revenue. But reaching Buyer 2.0 with precisely the right message requires B2B marketers to incorporate new tactics. One of the most fundamental is aligning marketing efforts more closely with their sales organizations. Salespeople may care about individual demographics, such as job titles, but typically only after they’ve identified their target accounts by market, industry,

region and other segments. That’s why it’s critical for B2B marketers to align their strategies and programs across the same target companies that their sales teams are focused on. Furthermore, having the ability to segment across the various dimensions that matter to their go-to-market strategies and the way selling teams are structured to support their business model. This alignment and target account approach helps marketing connect their efforts to programs that more directly drive to revenue.

Target Account Marketing: Delivering on the Promise of Account-Based Marketing | Demandbase

Account-Based Marketing: A step in the right direction.

Start aligning sales and marketing strategies for greater effectiveness. Today’s businesses use teams of buyers to research, evaluate, consider and purchase products and services. In order to reach all of the potential purchasing decision-makers and influencers at a specific account over the course of a 6- to 18-month-long sales cycle, it’s essential that marketing and sales focus on the same prospects. Account-based marketing (ABM) is the first step toward sales and marketing alignment. It’s a set of principles that range from trying to engage large, named customers at a deeper level to pursuing new, high-value accounts that share similar size, industry or geographical characteristics with existing top-tier customers. But these strategies all share one thing in common; unlike traditional B2B marketing, they prioritize accounts, not simply individual job titles or job descriptions alone. Focusing on accounts results in higher-quality leads delivered to sales in more reasonable quantities that sales can actually manage, while also reaching more prospects on the buying team. So, sales win rates, marketing efficiencies and company revenues improve dramatically. Even when ABM is successfully implemented and used by B2B marketers, it comes with a chief limitation: the inability to execute integrated marketing programs in a scalable way, pulling in the real-time nature of how Buyer 2.0 interacts with a prospective vendor’s brand online. It requires alignment not only between sales and marketing, but also across the entire marketing department itself. And while marketers might have point solutions that support ABM best practices, it’s still difficult to integrate that information and deliver a unified sales and marketing effort on a larger scale if everything remains siloed across marketing, web and operations systems. As a result, B2B marketers have begun to implement ABM, but lack the technology resources to put all of the pieces of information together and deliver on its full promise.

Who: DocuSign The Challenge: DocuSign® is the leader in eSignature transaction management. DocuSign needed the ability to attract the right audience and serve visitors the content that engages them in a meaningful way. The Solution: DocuSign implemented the complete Demandbase targeting and personalization platform to launch company-specific digital campaigns for six industries, attracting target accounts to the website, engaging them with relevant content, and converting them to sales prospects. The Result: DocuSign saw immediate results with the Demandbase Company-Targeted Advertising and Website Optimization solutions. • Targeted 450+ companies with over 1M impressions delivered • Attracted 59% of all companies targeted to its website • Generated relevant interest with 13 average page views per company Additional Benefits: • Grew the sales pipeline by 22% for its top six industries • Increased average time-on-site by more than eight minutes • Boosted page views by over 300%

How buyers say they spend their time during their buying process: Key Takeaway: Time spent with content or searching for it comprises 56% of the buying experience. Source: “Treat Your Content with More Respect,” Marketing Interactions blog, July 21, 2011

• Decreased the bounce rate from an average of 35.29% to only 13.5% 18%

23% in discussions with colleagues

23%

21% with sales team interaction 19% searching the web

19%

21%

19% with educational content

19%

18% reviewing promotional content

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• Tripled the click-through rate on DocuSign.com with industryrelevant calls-to-action

Who: StrongView The Challenge: StrongView is a leader of email, mobile, and social media marketing solutions that enable marketers with multi-channel programs to acquire, retain, and drive loyalty across their customer initiatives. Their marketing team needed a cost-effective way to provide ‘air cover’ to sales by educating prospective customers on their shift in product emphasis before the teams engaged with their target accounts. The Solution: StrongView used Demandbase Company-Targeted Advertising to combine digital advertising with strategic account marketing to get their brand and ‘what we do’ message to a targeted list of accounts. The Result: StrongMail saw one-to-one results measured by website engagement from the list of strategic accounts: • 42% lift in website traffic, specifically from the targeted list of 500 accounts. StrongView was able to measure and see an increase in engagement for the accounts —from advertising to website activity. • 29% conversion from inactive to active accounts. StrongView saw a 29% lift in new visits from strategic accounts that had been dormant and not on their website in at least 2 months. • Over 20X increase in time on website. Over 20 fold average increase in page views as a result of running personalized, targeted messages after visitors landed on the website. • 5X click-through-rate (CTR) with dynamic vs. static content. StrongView conducted A/B testing with messaging and saw a powerful engagement rate when dynamic content was served to their target audience.

Target Account Marketing: The next, logical step.

Turning ABM into targeted lifecycle management of your most valued accounts and segments. ABM enables sales and marketing to identify and focus on the key accounts that are most likely to become customers. Target Account Marketing provides a programmatic solution to drive true ABM at scale, allowing B2B marketers to execute programs against their most prioritized accounts quickly, efficiently and more effectively than ever before. It is a collection of both marketing practices and tools aimed at attracting those accounts, engaging them, converting them to target account leads, then measuring the prospect activity, which can indicate sales-readiness. It doesn’t necessarily replace account-based marketing or traditional demand generation; it builds upon both leveraging technology that ensures every lead that goes into the sales funnel has been highly qualified based on the same set of account characteristics jointly defined by marketing and sales—and then acted upon as quickly as possible. In this way, Target Account Marketing best aligns these often-disconnected disciplines, ensuring these efforts map to the common goal of accelerating revenue against an organization’s most prioritized prospects and customers. Target Account Marketing relies on a solid ABM strategy, so B2B marketers will need to work with sales colleagues to identify key accounts. Once this alignment is achieved, B2B marketers can use Demandbase to holistically execute across a targeted lifecycle approach. As the only Target Account Marketing focused technology solution, Demandbase allows the collective marketing and sales activity to build and define a targeted, personalized relationship with an account across its entire lifecycle. It executes ABM in the way it was meant to be done: scalably, effectively, efficiently—and in real time. B2B marketers can reach buyers in target accounts with personalized, highly relevant online advertising, without wasting money serving those ads to non-target accounts. They can also make better use of Buyer 2.0’s most valuable resource—the company website—by recognizing visitors from target accounts and serving to them the segment-specific website content they’re seeking. This is complemented by the ability to monitor and optimize advertising and website content in an always-on manner and thereby acting when buyers are ready to talk to sales, or at least identify themselves to the marketer for more information— ensuring a highly qualified MQL.

“It’s no longer enough to get your content found by the right people. Marketers must now engage Buyer 2.0 for the entirety of the buying process—yes, even providing an assist when sales is invited to the party.” Ardath Albee, CEO, Marketing Interactions, Inc.

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Target Account Marketing: Delivering on the Promise of Account-Based Marketing | Demandbase

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In a recent survey, B2B marketing executives were asked to rank their marketing challenges. Key Takeaway: Poor sales and marketing alignment was the highest-ranked marketing challenge. Source: Demandbase white paper, “Account-Based Marketing in 2013” July 21, 2011

5

Lack of budget

4

Lack of marketing personell or resources

3

Effective program selection/ resource allocation

2

Reliable marketing intelligence/ acquisition of lists

1

Measuring return on investment (ROI)

0

Poor sales and marketing alignment around common targets and goals

(Rank from 1-6 with 6 being most important.)

A snapshot of Target Account Marketing in action, fueled by Demandbase. Most B2B companies leverage their website as a way to drive online lead capture—often times, focusing on website UX/UE best practices to drive visitors to their high-value pages. What gets missed is the ability to prescriptively identify their website visitors in a way that drives action and leads to higher engagement. With Demandbase, marketers can identify their website visitors by company name or key business attributes, segment them into actionable categories and serve them very directed, relevant content. What about improving conversion and lead quality? Website registration forms that gate content items, such as white

papers, webcasts and third-party research, have traditionally been used to capture information about prospective customers. Shorter web forms have higher completion rates, but sales teams demand highly qualified leads. So, marketing organizations tend to ask too many qualification questions on their registration forms, dramatically reducing conversion rates without a significant improvement in lead quality. Marketing teams who implement Demandbase solutions across their website suite of solutions, such as Analytics and Content modules, can identify target accounts when they land on websites and automatically shorten forms at registration. This increases registration volumes while also improving the quality of the sales leads—and delivers them programmatically.

Even more significantly, what if marketers could target messages and advertising campaigns to their key accounts or market segments even before they landed on the company’s website? Demandbase’s CompanyTargeted Advertising solution provides marketers with the means to achieve this objective. It’s a full-funnel, programmatic method for maintaining connected conversations with key accounts that enables marketers to target key companies and personalize website content them. Doing so ensures that the right companies and most valuable target segments are getting messages that continue to qualify them down the funnel, ensuring a higher rate of conversion on prioritized companies or targets.

“We see companies embracing account-based marketing in a much more pervasive and disciplined way. And they’re looking to us for best practices and to companies like Demandbase for the tools to support them.” Megan Heuer, VP and Group Director, Data-Driven Marketing, SiriusDecisions

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Who: CSC The Challenge: CSC, a leading provider of technology-enabled business solutions and services, had implemented the Demandbase Analytics, Content and Forms modules to personalize their website to target companies. Jumping at the chance to extend the power of company-targeting beyond their website, CSC went ahead and kicked off their first Company-Targeted Advertising program. In particular CSC wanted to leverage the key company attributes and capabilities obtained from their website solution and extend them to their advertising. The Solution: CSC initiated its first CompanyTargeted Advertising program to present its banner ads only to employees of a predefined list of companies, blanketing the right prospects with dynamically personalized ads that drive them to a personalized website and eliminating ad spend waste. The Results: • Beat predefined lift goal: Demandbase hit it’s predefined lift target at 27% increase in new and existing companies visiting CSC’s website. And the company hit it within the timeframe expected. • Dramatically increased company engagement with CSC generating a 44% increase in the number of target website pages visited by target accounts.

58%

How do B2B marketers qualify their prospects? Key Takeaway: B2B executives need to better align lead-scoring with marketing targets and resources.

48% 43%

45% 39%

35%

Prospect Title (i.e. Manager, Director, VP) Prospect Department (i.e. Marketing, Finance, HR) Companies by Industry/Vertical Companies by Size (annual revenue or employee count)

Source: Demandbase white paper, “Account-Based Marketing in 2013”

Companies by Geography Named Accounts

Demandbase enables Target Account Marketing. Demandbase delivers on the promise of Target Account Marketing, unifying information across silos and disparate teams that make it difficult to scale ABM beyond a select group of key accounts in real-time. In this way, B2B marketers can: • Identify and prioritize accounts • Attract them to their websites with dynamic, personalized online advertising • Engage them by serving up personalized, account-specific web content in real time • Increase conversion by shortening forms while still capturing full company information • Measure website activity according to account, segment and other company-specific attributes • Close the loop and refine the Target Account Marketing process further • Integrate Demandbase into the marketing tools they currently use, building intelligence and richer ROI into these existing investments

“Research from IDC found that 56% of time during the buying process is spent searching for or engaging with content. This is a huge opportunity to influence engagement levels and purchase intent—if you know who your buyers are and what they’re interested in.” Ardath Albee, CEO, Marketing Interactions, Inc.

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Target Account Marketing: Delivering on the Promise of Account-Based Marketing | Demandbase

Conclusion Broad-based demand generation tactics quickly overload B2B sales organizations with marketing qualified leads (MQLs) that cannot be converted to sales. This wastes marketing resources, reduces sales efficiency and increases resentment toward marketing. But because B2B marketers are measured on lead quantity, not quality, they are reluctant to accommodate requests from sales for better-qualified leads. Some B2B marketers have embraced account-based marketing (ABM) and begun to improve efficiencies on a smaller scale by focusing a portion of their resources on a select number of accounts that fit their target customer profile. But B2B marketing tools designed to support lead generation have made implementing ABM on a larger scale—known as Target Account Marketing— impractical. The Demandbase Target Account Marketing Platform makes ABM scalable. So, businesses can implement Target Account Marketing across the marketing organization, ensure that sales receives better-qualified leads within the right accounts, and improve sales and marketing efficiency.

Experience Target Account Marketing in real time. www.demandbase.com

“We see the Demandbase platform as marketing’s next move because it allows marketers to see what’s working and use that information to target dream accounts with greater precision, optimize their efforts and produce better results faster.” Greg Ott, CMO, Demandbase

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Demandbase is the first targeting and personalization platform for B2B, transforming the effectiveness of marketing programs and marketing’s ability to impact revenue. While personalization tools have long existed for B2C, until now, none were geared specifically to enable B2B marketers to make online interactions more effective, delivering the right message at the right time. Without the use of cookies, Demandbase’s patented identification technology bridges the gap between known and anonymous web visitors by identifying and segmenting the companies visiting a website, and providing detailed, targetable business attributes in real-time. The Demandbase platform includes Company-Targeted Advertising, Website and Conversion Optimization modules, and Sales intelligence tools that integrate with other sales and marketing technologies to deliver unique intelligence about web visitors, and better attract, convert and retain the right customers. Enterprise leaders and high-growth companies alike use Demandbase to drive better marketing performance. For more information, visit http://www.demandbase.com.