Account-based marketing (ABM) is a B2B marketing strategy that targets a small group of accounts rather than targeting a market as a whole. Marketers design and execute their account-based marketing campaigns around these hand-picked accounts, planning personalized touchpoints throughout the customer journey to ensure that their messages resonate and move prospects down the funnel. In order to measure the success of these efforts and continuously iterate on your campaigns, you need ABM attribution.
With proper ABM attribution in place, you can clearly demonstrate ROI to your key stakeholders and maintain their buy-in. Let’s dive into attribution and see how it can help drive success in your ABM campaigns.
Yes, you can easily look at the number of sales opportunities and closed/won deals you’ve generated to determine if your ABM program is successful overall. However, it’s important to take an even deeper look at the metrics across all of your channels and touchpoints so you know what works and what you could improve upon. This is where ABM attribution comes in handy. ABM attribution helps you understand account-level metrics so you have the full picture of which channels and messages are working and why a buying committee ultimately chose (or didn’t choose) your product or service. Plus, it provides a source of truth and closes the loop between the marketing and sales teams so that both understand the effectiveness of their efforts.
But strong ABM attribution isn’t only helpful for improving your future campaigns. It is equally important to measure your ROI because ABM is such a large investment—according to Forrester, the average ABM budget is around $350,000 and is expected to rise. You need to ensure you track every last dollar and hour spent on your ABM efforts to clearly track your ROI and optimize future spending.
A successful ABM strategy typically involves the following steps:
Once you have your personalized messaging drafted, you’re ready to deploy it through your chosen ABM tactics. Consider using a combination of the following tactics for your ABM campaign:
Once your ABM campaign is up and running, you need to properly measure it to attribute your successes and identify room for improvement. This means setting up tracking for your campaigns and their various channels. You also want to ensure that this tracking is set up for each individual tier/segment of accounts so you can pull even more in-depth insights.
If you use an attribution tool for this tracking, set up a cadence where you're regularly monitoring and reporting on the successes of these efforts through various lenses. For example, which campaign is effective for X segment of your target accounts, and which segment is it not? Which messages work for Y segment, and which don't? Is Z channel a good use of budget for any or all tiers of accounts, or should we ax it altogether and move more money over to another channel that is performing better? By looking at your metrics from as many angles as possible, you’ll be able to answer more questions about your ABM program and share better insights with your organization.
While ROI is the principal ABM metric you want to measure, here are other metrics to look at in your attribution:
Attribution is the best way to determine whether your ABM campaigns are successful so you can allocate resources effectively. Investing time in analyzing your ABM metrics will pay dividends by highlighting the tactics that work best for your business.
One ABM tactic that continues to be successful for marketers is website and landing page personalization. Learn how Snowflake’s ABM team increased landing page conversions by 60% by using Intellimize to deliver a highly personalized experience to each target account.
Interested in improving your ABM program? Check out these other helpful posts to get started: