3 Powerful Ways to Kick-Start Your ABM Program and Get More Big Elephants

Did you know that 92% of marketers worldwide believe account-based marketing, or ABM, is important to their marketing efforts?

Why is ABM such a loved strategy? As Doug Kessler, Creative Director and Co-founder of the B2B Marketing Agency, Velocity, says:

For most B2B marketing teams, the elephant in the room is that there aren’t enough elephants in the room.

In other words, it’s easy for organizations to fall into the trap of spending their time prospecting companies 10-20 times smaller than some of their ideal customers. This happens because all marketers have been stuck in the lead generation mindset for so long. We all just need more and more (and more!) leads. But when we target those individual leads and not a company at large, we’re:

1. not accounting for the fact that decisions are not made by one, single person at any company, and
2. not able to narrow in on key companies that would be ideal accounts.

But that’s a problem because we all want more big elephants.

And that’s why we’ve all, as in marketers, at least started down the path of ABM. (We recently told the story of our journey of going from MQL-focused thinking to an ABM approach here!)

But many marketers are struggling to drive results from their ABM programs (mainly due to inadequate technology and executional strategies).

While tackling the technology side of things is one of the first steps you’ll want to get a handle on, having a solid understanding of who to target and a stockpile of targeted content to serve them is a close second.

Which is exactly where video fits in.

There’s a lot that video consumption data can offer when it comes to identifying which content to serve up key accounts. Let’s take a look at the three ways to use video to help improve your ABM programs.

1. Use Video Consumption Data From Closed Deals to Guide Which Content to Serve

There’s something to be said about those deals you already closed. That something is that you obviously did something right. So the first place to look for what content to serve new accounts is the ones you’ve already closed.

Check out what video content your ideal accounts consumed and stayed engaged with. Look at those videos that influenced closed deals in your CRM system and those that held a long attention span (ideally longer than 80%) in your video marketing platform. Then serve this content up to similar accounts. You might define these similar accounts by industry, or similar company size, or even attribute like marketing technology they’re using, for example.

Look specifically for those videos that your closed deals consumed the most of and those that they consumed at different funnel stages and then replicate this for your new key accounts.

And note that the attributes you choose to target will obviously change depending on your company, so make sure you sit down and identify these first.

2. Personalize Video Content to Target Key Accounts

One of the reasons ABM is so successful is because it tells the targeted prospect that you’re speaking to them directly. You’re reaching out one on one.

So if you can combine this one on one experience with video, the medium buyers’ are craving, you’ll be even further ahead. Consider personalizing video content for your top 10-20 accounts. You don’t necessarily have to record or create a brand new video each time (although you could do this for your top 5 if you were really ambitious!). Instead, you could create a templated video and just customize the video splash-screen and first few seconds with company information.

Be careful with this templated tactic, though. Make sure that your video message makes sense for all of your key accounts. If, for example, you’re targeting multiple industries and you can get your message across better by being much more industry-specific, you could always create a handful of videos that are tailored to each industry and then apply the ABM personalization on top. Or you could do the same thing for different personas within the same company.

The possibilities are endless!

Take a look at Taulia’s use of persona-specific videos to get an idea of how this might work, below.

Procurement

Accounts Payable

Treasury

3. Use Video Engagement Data as a Precursor to Serve Predictive Display Ads

If you’re using a video platform integrated with your marketing automation platform and someone from IBM watches your product video, you’ll know. But if they later left and started browsing through the rest of the internet, would you let them leave? And forget about you?

Elephants never forget.

So don’t let your prospects forget either. Use that video data to serve up ads around the web. But not just any ads, those that are specifically related to the content they already consumed — and the content you know they’re interested in — and address them (or rather, their account) directly. Using a tool like Terminus or DemandBase, you can create customized ads like this one below that Salesforce served up to Hoover’s about financial services.

Generally, you only want to promote new content along the same topic to those who consumed the entire video. If a viewer only got partway through the video, try retargeting them and sending them back to that asset.

From using tailored content to making use of in-depth video engagement data, there are so many opportunities to use video to beef up your ABM programs. Are you using video in your ABM program? Share how in the comments below!

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