By Alba Fraile, on 22 December 2016
Has your company decided to invest in Account Based Marketing in 2017? Well done! ABM promises to be one of the most effective and profitable ways to market to the B2B sector. Like any tool, however, (and especially for new tools in your plan), you need to know exactly how you are going to measure the results in order to justify the investment. In that sense, I would like to share 3 recommendations that will help you measure your Account Based Marketing ROI.
Learn how to measure your Account Based Marketing ROI
1) Know the data
The great new for those of you who are new to Account Based Marketing is that the numbers seem to be on our side: in fact, ABM is one of the types of digital marketing in which it is easiest to show a clear ROI.
According to Engagio’s Clear and Complete Guide to Account Based Marketing, this model has been profitable for many companies. 84% of the surveyed organizations confirmed that their ABM return on investment was “considerably higher” or “much higher” than other forms of marketing.
When identifying the cause of these amazing results, 75% or interviewees replied that their sales ratio improved significantly thanks to ABM, while 84% declared that it had helped them gain their clients loyalty and intensify their relationship with them.
The technique shows very promising results and statistics, which you can use to gain your whole company’s support in your ABM plans. Your company does, of course, need to live up to their promises and show that you can also get these excellent results. To know how to identify and measure your ABM strategy’s results, keep reading!
2) Start measuring from the very beginning
Engagio’s marketing director, Charlie Lian, recommends analyzing Account Based Marketing results back to front. In other words, starting with your final goals (income, opportunities, sales meetings…) and go backwards to measure the content’s success in relation to other types of marketing. You should always take into account each marketing channel’s effectivity in converting in each stage of the conversion funnel.
To be able to measure the return on investment with precision , you will need to assign a cost to each piece of content. This is relatively simple if you outsourced the content creation, but you should also be able to estimate the cost of in-house produced content.
For your measurements to be more precise, you need to concentrate on conversions and key KPIs in your marketing strategy, and not just your number of visitors. Don’t forget to also compare the data between the different channels you use to distribute your content, as your optimal format may very well depend on it.
To successfully analyse your ABM campaigns, I would advise using some sort of marketing automation software. By using an automated platform, you will be able to follow up on each piece of content and each account, from the moment when they see the content for first time, right up until they close the window, going through specific action such as subscribing to your newsletter or following your brand on social media.
3) Follow the right metrics
To do this right, you need to be sure you are following the right metrics, and these can be very different from those in other kinds of digital marketing.
With ABM, you need to measure your content’s ability to generate engagement and make sure you are reaching out to the right contacts at precisely the right moments. On the other hand, your content’s outreach is irrelevant, as your goal is not to impress more users, but rather to impress better segmented users. Other key metrics are the number of targeted accounts actually downloaded your content and the percentage of users who are actually relevant to your strategy. In other words, you are looking to estimate your precision when segmenting your ABM campaigns. The ideal situation is that your content reaches all of your pre-selected contacts using as little resources as possible.
Lastly, you need to analyze your content’s influence on conversions. To be able to actually prove your Account Based Marketing ROI, you need proof that your final sales has increased amongst the audience you have consumed your content. Good luck!
