Hello there! It's Chisco from Kognic, and today I'm excited to explain how you can create your Account-Based Marketing (ABM) campaigns in three steps. ABM stands for Account-Based Marketing, which means focusing our marketing resources on a specific set of targeted accounts. Our goal is to design the best campaign based on the intelligence that our sales team provides, allowing us to personalize the buyer journey effectively.
Step 1: Goals setting and Personas
First, we need to understand who our customer is so we can craft the most suitable campaigns for them. We address our campaigns towards two primary goals: lead generation, to feed into the sales pipeline, and brand awareness. By setting these clear objectives, we ensure our efforts are aligned with our overall business strategy.
Goals Setting
Setting clear goals is critical to the success of any ABM campaign. We start by identifying the key objectives we want to achieve. These could include increasing brand awareness, generating high-quality leads, improving customer retention, or enhancing customer engagement.
Next, we align these goals with our overall business strategy to ensure that our marketing efforts support our broader company objectives. Finally, we establish key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitor progress towards our goals. These include metrics such as the number of new leads generated, conversion rates, or the return on investment (ROI) of our campaigns. Regularly we review these KPIs to track our progress and make adjustments as necessary to stay on target.
Defining Personas
Personas are the key people we meet in our buyer journey. For that, we maintain a living document on Notion where we collect as much information as possible about their problems, pains, goals, and benefits. The more information we gather, the more accurate our campaigns will be, leading to better engagement with our clients. See an example of one of our personas in the screenshot below.
Step 2: ABM Campaign Design
After collecting all the necessary information from our personas, we translate that into the best marketing advertisements.
Collaborative Approach
Within our marketing team, we also use a living document on Notion. One person is in charge of the copy, another handles the visuals, and someone else distributes the content across the different channels and oversees the overall strategy. This collaborative approach ensures that the campaign is cohesive and well-executed.
Structuring Ads
We base our ads on different objectives, such as "LeadGen Europe" or "Brand Awareness USA", and structure them with a title, copy, and image. After gathering all the information with the marketing team, we integrate this knowledge into our advertisement campaigns.
Step 3: Campaign Execution and Measurement
Once the campaign is designed, the next step is execution.
Launching the Campaign
We launch the campaign across various channels, targeting the specific accounts we identified. At Kognic, we use LinkedIn Campaign Manager as our main advertisement platform, where we run campaigns with specific goals and monitor their performance over time. It's crucial to continuously monitor the campaign's performance and make adjustments as needed.
Our LinkedIn Campaigns - Above, you can see a screenshot when we launched our ads campaigns in June, divided into Lead Generation in Europe, and Brand Awareness in the USA.
Analyzing Results
We use analytics tools to measure engagement, conversion rates, and ROI. Regular check-ins with the sales team help us align our efforts and ensure that the campaign is meeting its goals. For instance, we receive automated notifications from our CRM (see the image below), which notify both the marketing and sales managers when a marketing qualified lead is generated. This allows the sales manager to promptly reach out to the lead for an initial call.
Continuous Improvement
Our job doesn't end with the launch. We keep monitoring the campaigns to see what works best and analyze the results after each campaign with the sales team. This ongoing process helps us modify and adapt our campaigns according to market feedback.
We hope these steps provide a clear roadmap for creating effective ABM campaigns. If you're interested in implementing something similar or have any questions, feel free to reach out. Stay tuned for more insights in our next Marketing Masterclass!
