B2B marketing leaders need to drive demand in creative new ways.
The problem? It can be tough to get creative in a climate of high pressure and low resources. Successful marketers know that tough economic conditions are a cue to double down on proven tactics—like ABM—while also taking smart risks. Read on for the 5 key reasons top performing companies are prioritizing ABM right now, and get a sneak peek of Inverta’s new ABM Starter Pack, which makes it easier than ever to build, launch, optimize, and scale a pilot ABM pilot program.
- ABM provides focus to your sales and marketing teams, so they stop spinning their wheels and start collaborating more effectively to drive demand. By aligning your efforts around a set of target accounts, you can ensure that your teams are working together towards a common goal. This laser focus helps to eliminate the inefficiencies that often arise when sales and marketing are working in silos. What’s more, this collaboration leads to better alignment on messaging and more targeted outreach, which in turn delivers a more cohesive buyer experience. By providing focus and alignment, ABM can help your teams work smarter, not harder, to achieve your revenue goals.
- ABM is an efficient use of budget because you’re only spending money to engage accounts that are your ideal fit. Unlike traditional marketing approaches that cast a wide net and hope to catch some leads, ABM is highly targeted—akin to spear fishing. In fact, in a study by ITSMA, 87% of marketers who measured ROI said that ABM outperformed other marketing investments. By identifying and prioritizing these accounts, you can be sure that you are spending your marketing budget in the most effective way possible. Rather than wasting resources on leads that may never convert, you can concentrate your efforts on engaging the accounts that are most likely to become customers. This targeted approach not only saves money, but it also generates higher quality leads and ultimately, higher returns on your investment.
- ABM increases the value of pipeline opportunities. By focusing on high-potential accounts and delivering personalized content and outreach, ABM can build stronger relationships with prospects which not only increases the likelihood of conversion, but can also boost contract values. According to a study by Alterra Group, companies that implemented ABM saw a 171% increase in their average annual contract value. How? ABM allows marketers (and Sales, too!) to tailor their messaging and approach to the specific needs and pain points of each account, which can lead to a more engaged and receptive audience. In addition, ABM enables companies to target decision-makers directly, expanding the scope of the buying conversation to address organization-wide needs.
- When implemented correctly, ABM is low risk and high impact. One of the most appealing aspects is its low risk, high reward nature. Inverta has helped hundreds of companies, both enterprise and high growth, implement and scale ABM successfully. And with our new ABM Starter Pack, we not only help clients identify high-potential accounts and personalize outreach, but we also set you up with proven ABM platforms to ensure your team is equipped with the necessary tools for success. With the ABM Starter Pack, you can achieve more predictable and consistent revenue growth within six months, without the risk and uncertainty of other traditional marketing tactics.
- It’s easy to prove the ROI of ABM by identifying your key metrics at every account stage. Unlike some other tactics, ABM provides a clear and measurable impact at every step of the sales and marketing process, across three types of KPIs: revenue, relationships, and reputation. This level of visibility allows you to optimize your program and adjust your approach to best serve your target accounts. It also equips you to socialize early engagement metrics with your executives and stakeholders, to demonstrate marketing’s impact long before a new pipeline opportunity is created.
To put it simply, marketers are doubling down on ABM because it works.
How it works is an entirely separate conversation—but we’d be remiss not to mention one critical, but often overlooked aspect of running a successful ABM program. And that’s the marketing technology that makes it all happen behind the scenes, such as:
- identifying priority accounts based on intent signals
- personalizing content and creating custom content experiences
- delivering real-time intelligence to optimize your program design
- coordinating messages and content across channels and stages of the buyer’s journey
Whether you purchase new ABM technology to achieve your goals or work to integrate your existing tools to support your program design will depend on what you currently own and what you’re trying to achieve.. Remember, the end goal is to work smarter, not harder, to drive pipeline., So think through your marketing technology needs and strategy before you launch your program.
If you need support in your account-based marketing strategy, technology, or execution, the ABM Starter Pack can get you up and running quickly, while equipping you with a scalable foundation for growth. If you start now, you can launch an ABM pilot with early results in Q4. Learn more about the ABM Starter Pack today!
Making the most of marketing technology is an increasingly important priority for B2B marketing leaders. The market is becoming flooded with more and more martech solutions. Finding the right one and using it strategically is becoming a challenge for marketers. This problem is expected to become more and more common in the coming years.
In 2023, 75% of businesses will increase their technology budgets. 60% of marketers will invest in new software, and 56% will update their data infrastructure. To succeed, marketing campaigns need to be highly strategic, technology-empowered, and operationalized across all marketing functions.
To help marketers unify their technology and activation strategies, Inverta and PathFactory have partnered up. This collaboration will enable marketers to develop customized, captivating, and conversion-oriented experiences across their content, martech, and strategy.
Let’s break down the challenges marketers face, how Inverta’s partnership with PathFactory addresses those problems, and the benefits of applying both Inverta and PathFactory in a B2B marketing organization.
The Challenging Intersection of Technology, Strategy, & Activation
The biggest challenge B2B marketers face today is marrying the full breadth and depth of their marketing technology to their strategy. Strategy and technology both need to inform the other. Still, without the right expertise and focus, it’s all too easy for marketing teams to fall into the trap of trying to activate a strategy without the right tools.
For example, personalization is an increasingly important aspect of content campaigns. Too many campaigns lack:
- Strategy driven by a deep understanding of the martech stack.
- Insights from relevant and robust analytics tools.
- Efficiency, ease-of-use, or scalability.
“In the current market, impersonal email campaigns and webinar invites aren’t driving as much value as they used to,” said Dev Ganesan, PathFactory CEO and President. “B2B revenue teams understand that their buyers want personalized and relevant content experiences, yet this is difficult to provide without the right tech stack.”
That’s where Inverta and PathFactory’s partnership comes in. Together, we can help companies enrich their marketing strategies and drive revenue by closing the gap between idea and execution, technology and strategy.
The Inverta & PathFactory Approach
So, how does it work? Inverta and PathFactory work together by applying Inverta’s strategic expertise in strategy design and technology activation to PathFactory’s platform so marketers can deliver personalized and automated marketing experiences.
Inverta and PathFactory’s combined approach is unique in several ways. Together, we help B2B marketers like yourself by:
- Content Strategy and Development: Without a solid content strategy, organizations find it difficult to effectively engage with their target audience, improve their brand image, and ultimately drive conversions. Inverta can assist by auditing what exists, identifying gaps and making recommendations that will create a content map that will effectively speak to their audience.
- PathFactory Execution Services: Designed to help businesses get the most out of the PathFactory platform, our team will build, manage and optimize PathFactory tracks to ensure that they are delivering the desired results. Additionally, we will help develop use cases that integrate PathFactory into a company’s campaign planning process, which helps to make it a standard channel used across your team.
- Building Your Tech Strategy: If you’ve ever struggled to prove the ROI of your tech investment, it’s likely because you lack the right strategy to leverage the technology in support of your GTM strategy. We can help guide you through auditing the tech you have, assessing new technologies, and building the use cases to integrate and bring your tech stack to life.
- Helping With Enablement & Change Management: A fully integrated tech ecosystem, when operating at its fullest potential will require the team to change the way it does things. So enabling the team on the new processes and investing in change management will ensure your teams fully adopt and put tech investments to use.
“We work with clients to operationalize and optimize personalization across messaging, content, and the overall experience with a client’s brand,” said Kathy Macchi, Inverta’s Executive Vice President of Innovation. “Together, Inverta and PathFactory make it easier to bring a B2B marketer’s innovative vision and strategy to life.”
The Outcomes: Improve Engagement, Personalization, & Tech Insights
Ultimately, an Inverta and PathFactory partnership makes sense because of the improved outcomes and ROI that marketing teams can experience when combining the two together. After all, companies who invest in deeper customer data analytics and can apply their findings to strategy make better choices, save money, and come up with more innovative products and services that their customers want.
By applying Inverta’s expertise to PathFactory’s platforms, you can experience benefits like:
- Increased engagement for your target audiences.
- Accelerated revenue through personalized content experiences.
- More audience insights, and content performance data that drives strategy.
Together, we can help your company have a smarter strategy, more connected technology, and accelerated revenue growth. Learn more about how Inverta and PathFactory can help your B2B marketing organization activate technology and improve your strategy.
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Unfortunately, simply co-writing or exchanging blog posts doesn’t constitute a true partner marketing strategy. Partner marketing can, and should, be so much more!
Blogs are to partner marketers what leads are to demand-gen marketers — an activity-based metric. While important, certainly, a partner marketing effort can be more.
Instead, partner marketers can learn from the ABM discipline of driving fully-fledged, targeted campaigns to make the most of a co-marketing partnership. When two partners come together on full campaigns that articulate the value of the partnership to their audiences, their impact doubles.
In this blog, we’ll break down the challenges and payoffs that come when you adopt an ABM mindset to partner marketing.
The Why & How of Teaming Up for Partner Marketing Campaigns
Adding two logos on a piece of content and calling it good isn’t the best partner marketing strategy. However, if this is you, you’re not alone. A recent survey of marketing leaders found that a lack of strategy is the greatest challenge to making partner marketing work for 25% of teams. Given that 15% don’t even have a documented partner marketing strategy at all, well, you see the problem.
An effective partner marketing strategy requires much more. It requires you and your partner to put on your ABM hats and get down into the details of your shared audiences, how a campaign might engage them, and what mutual benefits you can take away.
In short, it’s identifying a common story you and your partner are qualified to tell together, crafting a theme, identifying the programs and tactics you’ll deploy to get the campaign to market, and then creating joint goals to evaluate success. In essence, it’s an ABM campaign.
Is this hard to pull together? You bet! You’ll face hurdles such as:
- Identifying the right partners to begin with. Then, getting all the stakeholders on board to support the budget, resources, and promotion.
- Leveraging collective data, ensuring mutual benefits, and maintaining clear and concise communication for the duration of the campaign.
- Managing partner expectations regarding outcomes. Some 22% of marketers don’t pursue a partner marketing program because they couldn’t establish mutual growth goals with partners in the past.
However, that doesn’t mean going all in on a partner marketing campaign isn’t worth it. We know from experience! In a future post, we’ll break down the behind-the-scenes process of pulling together five industry-leading technology partners with us into the year-long campaign Martech Masterclass Series.
Payoffs of Great Partner Marketing Campaigns
We aren’t the only ones who’ve experienced great success from treating partner marketing more like an ABM campaign. A 2022 partner marketing benchmark report found that 56% of partner marketing programs have resulted in success over the past year, and 88% of marketers see partner marketing as a necessary tactic that yields value.
Whether you’re a tech partner or a services partner, combining your knowledge and expertise with a partner can multiply your efforts. Indeed, a well-crafted partner campaign can have a 1+1=3 effect.
Let’s break down the benefits of partner marketing for tech and service partners to illustrate how this can work in practice:
- Two Tech Partners: When two tech partners collaborate, they can talk about the power of their combined solution. After all, a campaign dedicated toward their joint customers can be much more successful than if they had one or the other product in a silo.
- Tech Partner + Services Partner: A campaign between these two is a little trickier since it can give the perception that the tech is so complicated it needs a service partner to interpret it. However, if done well, the service partner can provide the value of an “impartial opinion” to give credence to the claims of the tech partner. Meanwhile, it sets the service partner apart from competitors by demonstrating their specific knowledge and expertise associated with that particular technology. Win, win!
- Two Services Partners: Lastly, a partner marketing campaign between two service partners helps demonstrate a united solution where two partners can work together to solve related issues a potential client could have. Each focuses on its area of expertise, and each benefits from and augments the work of the other.
Next Steps: Transforming Your Partner Marketing Approach
As we’ve mentioned, the traditional approach to partner marketing is often very transactional. You sponsor my conference, let’s co-sponsor a field event, I’ll write you a blog post… sigh. The strategy behind it is all but absent.
So, how can you start to solve this? By hiring solid campaign marketers who have a sales mindset for generating revenue, just like ABM marketers do. THEN your partner marketing efforts can take on their strategic destiny and start to work as an arm of your company’s demand gen efforts.
At Inverta, our experts jump right into your team to cost-effectively optimize your strategy, campaigns, and more — including for partnering marketing. Learn more about what we offer here.
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