How to Measure ABM Success

So your company is moving forward with account-based marketing (ABM), and you’re planning to launch your first set of campaigns. Exciting! But I bet you’re a little overwhelmed with all the ideas your team has in store. You’re talking about running ads alongside web personalization, strategic SDR email touches tied to direct mailers, and everything in between.

While great ideas and proper execution are crucial, it’s important to take a step back to define what ABM success would look like at your organization. What are your main objectives? What are your priMary KPIs? How will you know when to scale back or ramp up your different aspects of the program?

Common Demand Gen KPIs

Before we jump into unwrapping the goodness that leads to measuring a successful account-based marketing campaign, we figured we’d share a little background on the traditional standards of measurements that many marketing departments use.

• Web traffic - Identify where your traffic is coming from. Watch for lifts in sessions, pages/sessions, average session duration, and specific goals.
• Email activity - Track email opens and click-through-rates (CTRs).
• Display ads - Look at ad impression and CTRs.
• Social engagement - Tally up reach, likes, and follows.
• Content downloads - Pay attention to high-performing content. It’ll help you understand what resonates best with your prospects and customers. If your content is gated, count the leads each piece generates and build nurture cadences.
• Events - How many people did you talk to? How many emails did you collect, and how many of them were in target?
• Leads - The more emails you collect, the more interest you’re generating, and the more you’re getting your name out there.

These KPIs aren’t necessarily wrong, but they also aren’t measuring the impact of marketing campaigns on revenue. With ABM, we’re introducing a new set of metrics that track account progression across the purchase journey. Account-based marketing metrics show when campaigns drive pipeline and revenue numbers, enabling marketers to take a more well-rounded approach to evaluating success.

Measuring Success in ABM

ABM metrics are about both quantity and quality. When you’re evaluating the success of an ABM campaign, you should be asking yourself, ‘How many of the right prospects at the right accounts did I engage?’ Rather than looking at web activity and CTRs for just anyone, focus on driving engagement within your target accounts.

To properly measure account-based marketing, you need to assess target account progression during the entire purchase journey. This enables you to take a broader view and quantify the impact of your campaigns on your bottom line. By doing so, you’re able to see dollars contributed to pipeline and revenue from campaigns aimed at target accounts.

Stages in account progression:

• Unengaged - Individuals that haven’t been to your website and haven’t engaged with any of your content.
• Engaged - This includes people who have visited your site, downloaded your content, and/or clicked on your ad, meaning they are interested in your product or services and are a potential customer. Targeted ads and web personalization campaigns are the best way to keep your brand in front of this group of people.
• Marketing Qualified Account (MQA) - This is based on account scores and shows the engagement of all stakeholders within an account, not just an individual. With an ABM tool, you can aggregate all types of activities into one score such as engagement in email campaigns, ad impressions, third party intent, and web content. Within an ABM tool, marketers can set an MQA threshold that indicates when that account is ready to talk to sales.
• Pipeline - This refers to open opportunities in CRM of individuals that have already engaged with the sales team.
• Won - Congratulations, the prospect has become a customer!

So you see, ABM isn’t about counting the number of leads you have but rather assessing their value to pipeline. By shifting your measurements of success you gain better visibility into what target accounts should be nurtured and how to properly engage with them to convert prospects into clients.