Account Based Marketing

How to tackle ABM Advertising to Meet Your Business Goals

One of the long-standing marketing strategies of the internet age that saw a large uptick of investment this year was display advertising. In light of remote work, it makes sense. The thought process is, by leveraging a targeted ad strategy, you can make up for some of that brand presence you’d normally get at events and drive awareness to an expanded audience.

In our most recent customer TableTalk session, we discussed just that—the common myths around account-based advertising, what it can do for your demand gen, and what it can’t. Today’s blog post covers three great questions we got from our customers that all marketers should be asking about their ABM ads.

What is the Best Type of Targeting? 

Really, it depends. The two priMary types of targeting that people talk about are IP targeting and cookie targeting. Fortunately, Triblio’s learning engine handles both types of targeting and allows you to use a mix of the two, depending on what your goals are. 

In the US, we recommend using a contact-based ad targeting strategy. There’s a time and place for IP targeting, but generally, if you know exactly who you’re going after, a contact-based strategy will keep your targeting lean for more cost-efficient results. Unfortunately, contact targeting is not available in some regions of the world due to privacy restrictions like GDPR. Nevertheless, while IP targeting is broader than contact targeting, account-based ads as a whole are always going to save spend in comparison to traditional advertising.

Unique to 2020 is the concern around targeting accuracy in a remote workforce. However, we haven’t found teleworking to be an issue due to the widespread use of VPNs. Those logging in through VPNs chime into their corporate IP addresses, and as far as we can see, there hasn’t been a drop in the ability for ad networks to reach target accounts.

How Long Should You Run Dynamic, Intent-based Campaigns? 

Again, it depends. This is contingent on how you set up your campaign. If you’re using Bombora data surge to choose the window to run your campaigns, we recommend anywhere from four to six weeks for the best results. Running your campaigns any less than four weeks won’t allow enough time to nurture the accounts receiving your ads. If you're using the intent data to simply campaign plan and gather a set of account lists then we would still suggest waiting the four-week period to start looking at the responses from the campaign.

A pro tip is to use intent for segmentation and sequencing. Perhaps you push the disengaged accounts in your campaign into a separate audience. There you can a.) run different messaging against an alternate audience to see if another offer resonates better and b.) double up efforts towards those who are engaging with the existing campaign to drum up more conversions with those who are more ready to buy.

Are you spending enough to make a difference?

What we’ve found is, most organizations are not spending enough on their ABM ad campaigns to create a real impact on demand gen or pipeline growth. In Q3, most of our customers needed to increase spending 5x to 10x more than what they were actually spending per account for optimal results. On average, Triblio customers’ spend rate hovered right around $0.98 per account, when ideally they needed to be in the $5-10 range per account, every month.

It’s important to match your budget to the correct targeting source. When targeting a specific contact, a good rule of thumb is ½ cent a day per contact and when targeting IPs, spending $0.45 a day per account is good practice. Keep an eye out on daily spend caps to get a better idea on spending trends and to correctly adjust your ad budget. It pays dividends to be diligent in checking the ebb and flow of your ad performance as the correct spend rates are periodically adjusting.  

Hopefully, we tackled some of your account-based ad strategy woes and you feel ready to spruce up your ad execution. But if you’re looking for more tips on how to polish up your ABM ad strategy schedule a meeting with one of our experts today.

About the Author

Joanne

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