Make your ABM efforts count in 2024
Marketers expect budgets to increase in 2024, but the majority of B2B marketing teams are still perceived by CEOs and boards as a cost center rather than a source of company growth. This year, B2B marketing teams need to align all of their go-tomarket motions to create a unified experience across channels to attract buyer groups from their most profitable market segments.
The facts are clear. To drive growth in 2024 marketing teams need to break out of their channel silos, create connected messaging between ABM and demand, and build cross-functional marketing teams to deliver optimized experiences for their segments.
As you plan for 2024, it’s critical to focus on ways to maximize your ABM and demand programs. This guide will outline four priorities for optimizing your efforts:
- Connect ABM programs to lead generation programs. Learn how the addition of lead generation tactics can benefit your ABM programs.
- Invest in lifecycle revenue marketing to drive growth. Apply ABM and demand tactics to support retention, cross-sell, and upsell revenue.
- Extend the reach of your programs to third-party channels where buyers do research. Find out where your prospects prefer to search for purchase information and use your paid and earned media strategy to connect with those outlets.
- Redefine content marketing. Content can no longer only support your top of-funnel needs. You need to create content to support the entire customer lifecycle: acquisition, retention, and expansion.
74%
of B2B marketers expect budgets for programs, personnel, and technology to increase in 2024.
Forrester Vision Report 2024 Planning Guide
Connect ABM with lead generation programs
Eighty-seven percent of marketers say ABM outperforms every other marketing investment they make, while 80% of marketers say the win rate is higher in ABM engaged accounts. Yet executing ABM at scale is both challenging and expensive. That’s because ABM is personalized and requires additional investment in content customization and data insights to achieve results.
You can maximize ABM efforts by folding in tactics from your lead generation program. Here’s how:
- Look beyond display advertising. Display advertising is a commonly used tactic to support ABM programs. While display ads are effective, they aren’t enough. It’s important to experiment and test new ways to reach your target segments.
- Deliver proven demand tactics to account segments. Savvy ABM marketers are leveraging successful demand tactics such as webinars, digital experiences, and content syndication to engage with specific account segments. For large account (1-to-1) ABM, marketers are creatively using channels such as account-specific intranets and proprietary events to deliver marketing offers.
- Pursue a cross-channel, buyer-centric approach. Cross-channel campaigns — campaigns that integrate multiple programs and tactics — are the top strategic marketing approach right now.
Benefits:
When marketers adopt a cross-channel, buyer-centric approach, they see up to a 15% increase in revenue and a 30% decrease in costs.
50%
of B2B marketing decision-makers named creating connected messaging to better align experiences across-channels as their number one priority for driving growth.
Forrester 2023 Communications Survey
Invest in lifecycle revenue marketing
Lifecycle revenue marketing goes beyond new customer acquisition. It utilizes ABM and demand marketing techniques to support retention, cross-sell, and up-sell programs. With ABM in place to drive net new customer growth, create small crossfunctional marketing teams to run test programs designed to enable specific customer retention and expansion motions. Here’s how to optimize in this area:
An effective, productive, and profitable content syndication nurture strategy includes five data-driven components:
- Use ABM strategies to gain insight for segmentation. Marketing often segments accounts based on internal factors, like sales territories, which doesn’t allow tailored messaging to groups of similar accounts. Better segmentation approaches include account size, shared industry, and customer whitespace analysis.
- Develop relevant messaging and content based on those segments. Conduct research to identify specific pain points and topics of interest to your account segments. Identify messaging needs utilizing buyer journey stages and desired program outcomes to create messaging maps to support your expansion programs. For example, you might want to create content covering the buyer’s journey stages of awareness, consideration, and conversion to support selling a set of customer accounts a new solution you’ve created.
- Develop “cross-functional” marketing teams. Break your marketing teams out of their channel silos. Instead create project-based teams with stakeholders from demand, ABM, digital, content, marketing operations, and product marketing. Direct these teams to develop cross-channel programs and experiences for buying groups from specific segments.
Benefits:
In 2024, everyone knows how to optimize the performance of a single channel. Competitive advantage can only be gained through optimizing the performance of all your channels for individual segments. Develop cross-functional teams and focus them on driving growth in intelligently selected prospect and customer segments.
Extend your reach with third-party channels
Today’s B2B decision makers are doing their own research. Seventy percent fully define their needs before engaging with sales, while 60% will seek information from third-party sources by 2025. Also, individuals don’t make purchase decisions anymore; buying groups do. And these groups are getting larger, with a current average of 12–18 engaged buyers per group.
To reach your target accounts, it’s important to get your message out via third-party channels where they are researching. Here’s how:
- Identify all the personas in the buying group you’re targeting. It’s key to address all the individual personas in B2B buying groups. Take time to discover their unique needs and challenges.
- Find out where they go to do research and exchange information. Which industry news channels do they consult? Which trade shows do they attend? Where do they connect with others in their industry? What kind of content do they like to consume, and where? Ask other customers in their segment for insights.
- Understand the buyer journey. Consider the purchase journey from their point of view, not yours. Connect personas with the business issues that concern them.
- Create relevant content and invest in solutions that connect to those third- party channels. Track third-party channels for trending topics. Then, create targeted content that speaks to your buyers’ needs.
Benefits:
Taking a buyer-centric approach lets you reach your audience with the right message at the right time on the right channel, yielding more engagement and conversions.
21%
of B2B buyers are more likely to consider purchasing solutions from vendors that personalize their messaging to specific business needs.
Momentum ITSMA’s 2022 ABM Benchmarking Study
Redefine content marketing
Ninety-seven percent of marketers say content is a key part of their overall strategy. But there’s a productivity limit for traditional content marketing and many teams have already reached the point of diminishing returns. In 2024, you need to re-define content marketing. Content can no longer only support your top-of-funnel needs. You need to create content to support the entire customer lifecycle: acquisition, retention, and expansion.
Content must provide the right message, at the right time, for the right segment. Here’s how to make the pivot:
- Identify content gaps that matter. SEO keyword research isn’t where content marketing starts and ends. Examine the set of buyer journeys you need to enable for acquisition and expansion across all your solution sets. Do you have content to support every single buyer journey stage for every single solution you sell? Do you have content to support every possible expansion motion?
- Don’t create content for personas. That’s just not specific enough in 2024. You need to create content for a persona, in a specific buying group, in a specific account segment, from which your marketing team is trying to generate demand for a specific offering. Identify the full set of such combinations that exist, prioritize them according to expected profitability, then start creating precise content with the right context.
- Don’t distribute content, activate buyer journeys. If your content team produces specific content, ensure it’s being activated across channels with appropriate audience segmentation, targeting, and messaging. The marketers that manage channels need to be enabled on the content. Don’t give them individual pieces – give them a sequence of content assets that constitute a complete buyers journey.
- Measure content against the only result that matters. Measure your content in the context of the buyer’s journey that it supports. Set specific goals for content by buying stages using short-run (buyer group acquisition and engagement) and long-run indicators (pipeline and revenue influence). When you execute and measure your content strategy to determine its impact on creating end to end buyer journeys for specific offerings for specific segments, you’ll quickly see which journeys you need to optimize and at what stages.
Benefits:
Shift from creating content to generate leads to creating buyer journeys designed to influence specific buyers to make purchase decisions about specific offerings.
90%
of tech-decision makers highlight that it’s important for vendors to provide relevant content at each stage of the buying process.
Forrester Content Preferences Survey
Ivanti sees 41% of pipeline now generated by marketing
- 41% pipeline generated by marketing – up from less than 30%
- 225% achievement of new opportunity creation
- 52% wins from marketing-generated pipeline
- 119% achievement of total pipeline value
“Precision Demand Marketers map personalized journeys that work in concert with their cross-channel peers. They engage with the best prospects at optimum touchpoints — the right message to the right person in the right channel at the right time. They abandon their bloated tech stack in favor of the right technologies. They know the who, what, when, why, and how of their sales and marketing data program. And ultimately, they improve marketing ROI.”
Leslie Alore
Global Vice President, Growth Marketing, Ivanti
