August 8, 2023
August 8, 2023
If you are working in the SaaS industry, you must have heard about the two types of marketing approaches: Demand Generation and Account-Based Marketing (ABM). With the current developments in B2B marketing strategies, ABM has really caught the attention of marketing professionals.
Does that mean that you should completely ignore the good, old demand generation approach?
The simple answer is No!
Time for a quick marketing lesson:
Both demand generation and ABM have the same purpose: to increase the number of your customers. The best B2B marketing approach should utilize the potential of both strategies working in parallel to each other to increase the business’ chances of finding customers. If you want to achieve your business goals, we recommend implementing the two approaches in your business’ best interests. But before we delve into the details of why one should focus on both demand generation and ABM, let’s have a quick look at the differences between the two marketing strategies.
If you are already aware of the differences between demand generation and ABM, go ahead and see the framework we aim to work with.
Simply put, Demand Generation is about gathering as many leads as possible. By dint of this approach, decision-makers within an organization are mainly targetted. The leads are given a marketing qualified lead (MQL) score by the organization’s marketing team after they satisfy certain criteria to be considered potential customers. During the process, the leads are continuously nurtured with the intention of building interest and the inclination to buy the product or service. Once a lead has received enough points to be considered an MQL, it is passed on to the sales team.
With the Demand Generation approach, the goal of the marketing team is to generate a maximum number of leads and MQLs until they are transferred to the sales team. Primarily, the two teams work independently with limited exchange of communication.
Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is a B2B marketing strategy primarily executed by marketing and sales teams to target a group of selected accounts that account for better expansion opportunities based on customized marketing campaigns and sales support. The approach is implemented when both marketing leaders and the sales team collaborate in order to create a list of accounts followed by planned engagement to increase the company’s outreach. The success of ABM relies on tailored marketing campaigns for selected accounts.
One of the most promising benefits of an ABM approach is its higher ROI. According to research by Altera group, 97% of respondents claimed that they achieved higher ROI levels with the implementation of ABM as compared to any other marketing strategy.
Certainly, the two approaches are quite different from each other. Considering that, one might wonder if there is a way one can get the best of both worlds.
Let us take you through the main steps of how RevenueOS aims to use a balanced blend of these two approaches to help you achieve your marketing goals.
A summary of our platform is as follows:
You start your marketing campaigns such as using paid ad campaigns on Google, sending emails to lists, starting microblogging on LinkedIn, or outbound sales. When you get traffic and interest from these sources, you will collect all the leads from these sources and implement account-based marketing practices on these leads by nurturing them via Twitter, LinkedIn ads, sending emails, etc. You should rank your leads by giving them a score based on your criteria. If a lead has a score higher than ‘x’, send them to the sales pipeline. Otherwise, you will continue to nurture such leads. After implementing a number of marketing channels, measure the success of each channel by means of reports such as multi-touch revenue attribution and optimize your budget accordingly. You would invest more money in the channels that have room for growth, at the same time, you would pull back from the channels that are not performing well anymore.
The first step is always to test the waters by implementing a plan to reach people. In order to increase the traction of your business, you will have to experiment with different strategies and perhaps develop a system that comprises of more than one channel.
According to Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mayers, the writers of the book “Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers”, there are 19 different traction channels that are being used by companies to increase their reach. Here is a list of all the 19 channels:
It is important to mention that you will have to start using a combination of these channels and understand which strategy works the best for your business needs.
Undoubtedly, a business's success depends on reaching out to people more frequently. On average, people have to ‘hear’ about your product or service at least 7 times before they make the purchase. Therefore, it is important to collect leads through different channels. For example, Reverse Ip can inform you about big companies visiting your website. If these people are not on your CRM, you can target them directly. Following or liking a post on Twitter and LinkedIn shows that the person is interested in your product or content. These leads can certainly be added to your target list and approached wisely.
Leads can also be collected by Form Submission or Sign Up. Before a sales representative contacts a lead from your CRM system, it is important to target them on Twitter or LinkedIn. This way the company is likely to be acquainted with your company and your product before you directly reach out to them.
After collecting leads, it is time to enrich them by finding their company, website, company Twitter handle, etc to target during campaigns such as ads or emails. Only collecting their email address or Twitter handle is not enough!
After attaining a few leads, it’s time to rank them according to your own criteria of an ideal customer. Therefore, the first task is to be able to clearly define your ideal customer based on the size of the product of the company, the development stage, the company size, its number of employees, etc. Once you have a clear vision of an ideal customer’s profile, you can start giving scores to your collected leads.
You can devise a system of scoring leads based on your lead’s profile including its size as well as its behavior. For instance, how much and how frequently do they interact with your content on your website. Based on such activities, the lead’s score would increase, and if they meet your minimum score, the lead can be transferred to the sales pipeline. On the other hand, if a lead has not scored enough points, you nurture them further until they reach the minimum criteria.
After you have scored and enriched some leads, it is time to nurture them. First of all, you would like to nurture a lead after adding it to your CRM system and before the first call. You don’t want the lead to respond with “I don’t know about <your company>”. You could nurture the lead for about a week before making the first call, so it is more likely that you would be able to close the deal.
You could do that by contacting and nurturing the decision-makers in a company on Twitter and LinkedIn using their handles and domains so that they develop an interest in your product or service. Another way of nurturing leads would be to benefit from Twitter Ads and LinkedIn Ads for targeting relevant accounts. If your company has made the decision to use the ABM approach, then it is a good start when you join multiple account-based marketing platforms and learn effective ways of nurturing your leads.
Learn more about Twitter Ads and LinkedIn Ads for nurturing your accounts.
For a B2B marketing team, it is vital to understand what kind of their activities are initiating customer journeys and bringing revenue. Revenue attribution models come in very handy in finding the main lead-conversion channels. Such revenue attribution models derive data after data-crunching and credit-division, so you can make learned decisions about your campaigns.Revenue attribution reports can provide critical insights regarding the customer journey from their first touch to their final purchase. Moreover, the attribution reports can be helpful in measuring the extent of revenue generation across your pipeline, channels, and campaigns.
For instance, one has to make certain decisions regarding their traction channels which could be working better at the top of the funnel but are not performing as well at the bottom. A different set of traction channels would then be advised to be used at the bottom of the funnel to drive more revenue.
Does putting more money into a campaign guarantee success? Certainly not. Once you have multiple active marketing campaigns, it is time to evaluate their performance and their success by dint of revenue attribution reports and consequently, allocate your budget. For instance, putting more money into one campaign might not be fruitful as it might have already reached its saturation point. An iterative approach is a method of improving the condition of a process or product by constant reviewing and testing. It is always better to use an iterative approach of scaling up or down when it comes to optimizing your different channels as you can see how every channel performs over time before making any long-lasting decision.
It is faster and more efficient to optimize your traction channels based on your lead scoring because there are different types of optimization goals. Some businesses want to optimize their campaigns according to their revenue generation while others may want to optimize the channels that bring more leads. Companies with long sales cycles find it difficult to optimize based on revenue generation and optimizing based just on leads can also be misdirecting as not all leads are equal. Consequently, one must optimize their campaigns based on their lead scores and focus on the channels that bring better leads.
Let’s get to know each other better!
If you have come this far, it would be safe to say that there is something that caught your attention. Our team would be glad to hear from you, learn about your methodologies, give more details about ours, and remove all doubt! Please feel free to contact us and book an appointment.
Let’s discuss your current process and explore customized automation solutions with RevenueOS.io
