In this video, you will see how to stop and start your advertising drip campaigns. You will also learn the differences when preparing a campaign, types of qualified accounts, and types of drip campaigns.
How many campaigns should I plan?
This question comes often, “How many campaigns can I or should I run inside of an account-based advertising program?”
ListenLoop has no limits on the number of campaigns you can execute. But there are some practical considerations of how you should prepare your campaigns.
Begin with segmentation of your campaigns by buyer persona, by industry, and by funnel. This method will help you align your campaign with different ABM strategies.
Buyer persona segmentation
Assume you are a marketer for Salesforce CRM products. As you can imagine, you have to consider many different buyer personas. One buyer persona might be a B2B marketer at an IT company. Another buyer persona might be a marketer/sales ops person over at a finance company. And then, an entirely different use case might be a chief revenue officer who is interested in reporting high level metrics at a software company.
Ideally, each buyer persona should have a different set of ads delivered to them.
Your B2B marketer at an IT company should have ads that speak to them in the most relevant way possible. So, in your campaign setup, you should target B2B job titles while uploading a list of IT companies. Then, upload ads tailored to this buyer persona. Repeat these steps for each buyer persona. This is a quick and easy way to segment your campaigns across different buyer personas relevant to your products or services.
Industry-based segmentation
Let’s take a different approach: industry-based segmentation. Unlike the campaigns described above, this approach focuses on a combination of the buyer’s job title and their industry. The result is more generic advertising while achieving more scale for a 1-to-many ABM campaign.
Bottom line, don’t be that marketer who says, “Here’s a list of a thousand accounts. Let’s start advertising to them.” It’s OK to have thousands of accounts, but it is always better if you can segment that list down to at least their respective industries.
Using industry-based segmentation can increase your engagement and click-through rate
Consider segmenting your thousand or so accounts into buckets of 300 – 400 accounts. Then setup different campaigns in ListenLoop, where each campaign is linked to ad relevant for each industry. By maximizing relevancy per industry, your messaging will resonate with target buyers.
Funnel-stage segmentation
Another type of campaign segmentation relies on each account’s CRM funnel stage. Suppose your sales funnel has accounts moving through various stages. You want to deliver ads that are relevant to your accounts at each stage of your funnel.
Top-Funnel Campaign
If you’re targeting net new accounts (NNA), you should deliver brand awareness / positioning ads. At this top-funnel stage, you should deliver ads that distill your brand to 6-8 words. Make it punchy and relevant to the lists of target accounts. Make your ads highly visual with few words and consider omitting a call to action. Look at Engagio’s ads for a great example of brand awareness advertising to target accounts:
Middle-Funnel Campaign
For marketing qualified accounts, who have shown some level of engagement, you should deliver ads that nurture and educate the whole buying unit at a target account.
Perhaps a target account has been to your website multiple times. Someone at the target company has engaged with your content – be it ebooks, white papers, or webinars – but they are not quite a sales qualified opportunity yet. For this type of account, you should deliver ads that educate the rest of the stakeholders within the buying unit. You want to nurture the overall account, so that multiple people at the target company begin having “water cooler” conversations about your product or solution. That’s when the magic happens.
Here is an example of an educational, middle-funnel ad unit from Cloud Elements:
Bottom-Funnel Campaign
Imagine that your salesperson has added an opportunity to an account. Now you should deliver ads that keep your solution top-of-mind and build credibility toward closing the deal.
Consider delivering ads that showcase testimonials and case studies, as supposed to e-books. Break out the “business case calculators” – assets that show how to buy your product in a complex B2B sales environment.
You may want to skip the gated content at this point. You already know the prospects at this account are sales qualified. Instead, deliver un-gated content that builds credibility.
In sum, this blog post showed three ways to segment your advertising campaigns. By associating different ads to each campaign, you can deliver relevant, targeted messaging to your most-desired accounts.
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Also published on Medium.
