The central idea of account-based marketing is for B2B marketing and sales teams to focus on their best-fit prospects and opportunities instead of "spraying and praying" like traditional lead-based marketing. Before ABM, the key metric for measuring marketing campaigns was how many leads were created from these activities. Now, with account-based marketing, the key performance indicator is how many revenue opportunities were generated from these marketing activities. This is called marketing-sourced pipeline.
Your account-based marketing activities will include a variety of campaigns and channels, depending on your target audience. The one constant will be how you measure each of these campaigns. Here is how you will audit the performance of your account-based marketing efforts, then adjust as needed for improved results:
- Advertising: How many contacts in your target accounts did your display ads reach? What was the cost per click (CPC)? How much did you spend? Did it progress these accounts to the stage in the purchase decision or "account's journey"? The stages of the account's journey include
- Marketing Qualified Account (MQA)
- Sales Qualified Account (SQA)
- Opportunity
- Customer
- Email: If you're going to send an email, start by preparing a list of contacts in accounts based on their industry and where they are in the account's journey. This list of who you're targeting with your message will be the foundation for what content you include in the email. The metrics to measure of your email campaigns include
- Open rates: The percentage of people who opened the email.
- Click-thru rates: The percentage of people who clicked on the call-to-action (CTA) in the email. A CTA can be such as registering for an event and downloading content.
- Content: Such as case studies, whitepapers, ebooks, and infographics. How many people in your target accounts downloaded the content?
- Social media: The number of contacts in your target accounts who clicked on one of your sponsored posts on social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter.
- Website: Conversions from the right accounts on landing pages, form completions from personas in ICPs, blog post reads, time spent on site.
- In person-events: New contacts you met at a tradeshow who work for companies which align with your target accounts.
- Digital events: Webinars and virtual summits. Look at the registrant and attendee lists. What content was offered, revised as needed for your next event.
