Monitor Account-Based Marketing Activities

You need know where your prospects are most active, and whether this is on inbound or outbound marketing channels. Sending prospects content and engaging them helps to create activity, ultimately bringing them closer to revenue, but you need to specifically know what's working. Using your marketing automation system, you can monitor the activities that try to connect with your contacts.

You monitor the engagement level of your contacts in accounts through reports. By using reports, you can see which reports are generating the most interest. This figure shows an example of the reports available in your marketing automation system.

You can drill down in these reports to see which campaigns are most effective for your contacts in accounts. The next figure shows a snapshot of activity at the contact-level with applicable scores.

You can set up rules in your marketing automation system. Rules are if/then statements predicated on specific activities.

Here is an example of a rule: If an opportunity is created, then those people are removed from an inbound nurture program, such as a drip email. Because your contact in the account is progressing to an opportunity, the contact needs different types of marketing. Your messaging, advertising, and content need to be specific to each stage.

You can get advanced with a nurture track for each stage of the account's journey: prospect, opportunity, and customer. When the contacts get transferred will depend on which stage they are in the purchase decision.

The first person who came in through inbound marketing will become the primary contact in the account associated with the opportunity. As you expand your marketing efforts to other contacts in the account, you need to make sure they're all tied to the same revenue opportunity. If not, those contacts would continue to receive nurture email drips because they're still listed in the prospect stage. There are two ways to set this up correctly to ensure all contacts tied to the account receive the same stage-based content:

• The sales account executive who owns the account should update the stage of contacts associated in the account in your CRM to change the messaging for the entire account.
• If the contact has been investigating your website, and is not yet associated with a revenue opportunity, leave the other contacts in the account in the prospect stage so they continue to receive introductory content. These nurturing activities help to "warm up" all the contacts in the account.