3 Steps to Drive Demand with ABM Social Media Campaigns

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by Samuel Pordengerg Mar 17, 2023 News
3 Steps to Drive Demand with ABM Social Media Campaigns

The Marketing Director at Full Circle Insights outlines three ways companies can use social media to drive demand.

B2B marketers don’t need to be convinced to adopt an account-based marketing (ABM) approach—the overwhelming majority are already there, according to Foundry research, which revealed that 94 percent of marketers have an ABM strategy in place. While B2B marketers have enthusiastically embraced ABM, most still struggle with performance measurement; the same survey revealed 81 percent of survey respondents found quantifying program results as their top challenge. 

According to the survey, many marketers don't know how to measure the effectiveness of their paid and organic social media campaigns. Forrester has a B2B revenue waterfall that can provide the necessary structure. The buying group journey is depicted in the updated waterfall.

B2B marketers can map out social media campaigns to get better insight into the customer journey and an overview of the metrics they need to understand how well their paid and organic social media campaigns perform.

1) Creating awareness and detecting target accounts

You can use paid and organic social media campaigns focused on intent topics relevant to your line of business if you define the target market and ideal customer profile. You can mark contacts as members of account buying groups that show interest in your products at this point in time.

Your social media content could include paid campaigns on sites like LinkedIn, which is a great platform to reach people in career mode, or nurturing leads organically by posting links to relevant content. Target account volume can be used to understand the effectiveness of your paid and organic social marketing strategy.

2) Activating and engaging accounts

Your marketing focus will change as your campaign progresses. You want your target accounts to engage with your website's content. Stage 4 of the Forrester B2B revenue waterfall is when you associate and prioritize buying groups.

Suppose you run digital campaigns on social media platforms. You would look at the campaigns that drove buying group members to engage with your site. Purchasing group members will have different needs depending on their role within the company and progress on the buying journey You can invest in campaigns that work and cut those that don't with metrics like the engagement to prioritized conversion percentage.

3) Prioritizing accounts and driving pipeline growth

The Forrester B2B revenue waterfall stages include the marketing and sales handoff. Hyper-segmentation is one of the advantages of the ABM approach, it allows you to communicate with buying group members in a more personal way. Your hyper-segmentation strategy will come to fruition when this step is taken.

The marketing team could follow up on active accounts to nurture leads and the sales team could build relationships with qualified buying group members on the LinkedIn platform. The team can assess campaign performance by using key metrics.

Many marketers are still figuring out how to quantify the results of their programs. The Forrester B2B revenue waterfall gives context on the stages of the buyer journey. It is a good way to see the B2B buyer experience because it focuses on target accounts.

It is helpful to map out how real-world social media campaigns generate leads within that framework and what steps you can take to improve conversion rates from the Detected accounts to the Won stage. The single source of data truth for performance metrics can be found in theCRM.

An overview of steps to take at each stage of the revenue funnel can be found in a cheat sheet. You will be prepared to fully embrace an ABM approach that reflects your work as a B2B marketer and align your efforts more closely with your sales team. If you follow these three steps, you will be better prepared to quantify the impact of your programs.

Brianna Perkins Marketing Director at Full Circle InsightsBrianna Perkins is the Marketing Director at Full Circle Insights, a martech measurement platform. Brianna is a driven and compassionate B2B marketing leader with extensive experience in ABM, growth marketing, and brand strategy in the martech industry. She is a health and wellness advocate passionate about helping others lead with a proactive growth mindset to build impactful relationships.
Brianna Perkins
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