These days, you only have to scroll through social media for a few minutes to know video is dominating the content sphere for brands. But if you are new to the video marketing game, getting started can feel daunting. 

Lucky for you, there’s no need to start from scratch. Whether you plan on starting a YouTube channel or have your sights set on increasing the organic reach of your brand’s social feeds, the best way to begin is by repurposing your existing content. 

Creating videos from your existing content is easier than you might think. And it’s a highly effective way to increase your marketing reach.

Why video is a must-have for all marketers 

Before we jump into repurposing different types of content, let’s spend a minute talking about the treasure trove that is video marketing. Why is video so important for brands? 

Video increases engagement

When it comes to likes, comments, and shares, video content consistently outperforms images. We see this a lot with ads, but it holds true across the board. Even organic video posts outperform image posts in the likes department by up to 45.95%.

Video increases engagement

Breaking into video-only platforms like YouTube gives you access to audiences that may not be on other social sites. Most social media platforms see a sharp decline in users in the 40-plus age bracket, but not YouTube. In America, 70% of people between the ages of 46 to 55 and 67% of people over age 55 use YouTube. 

Video is persuasive and memorable 

72% of customers say they prefer learning about a product or service by way of video. And it’s no wonder why. On average, people retain 10% of a message when reading it in text, compared to 95% when they watch it in a video. 

The bottom line: video marketing is powerful. And it’s high time you get it working for you. You’re already sitting on a gold mine of tried and tested content. Extend the shelf life of your content and break into the video marketing game with these five easy ideas.

1. Turn glowing reviews into testimonial videos

You probably already have a good amount of customer testimonials in written form. This is perfect fodder for video content. Testimonial videos can populate a YouTube channel and then be used across different platforms like websites, emails, and ad campaigns. 

And they are incredibly easy to make .

When most people hear the term “testimonial video”, they imagine a labor-intensive process of filming customers in person and cutting together a video montage. But in reality, you can create effective testimonial videos in a matter of minutes. 

First, pick your top five testimonials and winnow each down to one or two lines. Next, combine stock background video footage with these written testimonials to create compelling visuals. Include slick transitions and a soundtrack and you are in business. 

2. Create effective how-to videos

How-to or explainer videos are some of the most popular video types made today. When learning a new skill, video is unmatched at conveying instructions. In fact, people process visual information 60,000 times faster than text. 

No matter what industry you’re in, imparting instructions to your customers is probably already a part of the service you provide. How-to videos can be about physical tasks like “How to use our milk frother with nut milk”. They can be technical, teaching viewers a skill like “How to add a cover image to your profile”. Or they can be educational, showing your industry expertise such as ‘How to make eCommerce YouTube ads that really work”. 

If you ever find yourself explaining how to do something in your business, jot it down and turn it into a how-to video. You’ll even save yourself time in the long run by linking to your own video instead of explaining things over and over. 

How-to videos are easy to create. Just map out the steps, clearly number the order of everything, and at the end, finish with a CTA that encourages viewers to reach out if they have any more questions. 

As a final tip: If you post these on your YouTube channel, always include the search term “How to” in the video title. This improves your SEO by mimicking the way users type queries into YouTube.

3. Use blog content for awareness videos

An awareness video is anything you make simply to familiarize people with your brand. Your blog is the ideal hunting ground for this type of video, because blog pieces already have a well-developed narrative.  

The aim of the game with awareness videos is to keep the audience watching and have your brand make an impression. That’s it. It’s not even about engagement metrics. These videos perform the essential task of building subconscious trust through repeated exposure. 

This is why blog content is perfect for awareness videos. Just like with your testimonial videos, you can use text along with stock footage to create simple content without shooting an ounce of footage. Condense the blog’s written content down to about one line of video text per paragraph of blog text. 

Try to follow the same narrative flow as the original blog, but lean heavily on music and transitions to recreate the emotional resonance of the story. Use upbeat music and short, snappy cuts for fun blog stories and slower music with gentle cuts for more meaningful stories.

4. Design an FAQ series

FAQs are a great format for video because your audience know exactly what to expect and, even better, they set the agenda by asking the questions in the first place. 

FAQ videos are also ideal for serializing. That is, make a new video for each individual FAQ. Create a standard template and follow it for each video in the series. Post the entire series on your website’s FAQ page, unveil one each week on your social media feed, or create a YouTube playlist for easy reference.   

Whatever you do, don’t try to cram more than one FAQ into a single video, as you get the best results from viewers if you keep videos under two minutes long. 

As you would for written FAQs, pay close attention to your wording. If it’s a technical question or a question that covers legalities, people will follow along closely and fixate on individual words. Be precise with your language. If your video involves a “talking head”, include on-screen text to underscore the most important information.

If it’s a technical question, also include screen grabs or recordings that walk the user through how to solve their problem. 

Once you’ve accumulated a few FAQ videos, pop them into a playlist and link to it on your website or in your customer service comms — it’s a great resource to concierge customers without lifting a finger. 

5. Repurpose written or audio interviews

For a long time, marketers primarily carried out interviews in written format. It was much too expensive to produce video content when an interview could be turned into a blog on the cheap. But that’s all changing with the advent of inexpensive, easy-to-use video making software. 

Video interviews are back on the menu. But does that mean you have to crack out the camera and set up a slew of new interviews? No! If you’ve already interviewed people for your blog, social media, or emails, you can easily turn that content into a video. 

If you have a quality audio file, cut that up into short snippets. The goal isn’t to recreate the entire interview as it happened. Instead, break it down into interesting sound bites that revolve around a theme. With a voice-over in place, all you need is some b-roll footage either provided by your interviewee or taken from stock footage databases. 

If the interview took place over email or you don’t have the audio file anymore, you can still pull interesting quotes and include them as text in your video. If it feels right, you can even batch these quotes into a listicle style video (like “Five things Clark Kent said to us that we can’t stop thinking about”). 

No matter which of these video ideas you tackle first, remember this: video marketing is effective. And it’s easy. All you have to do is review your existing content and get started.

These challenges become even more difficult when you’re dealing with distributed marketing teams that are spread across multiple offices, marketing to different regions, and often doing so in different languages. Because of these added factors, distributed marketing teams can also find it more difficult to collaborate, ensure brand consistency, and report on their collective success.

Unfortunately, when companies fail to address and resolve these challenges, the consequences can be devastating. For example, you might find that some marketing units have no trouble achieving their goals while others are struggling to implement a multi-channel marketing strategy that works. Lack of control over these efforts can also result in campaigns and efforts that are all over the place and not on brand, which can severely damage your brand reputation.

Effective and efficient organizations have systems in place to help their teams work together regardless of where they are in the world. Successful organizations have found a way to centralize their efforts, improve visibility and communication, and equip their teams with the tools they need to launch effective marketing efforts. 

Today, we’re going to walk you through a few tips and tools to help you implement a system that will empower your distributed marketing team to collaborate and improve results across the board. 

Improve Visibility and Collaboration by Adopting a Solution With Parent/Child Account Capabilities

You need to have a good foundation in place before you can improve efficiency and collaboration across your distributed marketing team. That means you need the right processes and tools to help facilitate communication, consolidate data and insights, and empower your team with the tools they need to execute your campaigns to the fullest. 

While many companies let each marketing unit choose their marketing automation platform , this offers subteams little-to-no visibility of what their peers are doing. It also opens the door for them to surpass any type of approval process before launching their marketing efforts, leading to disjointed and off-brand marketing efforts. (Our friends at Sharp Europe actually came to us in an effort to solve this problem, which you can learn more about here.) 

Adopting a marketing automation platform that supports a marketing network (also known as parent/child account capabilities) allows you to get your entire team on the same page. Marketing networks allow you to assign a “parent” or central account to manage the “child” accounts across your organization. The parent account is responsible for specifying which users have access to certain accounts, campaigns, and templates — as well as managing the approval process. 

This model allows you to centralize your efforts, providing key stakeholders with improved visibility into your marketing initiatives and results across the organization. Using one platform also enables team members to collaborate on projects even if they’re working miles away from each other and paves the way for your team to share best practices and improve processes across the board. 

Leverage Templates to Streamline Marketing Processes and Ensure Brand Consistency

One of the biggest challenges for large and distributed marketing teams is maintaining brand consistency. When your different marketing units are working on distinct projects with different priorities and deadlines, it can be easy to bypass an established approval process in an effort to get things out the door as soon as possible. 

The problem with this approach is that it often results in messaging and design that don’t accurately represent your brand and do very little to build your trust and credibility. As a result, many of your leads will lose interest early on, even if your product or services are superior to those of your competitors.

Creating pre-approved templates for emails, forms, and landing pages to share across your distributed marketing team helps you eliminate this challenge and streamline processes — especially since it saves so much extra work for your team while also eliminating the potential for human error.

The right marketing automation platform should equip you with the tools you need to easily build, store, and share these templates with your team. Act-On has easy-to-use drag-and-drop tools that enable you to build professional and eye-catching templates that your distributed marketing team can leverage without having to know HTML. 

Consolidate Your Data to Enhance Your Strategy Across the Board

Consolidating your data and then analyzing it into actionable insights is a challenge for many companies, especially those using multiple platforms and dealing with disconnected systems. But to improve collaboration and work with your entire distributed marketing team to enhance your marketing strategy, you need to gain visibility into your collective results. 

Knowing which of your efforts are working and which need improvement enables you to come together to share best practices and identify what you can do to strengthen your marketing strategy. Tracking and consolidating your results in real-time also allows you to take immediate action to remediate any efforts that aren’t generating results. All of this allows your team to spend their time and effort on tasks that will yield the best results for your organization. 

The right marketing automation platform should equip you with the tools you need to measure your marketing ROI and analyze performance. Act-On’s Data Studio, for example, allows you to consolidate your data from across your organization in one place and provides you with tools to easily dissect your results. 

Our platform also integrates with leading CRMs and BI tools to make it easy for you to share data with other distributed marketing teams across your organization. 

Choose a Tool That Enables Your Distributed Marketing Team to Implement an Effective Multi-Channel Strategy

In addition to searching for a solution with parent/child capabilities, you should look for a tool that allows you to streamline processes and enhance your marketing.

Act-On is designed to empower teams of all sizes with the resources they need understand their customers’ pain points, anticipate their needs, deliver targeted and effective multi-channel campaigns, and measure their marketing progress for consistent improvement and great ROI. 

If you’d like to see our platform in action and learn how it can help your distributed marketing team achieve their goals, please schedule a demo with one of our marketing automation experts.

Doing so can be difficult because of everything involved in getting prospects to the finish line. For businesses dealing with disconnected systems and inefficient processes, it can be hard to gauge where things went wrong, how to reel leads back in, and also ensure a seamless handoff when prospects are ready to talk to Sales or make a purchase. Many times, these organizations find themselves constantly putting out fires instead of focusing on driving growth. 

Thankfully, with the right strategy, businesses can attract the right leads, provide them with personalized experiences that improve engagement, and ensure they have everything they need to make an informed decision when they near the end of the sales funnel. 

So, if driving conversions and improving ROI are two of your business goals for 2020, you’ve come to the right place.

The following tips will help you engage your leads, keep them moving through the sale funnel, and win them over when the time to make a purchase comes around. 

Use Segmentation to Personalize Your Marketing Efforts

Thanks to Google and social media, today’s customers are accustomed to accessing the information they need in just a few clicks. This puts the pressure on you and your team to deliver targeted information and experiences. 

To meet this demand, companies are replacing their one-size-fits-all marketing with more tailored and targeted messaging and experiences.

Unfortunately, this has proven to be a very difficult, expensive, and time-consuming feat for many organizations. Not only are they trying to expand the number of campaigns they produce, but they’re also determining the most effective method to distribute their efforts to the right audience at the best time. Delivering the right message to the right person at the right time is simple and effective when you leverage audience segmentation.

Segmenting your audience allows you to target based on characteristics like:

• Stage in the Sales Funnel: Leads need different information based on where they are in the sales funnel. Segmenting them in this way will help you provide personalized marketing that will encourage them to take the next step in the buyer journey. 

• Industry: Depending on their industry, your lead might have a specific use case for your product or service. Segmenting based on industry can help you speak their language and provide them with relevant examples of how you can help them achieve their goals. 
• Product or Service Interest: Knowing which particular product or service appeals most to your customers allows you to cut straight to the chase and focus on the features and benefits that make you stand out from the competition.  
• Job Title: Knowing who your decision-makers, influencers, and users are can help you tailor your marketing to their particular concerns and interests. 

Unfortunately, for many organizations, audience segmentation can be tedious and prone to error.

Investing in the right marketing automation platform can help you automatically group customers based on characteristics such as industry, title, product interests, and more. This convenient feature frees up your team’s time and resources, allowing you to focus on more important and impactful tasks. 

Nurture Your Leads to Guide Them Through the Sales Funnel Effectively

When used properly, email continues to be one of the most reliable and effective methods to engage your audience. To reap all the rewards this marketing channel has to offer, you need to focus your efforts on developing targeted nurture campaigns instead of one-off emails. 

Unlike generic batch-and-blast campaigns and one-off emails, lead nurturing campaigns are designed to deliver targeted content and information to specific audience segments over a period of time. This model allows you to provide your audience with the resources they need to make progress through the customer journey instead of scaring them away with a hard sell right off the bat.

Developing targeted nurture campaigns requires a bit of a lift at the outset (mostly due to content creation), especially when you have multiple audience segments. But there are resources to help you manage them once they’re up and running.

For example, Act-On allows you to automatically enter contacts into automated nurture programs whenever they meet specific criteria or complete an action. This feature ensures your prospects and customers always receive the messaging and content they need to take the next step in the buyer journey and eventually make educated purchasing decisions. 

Leverage Lead Scoring to Identify Qualified Opportunities

One of the things that companies find most challenging when it comes to optimizing their sales funnel is determining when a lead is ready to talk to Sales or needs a little more love to keep moving along.

In these instances, lead scoring can be a marketer’s best friend because it allows them to determine where leads are in the sales funnel and which marketing tactics are piquing their interest. 

Lead scoring can sound a bit intimidating, but the process is actually quite simple. You assign scores to specific actions (such as downloading an eBook, filling out a form, or visiting a specific webpage). Your leads and/or accounts accrue or lose points as they complete these actions, which indicate where they are in the sales funnel – as well as their level of interest. 

This information allows you to tailor your strategy to keep leads engaged and helps your sales team determine the best time to reach out to schedule a call.

Integrate Your CRM to Activate Your Sales Team

Sales and Marketing alignment continues to be a neverending struggle for many organizations. Despite their best efforts, most companies haven’t figured out how to improve collaboration and communication between the two teams. 

Integrating your CRM with your marketing automation platform can help you streamline processes between Sales and Marketing and provide both parties with full visibility into the customer journey.

For example, Act-On allows you to set up automatic notifications to alert your salespeople as soon as a lead becomes qualified and is ready to talk to Sales. Your sales team can also look at your contact’s entire behavior and engagement history, allowing them to have more targeted and effective conversations. 

Invest in a Tool That Helps You Take Control of the Customer Journey

This probably isn’t the first time you’ve heard of a lot of what we’ve covered here, but you might be feeling limited due to lack of time and resources. 

The right MarTech stack can help you easily optimize your sales funnel, enhance your marketing efforts, and drive ROI. And with Act-On, you have everything you need to improve Sales and Marketing alignment, deliver personalized marketing efforts, and gain valuable customer insights. 

Don’t just take our word for it, however. If you’d like to learn more about what we’re all about, please schedule a demo with one of our marketing automation experts. They can walk you through our platform and show you how you can use it to overcome marketing challenges and achieve your business goals.

Despite their exciting growth, Simpleview’s internal marketing department remains relatively small, so every team member is required to have an incredible amount of skill, expertise, and productivity in order to launch Simpleview’s ambitious campaigns. In addition, many of Simpleview’s clients use Act-On to develop and execute their marketing initiatives, so their staff must have a complete understanding of the platform to best serve their customers.  

We recently sat down with Nate Casimiro, Marketing Operations Manager at Simpleview, to learn how he and his team are using Act-On for their own marketing efforts, as well as how they’re working with their clients to help them get the most out of Act-On’s marketing automation platform. 

Act-On: Hey, Nate. Thanks for joining me today. Let’s jump right in! Can you tell us a bit about your role at Simpleview and what you guys are trying to achieve as a whole?

Nate Casimiro: Sure. I’m the marketing operations manager, so my role is to manage the marketing technology and the department. I’m also in charge of training and onboarding our team members — and providing them with the skillsets they need to use our tools to the best of their ability.

Our clients are destination marketing organizations. So, picture tourism boards and the cities they represent. They’re organizations that are trying to promote tourism and travel to their locations. Simpleview provides the marketing software and services they need to achieve their goals. So, in some ways, we act as both a vendor and an agency.

The main products we sell are our proprietary CRM and CMS, both of which are specific to destination marketing. Then we also have a number of other solutions that are integrated with those tools — things like a digital asset manager and a number of other tools. We also provide specific services that amplify the whole process, like SEO consultations. Basically, we sell integrated solutions for destination marketers.

AO: If I’m a destination marketing organization, why do I want to work with Simpleview?

NC: Great question! A number of reasons, really. For destination marketing, the teams are usually funded by the government and, therefore, pretty small. So, obviously, that’s where our marketing automation ties in really well because our clients wear a lot of different hats. Typically, they have smaller budgets and smaller teams to manage their campaigns, so marketing automation is pretty crucial for them. 

Another major reason is that we’re able to help our clients create quick and seamless integrations with their CMS and CRM system. That’s one of the biggest reasons people work with Simpleview, specifically, and it’s something our clients absolutely need but just aren’t sure how to handle on their own.

AO: What were the primary factors that led to you and your team choosing Act-On?

NC: Well, we’re a bit unique in that we were looking for a true partnership that could supply a solution, not just for us, but for our clients as well. We needed a tool that was powerful and would help us do a lot beyond just email. One of our main concerns was creating good funnels that would usher our prospects through a compelling customer journey — and we knew that our customers would be looking for the same sort of automation. 

AO: Can you speak a bit about the onboarding process with Act-On?

NC: Yeah, definitely. We onboarded and launched Act-On two years ago. I was pretty impressed by the support options you were able to provide. The knowledge base in Act-On Connect was really helpful and our account and success managers worked with us heavily to answer a lot of our more complicated questions. I remember we would meet monthly and had a 90-day plan ironed out early on. There were also a lot of training courses and other resources available with Act-On that made implementing the tool a lot easier and a lot more successful.

AO: That’s awesome. We love to hear that. How has Act-On influenced your digital marketing processes from a holistic standpoint?

NC: Well, I don’t know if you know this, but we actually redesigned our website around Act-On because it’s such a powerful tool that we could get even more out of it by aligning our CMS with marketing automation. For example, we used to store all of our content and images in a media library on our CMS, but Act-On’s Media Library is just so much more powerful and ties directly into other tools (like segmentation and automated programs), so we decided to house all of our media there instead.

AO: What are some other Act-On features you’re currently using?

NC: Well, our sales team uses Act-On Anywhere when they’re on the go and in the office. They also use the sales portal and Data Studio. In fact, since we’re growing so quickly, Data Studio helps us pull important behavioral insights, and then we can generate reports to see whose lead scores have increased or decreased. And then, since we’ve been creating so much more content since partnering with Act-On, we’ve started gating these assets behind forms, which we can do within the platform itself. This helps us unmask our users and teaches us what they’re interested in and where they’re at in the funnel. 

We also use the Website Prospector Tool and have set up alerts so we know when a known visitor has checked out certain pages on our site. So, if someone visits our Demo page and clicks on our call-to-action but doesn’t actually fill out the form. We’ll get that alert, and it’s immediately passed to our sales team via our CRM for them to follow up.

So it’s just a really strong tool that helps us do a ton of different things.   

AO: How is all of this translating into numbers for Simpleview?

NC: So, I actually just pulled a bunch of metrics from our last monthly report. Ever since we redesigned our company website to align with Act-On, we’ve seen a consistent increase in form submissions and web qualified leads for four consecutive months. Our form submissions increased by 196%, going from a total of 103 in April to 305 in July. And then, since we moved from an ESP to Act-On, we’ve achieved a 34.57% open rate and 5.80% click rate — both of those numbers are well above the industry average. Our hard bounce and unsubscribe rates are also far below the industry average.

AO: Is Simpleview using Act-On to help with any compliance issues?

NC: For sure. I almost forgot to mention that actually. Act-On has been extremely helpful, especially as we expand internationally and try to keep up with GDPR (the General Data Protection Regulation). I actually felt like Act-On kind of led the charge in GDPR compliance. You guys had resources up before anybody really seemed to be worried about it or even talking about it. And then you showed us and your other partners how to use Act-On specifically for GDPR. So something like DKIM settings or which fields to add or delete from a form. We learned a lot from your materials, and I really felt like Act-On was almost like a book on GDPR compliance just for me. Then we took what we learned and customized it for our clients. So, it’s definitely a super compliant tool that’s helped us improve our compliance across the board. 

AO: It’s been great talking with you, Nick! Anything else you’d like to add?

NC: I guess just that Act-On helped us create a more targeted experience and improve the customer journey. I feel like now we really have the tools to measure exactly where our customers are in their journey and in the funnel. We use the entire suite of tools to track and monitor our progress and also support our clients and help them become comfortable with our products and services to the point where they’re ready to talk to people on our team.

And then just all the specifics we talked about. We really feel like a lot of platforms have a lot of tools, and sometimes a lot of those are just throwaway features you don’t really have any use for. I don’t feel like Act-On has those throwaway features. We use pretty much everything available in the toolset, and that really helps us create better campaigns and understand our progress — whether that’s through lead scoring or segmentation or Data Studio. It’s just really made our jobs easier and also made it easier to work with our clients. 

Interested in Partnering With Act-On? Let Us Know!

If you’re trying to replicate the kind of success that Simpleview has enjoyed during their time with Act-On, please complete this form to learn more about our marketing automation platform and the benefits of partnering with our world-class team. 

Or, if you’re still on the fence about marketing automation and want to know more about how this software can help you create engaging customer journeys that attract awesome leads and generate more business, please download our eBook, “What Is Marketing Automation (and why should you care?).” It’s full of useful information, including:

• Basic terms and definitions
• Interesting statistics and data
• Key features and benefits
• Customer journey essentials
• Useful integrations and capabilities

Lastly, for those of you who aren’t sure about becoming a partner but already know what marketing automation is and how it works (generally speaking), please complete this brief form to schedule a demo today!

In these instances, having an account-based marketing approach can significantly improve marketers’ ability to effectively and efficiently nurture multiple stakeholders at an organization. This approach requires marketers to move beyond targeting individuals to a more holistic approach that enables them to nurture an organization as a whole and focus their efforts on better and larger opportunities.

But, before we go into more depth about the benefits of account-based marketing, let’s clearly define what it is. 

What Is Account-Based Marketing?

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a strategy in which organizations market to target accounts with personalized campaigns and messages that resonate with the collective needs and pain points of various stakeholders. This approach is effective because it allows marketers to tailor the way they approach these organizations based on an aggregated view of how key stakeholders are interacting with their marketing efforts. 

But why is this approach so effective? As we’ve already established, organizations are actively trying to involve key leaders and team members in the buying process to ensure that they are investing in a solution that best fits their needs and will generate a significant ROI. This creates a challenge for marketers who not only have to engage and nurture each of these individuals but also track their engagement to determine where the account stands as a whole and whether this opportunity is worth the time and effort of their sales teams.

Account-based marketing strives to alleviate this obstacle by enabling you to gain a holistic view of an organization’s pain points, interests, and concerns as reflected by the activity and engagement of its various stakeholders. Having access to the full picture allows you to identify your champions and detractors and also develop a marketing strategy that aims to generate enthusiasm for your brand among all key stakeholders regardless of where they currently stand. 

But this only begins to cover the advantages that stem from adopting an account-based marketing approach. Today we’re outlining 3 key benefits your organization can reap from implementing ABM strategies. 

1. Improve Your Ability to Gauge When an Account Is Ready to Buy

During the sales cycle, you will probably encounter individuals who are “champions” for your solution and would jump at the opportunity to give you their business if the decision were up to them. These individuals are very engaged with your messaging, and their activity and lead score tells you that they are more than qualified to talk to sales — but their enthusiasm doesn’t tell the entire story. 

Analyzing behavior on the individual level instead of across an organization is challenging because it doesn’t allow you to see where the entire buying team stands as a whole. For instance, one person’s enthusiasm could lead you to believe that the organization is ready to buy even if not all stakeholders are on the same page. Account-based marketing removes this obstacle by allowing you to gain a sense of the bigger picture and improving your ability to gauge the most appropriate time to transfer an opportunity to Sales. 

With an account-based marketing approach, you’re still tracking the way individuals are engaging with your marketing efforts, but you’re using these insights to inform your perspective of the account as a whole. Now, many of us know how difficult it is to collect data to begin with, let alone aggregate and analyze. Accomplishing this task, however, becomes much easier when you’re using a marketing automation platform. Act-On has Account-Based Marketing Software that allows you to consolidate and view key information and buyer activity in one location.

Using account-based scoring in addition to aggregating data can further improve your ability to determine when a lead is qualified. Using account-based scoring allows you to assign points to each customer action (such as downloading an eBook or viewing a web page) and define a threshold that tells you when a lead is qualified and ready to talk to Sales. This tactic not only allows you to measure behavior and engagement across an organization, it also enables your sales team to focus on more qualified and profitable opportunities. 

2. Nurture Your Detractors to Make Everybody a Champion for Your Organization

As we’ve already mentioned, it is highly likely that opinions will vary among different stakeholders at an organization. While you will have stakeholders that are extremely enthusiastic about what you have to offer and be quick to see your value, others will need your marketing team to pay them a little extra attention before they come around.  

This is another area where account-based marketing is extremely helpful. By looking at how various stakeholders are engaging with your website, emails, and marketing as a whole, you can more easily identify your champions and detractors. This information is extremely important to your success because it allows you to see which efforts are working and which are not, as well as pinpoint the individuals you’ll need to sway in order to finalize a sale.

Once you know who your detractors are, a good plan of action is to segment these contacts based on their interests and priorities and enter them into personalized automated nurture campaigns. This way you can deliver messaging and information that speaks to their specific pain points, interests, and questions to persuade them to become fans of your brand and help them make a final decision. 

By identifying roadblocks that are preventing stakeholders from seeing the value of your product or solution early on, you’ll be able to deliver more qualified and enthusiastic leads to members of your sales team. 

Do keep in mind, however, that paying extra attention to your detractors doesn’t mean you can get away with ignoring stakeholders who are enthusiastic about what you do. You should keep engaging with your champions in order to ensure that all stakeholders are on the same page once the time to talk to Sales comes around. 

3. Help Your Sales Team Seal the Deal

Speaking of closing deals, ABM can be just as useful to members of your sales team as it is to your marketing team — for many reasons. To start, when you transfer more qualified and enthusiastic opportunities to your salespeople, you improve their chance of gaining that final conversion and making a sale. 

One thing to note, however, is that a qualified lead doesn’t necessarily translate into a sales conversion. Nothing is worse for your salespeople than going into a phone call not being prepared to answer difficult questions regarding your qualified lead’s concerns and pain points. 

When the time comes to make that call, your salespeople have to be equipped with the right information to make their case, and that’s where having a holistic view of the challenges and sentiments across an organization comes in handy. Equipping your salespeople with insights about who they’re talking to, what they care about, and how they’ve engaged with your marketing campaigns and materials will prepare them for more productive conversations that leave lasting impressions.

If marketing and sales alignment is a challenge for your organization, a marketing automation that integrates with your CRM can help you improve collaboration. Integrating your marketing automation with a CRM system allows you to set up alerts that notify your sales team when a lead becomes qualified and facilitate the transfer of important information.

The Right Tool Can Help You Easily Implement, Launch, and Refine Your Account-Based Marketing Strategy

Developing and implementing an account-based marketing strategy can seem like a huge endeavor, but with the proper tools, it doesn’t have to be. A marketing automation platform like Act-On can provide all the tools you need to build engaging campaigns, measure engagement, consolidate insights, and test and refine your efforts. 

If you’d like to learn more about how Act-On can help you enhance your marketing strategy as a whole, we invite you to schedule a demo with one of our experts. 

That’s changing. You might even say we’re putting the “B” back in B2B. Here’s why:

Today’s B2B marketers have to move beyond the lead generation role of simply filling the sales funnel with individual, named leads. That’s a reasonable priority for consumer marketing; you just need one decision-maker to sell a hat, or shampoo, or organic beer. But once you get past attracting curious or motivated individuals to your brand, this buying road forks, with a deep divide between B2C and B2B.

B2B sales reps don’t close deals with people; they close accounts. B2B companies don’t bank cash from private citizens, but from companies. B2B churn refers not to lost individuals, but to lost customer accounts.

Holistic Account-Based Marketing Approaches

Research by CEB indicates that the average B2B decision-making group now includes 5.4 buyers, often from different departments and with unique concerns. That means that B2B marketers have to nurture their individual leads within a broad matrix of contacts inside a target account. When marketers understand how their product helps each of these stakeholders, they can build a strategic and integrated program that engages each one, on their own terms, through a lifetime of value.

This holistic perspective has fueled the resurgence of account-based marketing (ABM), an approach in which marketing works closely with sales to manage the complex process of targeting and nurturing companies, rather than lone prospects. It’s not a forsaking of traditional lead generation, but rather an expansion of it.

“B2B marketers have realized the limitations of traditional demand generation programs and measurements and instead are rapidly embracing the power of ABM,” said Peter Isaacson, chief marketing officer at Demandbase. This effort is delivering results. According to ITSMA, 84 percent of B2B marketers say that ABM delivers a higher ROI than any other approach. And in a SiriusDecisions poll, 92% of B2B marketers worldwide said ABM was “extremely” or “very” important to their overall marketing efforts.

The Impact of Account-Based Marketing

Smart companies are recognizing the power of ABM. They’re combining a traditionally B2C-style of building brand and cultivating awareness with an integrated approach to nurturing leads that reflects this new B2B environment. And they’re shifting their marketing philosophy – and the technology they implement it with – to leverage it.

Take for example SheerID, who helps clients such as Spotify and Expedia instantly verify consumers’ eligibility for special offers. Instead of focusing exclusively on driving leads with acquisition marketing programs, they began targeting prospects they knew would both benefit from their product and provide them with long-term revenue. And they identified and built individual relationships with everyone involved in the buying process, while simultaneously tracking and responding to accounts as a whole.

They also started using Act-On marketing automation software to drive this approach. Act-On serves as their command center, allowing them to precisely target all the decision-makers with relevant content, record individual responses as part of the big picture, and provide both marketing and sales with the account-wide insight they need to effectively lead a company to purchase. This allows SheerID to deliver a strategic and unified nurturing experience – and to enhance the overall value they provide customers after the sale.

The shift to ABM is accelerating, and SheerID is just one of the many forward-thinking companies embracing it. According to a 2016 State of Account-Based Marketing (ABM) study recently released by SiriusDecisions, more than 70 percent of B2B companies have staff that are fully or partially dedicated to driving ABM-specific programs. And in his blog post ABM’s Explosive Growth – What’s Next?, Isaacson notes a tremendous rise in both the amount of Google searches for “Account-Based Marketing” and the number of marketing professionals adding ABM to their skill sets on LinkedIn. ABM seems to be putting down roots – and bearing fruit.

Account-Based Marketing Requirements

But while ABM may be taking marketing’s center stage, it’s worth noting that effectively implementing it requires the same things as any approach: the full support of the company, a distinct value proposition, and the ability to clearly communicate it. “No matter how good your ABM or digital machine is, if you don’t have something differentiated to say and a culture that supports it, you will not break through the clutter,” said Rishi Dave, CMO of Dun and Bradstreet, in an interview with Engagio CEO Jon Miller.

SheerID is a shining example of how to do this right, and their success will be on full display at Flip My Funnel, a B2B Marketing and Sales Festival devoted to helping marketers understand how ABM can enhance the customer experience.

Simon Spencer, SheerID’s director of marketing operations, and Kevin Bobowski, Act-On’s chief marketing officer, will co-present a session titled Putting the “B” Back in B2B Marketing. Kevin will discuss how to successfully orchestrate a multi-channel ABM program, and Simon will share his ABM journey and the wins his company has seen since making the transition.

Marketers who can’t make it to the festival can still learn a great deal about ABM through Act-On’s eHandbook How to Profit from Account-Based Marketing.