Business

Knowing You Aren’t Wasting Money

There’s a famous quote from advertising legend John Wanamaker: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is, I don’t know which half.” The allocation and attribution of advertising spend are hot topics for marketers. The incredible part of account-based marketing is that you can be laser-focused on where your advertising dollars are going, and directly connect this amount with engagement metrics for each account.

You need to show a return on investment to prove to your executive and leadership and finance team why account-based marketing works to drive business, not leads. Lead generation was an easy sell, because it gave marketers the ability to demonstrate tangible, quick results. “Look, we generated 1,000 new leads this quarter.”

But, according to Forrester Research, less than 1 percent of leads actually close. That’s a lot of wasted money. Marketing to only the right accounts will have a much more significant impact on revenue. You won’t be wasting 99 percent of your money

Budgeting the right amounts

Account-based targeting doesn’t require nearly as much of an investment as other types of digital advertising, such as search engine marketing. You’re focusing only on the contacts in accounts you want to get your message in front of, so you can be more conservative with your advertising spend.

From here, you will set a daily budget for your advertising campaigns. The daily budget is the maximum amount you want to spend to get your advertisement to appear to those contacts in your target accounts. Test a smaller group to determine how much budget was needed, then scale from there.

Attributing advertising spend to revenue

With your targeted advertising campaigns, you can show a direct correlation to how much you spent at the account level and whether the account became a customer.

This is a significant proof point for account-based marketing. If your company is currently making any type of search engine marketing or CPC investment, you know you can’t attribute how much you spent on digital advertising to grow revenue. You don’t have enough visibility into targeting accounts.

Showing engagement in the buyer journey

Gathering feedback from your sales team is an important part of the optimization process. It should happen continuously as you run your campaigns. The goal of your campaigns is to move accounts faster through the buyer journey. To know just how fast accounts are moving through your pipeline, you can use reports in your CRM to see the number of days an account moved to the next stage.

Last word

At the account level, you want to demonstrate how your advertising campaigns created a halo effect. A halo effect describes how a contact in an account is surrounded by your message. This increased messaging helps to keep your brand top-of-mind and progress the account through the various stages of the buyer journey to close a deal.

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