Is there a more efficient way to identify and engage, and of course, convert your target audience into paying accounts?
The traditional methods that B2B companies earlier pursued are time-consuming, expensive, and inefficient.
Nowadays, B2B companies are betting on account-based marketing (ABM) to achieve better quality leads, shorter sales funnels, and higher conversions.
In account-based marketing, you narrow down your focus to a small group of accounts (companies). These companies tick every box of your ideal customer profile.
You create strategies, campaigns, goals, messages, and personalized content to target these accounts to achieve better results.
Video content can augment the benefits of account-based marketing.
Video’s persuasive powers are quite well known. Its ability to engage and convert increases manifold by combining it with account-based marketing. But, how to use video in account-based marketing. Let’s find out.
The common complaint of most marketers is that oftentimes even experienced ones have trouble launching a marketing campaign.
Most of the strategies and tools that make up an ABM campaign are decided at the planning stage.
Developing an account-based marketing campaign plan is necessary and crucial for its success.
The amount of effort you invest at the planning stage is in inverse proportion to the time you’ll have to spend during the campaign.
Step #1: Only include high-value target accounts with the potential to bring in the highest benefit to your company (i.e.) accounts that can contribute the highest revenue.
Step #2: Research to know the accounts as well as they know themselves. Learn their pain points, what are they doing to address them, their current status in the buyer’s journey, and a lot more.
Step #3: Understanding your ABM target audience will help you develop personalized content that resonates with the prospects. It also helps you create unique solutions to the problems faced by B2B companies.
Step #4: What types of videos will you create for account-based marketing campaigns? In addition, determine the tools and platforms where the video content will be published. Further, decide how the progress of the campaign is to be measured. Determine what key performance indicators (KPIs) you plan to track and measure.
Step #5: Decide where, how, and how much time and resources you plan on each section of the ABM campaign.
Step #6: Launch the ABM campaign, measure the progress, analyze the data, and refine the strategy.
Nowadays, some degree of personalization is required in any form of digital marketing. But, in account-based marketing, you’re expected to take personalization to a new level.
That’s because in B2B account-based marketing you don’t target a group but a specific company, account, or decision-making individual within a company.
Personalization in ABM makes sense. Imagine that you’re an executive in a company. One fine day you open the email inbox and find two messages: a traditional text-based mail and a video with your name or company name.
Naturally, you’ll first pay attention to the personalized video. Plus, you’ll feel an instant connection with the message in the video. More often than not, such personalized videos (for example, with the company’s name) will be circulated to other members of the company.
Experts too agree that personalized content works in ABM campaigns. In fact, the engagement rate jumps five folds in the case of marketing videos with personalized messages.
There are many ways to personalize video content. Videos that highlight the pain points of a target company and go on to explain exactly how you plan to solve these pain points can connect, engage, and convert the viewer.
It’s also an effective personalization strategy to create a buzz in the target company as the viewer may share the video with peers and colleagues.
You can take personalization a step further by adding basic interactivity. Make use of video editing services to add a clip where the video uses the viewer’s name or company name. An easy video editor can help you create your content quickly by allowing you to choose from hundreds of templates.
B2B buyers believe in gathering in-depth information about the product before making a decision.
Although a text-based product guide provides all the information, prospective buyers prefer videos because they are interesting, engaging, and informative. You can use tailored product demos and walkthroughs to engage the audience in ABM campaigns.
In addition, with tailored content, you can improve the audience’s user experience. Furthermore, experts believe that tailored demo videos can boost information retention by 10x times.
It’s easy to build trust with tailored product demos. That’s because the prospective buyer sees the product in action.
That said, keep the B2B buyer’s pain points or requirements in mind when creating demo videos for ABM campaigns. Equally important is the vertical, segment, or department of the company you are targeting.
Bear in mind that within the same buyer segment, different accounts might have different pain points and your product might benefit them in different ways. The product demo that convinces one might not resonate with the others.
Improve the chances of a positive response by creating personalized demo videos that directly talk to the account that your ABM is targeting. The same strategy could be later used to promote new products or upgrades to the ABM audience.
User-generated content is a potent marketing tool for any business. It can be highly effective in B2B marketing.
You may have a product, for example, software that can reduce the prospective customer’s workload and give his team more time to focus on other pressing matters.
You may create video demos that identify the viewer’s problems with pinpoint accuracy and offer a solution to the prospect’s satisfaction.
Even so, in some remote corner of the prospect’s mind, a lingering thought ‘Is the information credible?’ will never cease to exist.
In account-based marketing, user-generated content can help boost brand credibility. Customer reviews and video testimonials are particularly effective in building trust and credibility with prospects.
When you show another company with similar pain points benefiting from your product, the viewer may relate to the emotions and views of the peer company. A B2B company can easily relate to information that comes from sources like its own.
The benefit of user-generated content skyrockets when coupled with video content. Video testimonials exert tremendous influence on viewers.
Reviews and case studies in video format can convey the emotions of existing customers better than text-based content.
Email campaigns are often used in the ‘nurture’ stage of account-based marketing. Based on the accounts’ pain points and behavior, you send suitable video content using email campaign software. You can combine personalized emails and landing pages with your email campaign.
Monitor the engagement the accounts have with your video content. The information that you gather will help you further understand the needs of the accounts which you can use to develop tailored content for micro-targeting.
Prospective customers tend to prefer videos to text-based emails. That said email users only see the subject line on the mail. Hence, to encourage the ABM customers to open your emails include the term ‘Video’ in the subject line. According to recent statistics, adding a video to the email campaign boosts the engagement rate by 65%.
Automation tools could be quite handy in improving the performance of your account-based marketing.
With the help of these tools you can identify when the email was opened, the engagement with the video, and the call to action that performed the best.
Design your ABM emails with mobile users in mind. Even in the case of B2B, most decision-makers use tablets and smartphones to access their personal or company email accounts.
By making your video emails mobile-friendly you increase the chance of engagement as soon as the message lands in the inbox. You can use the notification delivery rate to measure the prospect’s interaction with your content.
Account-based marketing is all about efficiency. Obviously, in B2B marketing, the best-fit people to target are the decision makers and senior-level executives. It would be easier to delight this target audience by taking your message to them.
Next to email marketing (well, the target audience is not in the ‘nurture’ stage of the sales funnel yet), one of the best places to engage decision-makers of B2B companies is LinkedIn.
It makes perfect sense to publish your videos on LinkedIn for ABM campaigns. According to a survey, there are over 100 million LinkedIn users who are either decision makers or senior-level influencers in companies. That’s a large pool of decision-makers to target through account-based marketing campaigns.
Prepare a list of decision-makers from firms you plan to target on the platform. You can get in touch with decision-makers by adding them as connections.
Send them personalized videos via LinkedIn InMail to increase the chances of a response. LinkedIn says messages sent to InMail have a response rate as high as 25%.
You can expect better response with personalized videos. Once you make a connection, move the lead into the ‘nurture’ stage of the sales funnel. You can create any type of sales funnel using Clickfunnels or Clickfunnels alternatives. You can further engage the ABM companies using tailored content.
Video analytics is a collection of data that can be used to derive insights into your video content. This data can include things like video viewership, engagement, and conversion rates.
It can help you understand which of your video content is resonating with your target audience and driving results. This insight can then inform your ABM strategy and ensure that you are creating content that is aligned with your goals.
There are a few key stages in the ABM funnel where video analytics can be useful:
The growing use of account-based marketing by B2B companies is enough proof to show it works. By focusing your efforts on a small group of high-value accounts you have the best chance of increasing the return on investment.
Your efforts will yield better results by using video content as part of ABM to connect, engage, and convert the B2B prospects. Our how-to guide will help you effectively use video content in your account-based marketing campaigns.
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