Inserting video into your account based marketing (ABM) campaigns creates a compelling solution to every marketer’s “right person, right content, right time” dilemma. At Brightcove, we have found this combination particularly effective for both conversion and retention-- not only keeping our current customers, but creating new relationships to expand within existing accounts.
Why Brightcove Launched an ABM Campaign using Video
Our business reality should be familiar to most digital marketers:
- Even though we’re a leading global online video platform (OVP), we are but one of the nearly 4,000 vendors in the SaaS space. In order to reach the right prospects and not waste resources with spray and pray activities, we need to be strategic.
- The customer journey has moved online. We must use the most effective means of communication to reach our targeted prospects. ABM is a newer method that utilizes the many marketing channels we already use in a multi-pronged approach.
- We’re not selling to just one person. Technology investments like that of an online video platform have a long sales cycle because the purchase affects multiple teams. At any given time a different stakeholder could be driving the purchasing process, and we must be ready to anticipate their interest and answer their questions.
- Most of a prospective customer’s initial online research occurs before a prospect raises their hand and becomes a lead, and marketers need to recognize the top prospects earlier.
Our ABM strategy has aligned our marketing and sales teams around target prospects (the right people) and helped us push them through the pipeline. Video is the most effective form of digital communication, connecting with people at an emotional level and explaining complicated topics quickly and easily. It’s a communication vehicle we believe in, and thus, was the way in which we chose to engage our prospects and customers (the right content). Using ABM, we spotted a 200% rise in web activity from a target company before any of those visitors identified themselves through lead forms. We were able to quickly reach out to the company and put them into the sales cycle (the right time).
What’s the expression? Teach a man to fish? Well, inbound marketing methodologies presume that if all the fish are swimming into your net, you’ll eat for days. The problem is while a prospect might show interest, not everyone is the right fit. Sifting through the “wrong fish” and debris to find our target catch is time consuming and wasteful, yet, switching from fishing with a net to a spear is a cultural shift that can take time.
While the ideological shift percolates, you’ll be able to get your strategy in place. To define your ABM cycle you’ll need to: create your target lists, define your methods of measurement, choose your marketing strategy, measure effectiveness of each campaign element, and then refine your list for the next go around.
How to Align Your Teams for a Video ABM Campaign
While working on a programmatic process, you will also need to align your teams around the concept of ABM selling. Here at Brightcove, we tackled this alignment with the following steps:
1. Defined roles and responsibilities between sales and marketing teams
2. Trained demand generation and sales teams
3. Created shared dashboards with account activity, accessible not only online but broadcast on a large monitor in the office so everyone can review progress
4. Held recurring meetings to keep everyone on the same page and in the same direction
What We Did: An ABM Retention Campaign with Personalized Video
Identifying our challenges, adopting a new methodology and putting a plan together, Aligning and training teams-- a lot of work happens before you deploy your ABM campaign. When we began our ABM journey with a video campaign, we targeted our customers with the goal of expanding in our existing accounts. The “Meet Your AM” campaign essentially introduced account reps “in person” through video. Additionally, by using a combination of personalized video and interactivity to aid in communication and create a 1:1 digital conversation, we were able to achieve impressive results for the very first campaign we ran:
Video ABM Campaign Results
219 Responses
86 Meetings
$200k+ in Pipeline
Email. Advertising. Another marketing channel that pairs well with ABM? Direct mail. Direct mail, when done thoughtfully, feels personalized and helps break through the digital clutter. In our third iteration of video ABM for retention and customer expansion, we combined our digital efforts with old-school, direct mail - View-Masters. Recipients were sent both a digital experience and a physical package containing a View-Master with branded reel, the latter a nostalgic reminder of the combined power of visual image and text. The online experience concluded with a personalized account director video to “land and expand” targets-- alerting them that their company was already a customer, and introducing the account director as the personal contact for the team. There was also a broader, video marketing video paired for with the View-Masters send to new prospects. Our 2,000 mailings have resulted in over 1,200 active leads.
By taking the time up front to align marketing and sales around the ABM model, working out our programmatic strategy, and using video in multiple ways, we were able to exceed our goals. We achieved impressive results for our early efforts, and we expect even greater return as we refine our strategies. You can do the same!
Create Relevant, Engaging Video Campaigns