The struggle is real. And the reality of the situation is that you can have the best creative and landing pages ever, but if you’re not hitting the right audiences with the right messaging at the right time, it just doesn’t matter.

Our recent webinar, hosted by Senior Digital Marketing Manager, Riley Gilstrap, talks through how we can make it better and, as a bonus, rest easier at night.

Questions To Ask Yourself: Targeting and Placement

In terms of audience targeting, it’s critical that you’ve done the work of identifying your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). If you haven’t, you’ll want to go through the process of doing that. Your ads should speak directly to that ICP. You’ll also want to leverage the right data to continue to refine your audience. Using resources like Bombora, engagement spikes and other identified buying signals will help you continue to hit the mark on your audience.

You’ll also need to understand what stage the relationship between your brand and your audience is in. Are you trying to build brand awareness? Build pipeline? Drive expansion? The answers to these questions will help drive your creative and make it impactful. “It’s important to understand that the manner in which you speak to your prospects and customers SHOULD change based on their stage,” says Gilstrap.

When thinking through ad networks and where your creative will live, it’s important that your platform can serve up different types of campaigns. You’ll want to be confident that you’re able to leverage display ads, retargeting capabilities, global customization, LinkedIn advertising and more. Can your reach only business IPs? Residential? What about strategies around premium ad placements?

Best Practices: Messaging and Creative

Once you’re clear on the persona(s) that you’ll be targeting, it’s time to come to the table with messaging that speaks to the individual. “Jargon” is generally considered a no-go when you’re talking to broad audiences, but when you’re targeting a more refined audience, using more granular messaging can be a big win. It needs to be clear cut and have a solid next step for them to take. “Learn more” is too broad. Creating a call to action that is specific will get more clicks. Compelling actions like “Take the Quiz”, “Download Now” and “Sign up today” are all tried and true successes.

Cohesion is the name of the game. Do the creative and messaging of your ad set match the landing page? You don’t want the end user to question whether or not they’ve landed on the appropriate website, so messaging and imagery need to be in lock step throughout the entire campaign. If you miss the mark here, you’ll provide a less than ideal experience for your target audience—and it’s no fun trying to fight your way back from that.

After the Click: To Gate or Not to Gate?

“If your creatives and landing pages aren’t cohesive, it can lead to a confusing and less-than-ideal experience for your audience,” warns Gilstrap. When your audience lands on a gated landing page, it’s important to be thoughtful about what you’re ‘asking for. Do you need all of it? If you have required fields, denote them with a small asterisk. There’s no good that comes from frustrating a potential customer with a refresh to announce missing information. Indicate what you NEED to move them through the process and make the other things bonus if they decide to answer. 

Yes, your gate needs to be a pillar of the webpage, but don’t forget to start the relationship by sharing with the visitor what they are going to receive in turn for giving their data. This “virtual nod” will help them stay excited (and clear) about what they’ve signed up to receive.

If you’re providing an ungated experience for your content, the “choose your own adventure” path for the needs to be elevated in another way. If the landing page is difficult or cluttered, you run the risk of losing them, but you still want them to have resources available to continue their journey to learn more. If someone is on your page and is interested in learning more at their own pace, you’ll want to make it easy and natural for that prospect to take the wheel and guide their own journey through the brand.

Takeaways and Best Practices

• Take the time to understand who you are targeting, what the messaging is, and set your goals and expectations prior to launching an ad campaign.

• Work with your advertising platform to pinpoint where you want your ads to live. Think through what networks and placements will perform best for your messaging.

• Focus on cohesion across messaging, landing pages, and throughout the entire experience.

• Whether you’re sending your viewer down a gated or ungated path, be thoughtful about what happens after the click.

• Determine how you’ll measure success and celebrate your wins.

In case you didn’t hear the news last week, Terminus has been recognized as a leader in The Forrester Wave: B2B Advertising Solutions, Q3 2022 report. Advertising is the lifeblood of any successful marketing program, and Terminus leads the way in helping marketers maximize their spend and drive meaningful revenue impact. If you’re ready to get started, we’d love to show you how.

The post Best Practices for a Cohesive Digital Ad Experience appeared first on Terminus.

She is also a Terminus Rock Star customer.

Terminus Products Used:

Beckman uses Account Based Marketing (ABM) as effective, efficient marketing the whole revenue team can rally around.

Four reasons Beckman Coulter turned to ABM

There were four reasons they chose to get started with ABM. 

1. For Beckman Coulter, Field Marketing sits in the Sales organization, and many of our pre-pandemic activities were in the field, which were impacted by the pandemic. We needed to replicate user group meetings and instrument demos in a virtual environment as well as drive awareness of the new formats. 
2. We wanted to improve funnel velocity – reduced days to close, increased win rate, etc. – for prospect and customer opportunities.
3. We wanted a tool that could impact in-funnel opportunities.
4. We wanted the right marketing mix for our global key accounts.

We started with Email Experiences and expanded from there 

Beckman has been a Terminus client for about three years. We started as an Email Experiences customer with Sigstr, which Terminus later acquired. From there, we extended our relationship by adding Ad Experiences and Data Studio to our ABM program. We had partners at Sigstr who knew our business, our goals, and our ABM program … and they’ve helped us configure a more extensive program with the additional solutions the merger with Terminus brought to the table. Further, regardless of the team, from Data Studio to Ad Experiences to Email Experiences to Support, Terminus’ responsiveness has been fantastic. 

Establishing and expanding our ABM program was no easy feat. Beckman is a sizable organization. We have approximately 500 sellers. Just think of how many emails 500 sellers send on any given day. Now, think of how much unused real estate those emails represent to promote webinars, product launches, etc. So, email is a good channel to distribute our messaging. It’s also one more touch point with our customers. 

Within Email Experiences, there are a couple of ways to trigger email signature content. We primarily use the sender as the trigger since they are typically aligned with our different product lines. If a Sales representative sells a particular catalog of products, then their signature is based on that. There are also options where the sender can choose a different segment to override the standard configuration. That’s helpful for our sellers who sell multiple product lines or want to tailor the message based on the recipient.

Email Experiences has been great for web traffic. It’s generally our third ranking referral source after organic and direct. In addition, prior to Email Experiences, employees were taking creative liberties with their email signatures, so Email Experiences helped maintain centralized control of look and feel of our brand.

What’s especially exciting about Email Experiences is that because email is such a normal day-to-day business communication, marketing is happening in the background without the recipient knowing they’re being actively targeted. It’s not ‘in your face’ like display ads. It’s far more organic. It’s noticing something during an email engagement with someone you know and trust.  

As for our next steps, we’re looking forward to leveraging first- and third-party data to enrich our Email Experiences. We’re also considering more refined account-based tactics, where if the recipient’s email ends in a specific company domain, then Email Experiences overrides the standard signature with something specific to that account.

Email Experiences helped fill the void of live events 

Email Experiences has been a fantastic addition to our channel strategy, especially with the impact we saw on Field Marketing due to the pandemic. 

We target in-funnel opportunities, because for someone who’s in the consideration phase, coming to a user group meeting or getting a demonstration is a powerful way to accelerate purchase of our products.

Due to the pandemic, we lost the ability to go onsite with our customers, host user group meetings, conduct live demonstrations, and leverage other hands-on tactics. So, we needed to strengthen our digital muscle and adopt on-premises events for a more digital environment. Then, once we created a digital demonstration or a digital user group meeting, we needed a way to inform prospects and customers. 

Email Experiences saved the day.

Data Studio added data-based decision making to the mix

In terms of the data and measurement standpoint, Terminus has helped us in several ways.

With hundreds of products across multiple different product lines and geographies, from low-cost consumables to $300,000 instruments, our Sales teams have a lot to track. Terminus takes intent data, combines it with user behavior and pushes it back concisely into our Salesforce environment; so, sellers can see what their accounts are doing. From a marketing perspective, Terminus also enables us to have a singleline of sight into multiple marketing channels. It’s exciting to tie in email and ad data, especially as we – and every other marketer on the planet – prepare for the decrease in third-party cookies and the increase in first party data in our marketing efforts. The consolidated data enriches our understanding of our customer’s journey, who is interacting with what content in the funnel, and the impact we can have on Pipeline metrics like average deal size, velocity, and win rate. It shows us what moves the needle, so we can do more of what works and less of what doesn’t.

The future of ABM at Beckman

This year we are doing what we would internally call a “trystorm” or a pilot where we trial a variety of things to learn and secure baseline metrics as a jumping off point.

We’re thinking about it in terms of account-based experiences because we have long relationships with our clients and growing our share is very important to our revenue model. Another way that we’re thinking about using ABM is with our global key account management team, which manages our 20 largest accounts.  Once we sell an instrument to these customers, we want to know how to target them to purchase a service package or whatever the next logical product might be. We want to provide a white glove personalized experience to our highest value accounts. So, we are starting to think about our approach more as like ABX, or account-based experiences, to further penetrate those accounts. And we’re looking forward to partnering with Terminus in this area.

Marketing Hot Takes 

First, regardless of whether you’re in B2B or B2C, I think that we would all benefit from thinking about it as B2H, or business to human. The people on the other side of buying decisions are human first. So, how do we humanize our brands better? How do we tell more human stories? How do we make those purchasers see themselves within the content we’re producing? How do they see themselves in our brand and our stories?

Second, there are three campaigns for which everyone should be using Ad and Email Experiences. They are effortless ways to say ‘hey, check this out’ and get eyeballs on content and messages.

1. Driving registration to and engagement with webinars and events
2. Announcing new products or enhancements  
3. Promoting useful tools such as a cost calculator 

I’m Kallie Bonnell, and I’m a Terminus Rock Star. You can follow Kallie on LinkedIn for more learnings and tips from a real ABM rock star HERE!

The post Customer Rock Star Spotlight: Kallie Bonnell from Beckman Coulter Life Sciences appeared first on Terminus.

It’s no secret that the marketing landscape has changed dramatically the past few years. From virtual conferences, zoom fatigue, and (whispers ominously) working during the great resignation, marketers have had to constantly pivot in order to stay relevant. Even though we all benefit from seeing your cat on conference calls, there is one critical change that affects every single marketer in the current landscape. How do you identify buyers and accounts when they aren’t working from the office, but rather, their couch?

It starts with data, and yes, data is one of the less glamorous marketing topics, but arguably the most important. Having the right data sets you up for more accurate marketing strategies, better understanding of where to spend your budget, and makes you look really smart. Becoming a data superhero doesn’t mean you have to go back to school to master data science. It can start with understanding what type of data your ABM vendor provides, where they get it from, and how you can use it to further your program.

As the work-from-home movement continues to take root, Terminus is bringing first-party data sets, Terminus Identity, to the table. In this post I’ll discuss why first-party data is bringing home the trophy when it comes to ABM platform data offerings.

Different Types of Data

Many ABM marketing platforms tout match rates and various sources of anonymous visitor identification. This can be from cookies, from data pools, or from relatively static data sets that don’t update regularly. The data that you use today is likely a combination of first, second, and third-party data.

Today’s buyers interact with brands across multiple devices and channels. It’s a complex and fast-changing landscape, with new touchpoints constantly emerging. But the important thing isn’t how many disparate channels you use — it’s creating better brand experiences that delight customers and drive them back again and again.

All of these touchpoints allow brands to collect tons of first-party data about their customers. This data can be connected to individuals to resolve identity and drive a deeper understanding of how consumers behave, what they want and where they are in their buyer journeys.

Second-party data is typically data from a trusted partner. This data can help you achieve greater scale rather than relying on your CRM data alone. For example, a publisher might share its first-party audience data with an advertiser who wants to run ads on its site.

Third-party data usually comes from an outside source that has collected the data. This data is often aggregated, segmented, and then sold to companies for their own advertising use.

Many ABM companies leverage their wide reach across marketing landscapes to provide various data sources to their customers. They also likely partner with other providers in the landscape to fill in additional gaps in the data picture. However, we have seen time and time again that much of this data was curated for one specific reason – to reach buyers and accounts from their office IP addresses. This means, they can tell you who they are at work, but really have no idea who they are at home. With more people working from home, or working hybrid, this is not a solution.

Boost Your Data Strategy With Terminus First-Party Data

In the work-from-home landscape, it has become more critical than ever to know who your buyers are, wherever they are working from. One way to do this is to leverage an ABM provider with multiple marketing channels and first-party data. ABM providers often use a “match rate” to show how effectively they can identify the contacts that you are trying to reach and engage with. More often than not, these match rates don’t reflect the work-from-home landscape because ABM providers need robust first-party data to be able to effectively match contacts to residential IPs.

Terminus’ approach to multi-channel, native ABM means that first-party data is a critical part of the Terminus data landscape. Daily-updating data sets within Terminus Identity increase match rate accuracy and increase the volume of residential IPs that you can match to target accounts and contacts. In the new WFH and hybrid-work era, Terminus Identity powers the reach and impact of your ABM marketing strategy.

Take the First Step

Before you can reach your buyers, you have to identify who they are. We are here to help you do that. Check out how Terminus can help you take your strategy to the next level with Connected Account Experiences today.

The post The Truth About Identifying Buyers and Target Accounts at Home appeared first on Terminus.