Gartner Symposium | Adapting our ABM program to the ‘New Reality’ to achieve a 581% ROI

hi everyone welcome to the gartner symposium and to the include session adapting our abm program to the new reality to achieve 581 roi i'm nirosha methananda i'm the vp of marketing at influe2 and today i'm joined by our head of abm daria ivanova welcome daria hello nirosha thank you for introduction thank you so today we're going to jump right in because we've only got a very short time but today we're going to talk about um an influ 2k study and what we're doing because since its inception in 2017 influe 2 has had triple digit growth every year since it started and what is really amazing to me is um you know as a marketer that uh the marketing function has really been driven purely uh in most part by using our own drinking our own champagne and using our own uh person-based advertising platform and daria that's something that you have really that you have really been driving for us in in the past number of years so

really that's what i'd love you to share about but more specifically you know i really want to delve into when covert hit last year you know obviously it was a new reality for all of us um and you really thought about how we could uh take take that situation and be able to show marketers our b2b marketers how they could um really use our platform to be able to target who they wanted you know who they needed to target so are you able to tell us and share a bit about the platform oh sorry about the campaign with us um yes of course um when we formed the new reality campaign we had like a couple of goals first goal was to inform b2b marketers about influence capabilities to target buyers and buying groups even if they were working from home another goal was to demonstrate the value of influence to our target audience by giving them the personalized experience of how influential works actually to do this we first established our target audience from decision makers at enterprise level

accounts that fit our icp then we developed the campaign concept which was focused on showing the new work from home reality that b2b marketers had to face and meaning and when i'm saying this i mean i mean that businesses had to go remote rapidly leaving b2b marketers drastically fewer channels to communicate with the target audience our campaign had to show that info2 offered a way to keep the connection with decision makers in a world where ip targeting wasn't as effective if land communication was impossible and email marketing channels were overflowing all at the same time but at the same time we didn't want our messaging to add anything on top to the gloomy mood that was already in the air so the ad creative itself shows the picture to which almost every person who ever worked from home can relate to cool and i can say i can say um you know this is this is exactly where we are we're in a we're on a zoom call i can see your background is blurred i'm actually in a hotel room recording so

this is very relatable and uh also i i can you know it's always the conversations of saying you're a mute so even though i can understand like it was a gloomy situation it was uh something i think the messaging is really relatable and something that everyone everyone has that experience of so i i really like that and it's something that i've noticed daria that we adapt we adapt through not only this campaign but um in our you know in our outreach in general you know can you talk to me a little bit about why that is basically we're taking this approach to stand out uh from the crowd um compared to other abn vendors and compared to other dull b2b marketing so we are trying to add this spice a bit to our communication um even if we're communicating through the emails when we communicated through our ad campaigns we're always trying to write it up a bit cool cool and um and so you know it would be great if you

could tell us a little bit about how you approached um you know the the verticals and the targeting for the campaign as well um yeah of course we looked at verticals that we could focus on and also expand into um mostly we were looking for the verticals that would be challenged and reaching their audience due to covets we did we did analysis to determine those verticals so from this analysis we focused on three main verticals first vertical was software this is our core audience and while these businesses are typically digitally focused uh with the loss of in-person events there was a gap from elite and demand perspective that influence could help with another vertical is pharmaceutical companies typically this vertical relies on offline resources and activities for marketing and sales but targeting medical professionals through digital channels would open the opportunity for these businesses to

maintain their connection with their audience and the third type of audience is accounts with the abn program this is the best fit audience for influential as our product goes with abm goes together with with abm allowing marketers to get granular intangible with targeting cool and yeah i i think the the thing you know ever the events all evaporated last year and i think everyone sort of went into a panic and there were a flurry of um offline events or sorry online events um and i think one of the things that uh helps is you know when you hit people with emails and email invitations it's not always the most effective so i guess being able to you know bridge the gap with uh with some of the advertising and outreach from that perspective really supports that message and i'm imagining that's what that what you were seeing as well during that time yeah of course that's basically what our product does like we were able to compensate all the offline channels that

wasn't available at the time it would be really good to understand okay well what was the approach for the campaign because i think it took you know it took a little bit of a different approach than just being you know typically when you look at advertising it's only top of funnel and it's really just to drive in the the top of final leads but what i really like about this approach is you know you're supporting um all the way through from the top of the funnel middle of the funnel and bottom of the funnel can you talk us through that a little bit basically the campaign itself was executed across three different stages first stages first stage was when we set up the toefl ad campaign for a selected audience to reach them via display and social media advertising and since info2 allows you to track the engagement for each contact individually information about every target who engaged with our landing page was passed to our islam as their team for outreach they researched both the company and key decision makers and crafted personalized sequences these sequences consisted of a variety

of content primarily delivered through emails these emails actually included personalized videos case studies and even memes how we mentioned before to set our communication apart from communication of any other vendors at the same time the contact that was engaged was moved to a mofo campaign to air cover the sdr's with messaging that aligned with and supported the content of their emails the morpho campaign was about further promoting our sdrs and creating an additional channel for them to passively engage with key decision makers it was personalized for each sdr with content that was specific to their personality and the creative approach for this stage of the campaign was about further showing them how they can use influence to target their own audiences it was crafted to share the process of connecting outreach with advertising and then showing the metrics that were returned

right and that's what we're seeing at the moment so you know we've got a message from stacy to uh to one of her contacts and then so that was stacy's outreach um and then we it was supported i guess through facebook and then through um the landing page which really um i guess stacy's is that her puppy happy his name is leo leo leo so it's yeah so i guess that and that's really important one of the things that we that i've been just that we discussed um at another session um that i did recently was about how um you know b2b marketers buy from humans they don't they don't buy from brands they buy from humans so it's really starting to bring out the human um element and aspect and i think that's that's something that's super important so from here where did the campaign um the campaign sort of go to um when easter's booked a meeting the key buyer and other targets in the account bind group were moved to

one-to-one campaign each one-to-one campaign covered the specific pain points of the accounts and was designed to support the account executive working on closing the deal for example how you can see here on the slides with autodesk the campaign creative was related back to the precision of its product it was highly customized approach to understand what autodesk does what solutions they're using and then pull together something that would both catch their attention and communicate how influential could help them the t-rex on this ad creator was used on their website to illustrate the output from using autodesk products so using their own example we altered this to create the connection between the quality of the product and the quality of the current targeting through another vendor i absolutely think this is amazing because really what you're doing is you're going to a level of detail and granularity to really understand who who this customer is what their pain points are and then tying it back can you how long does this sort of

process take and how much um time and resource and effort did you do you put into this at this stage yeah that's actually takes a lot of time the research part is the biggest part that takes a lot of time like compared to anything else but when you have the clear understanding what of what um account does you will be able to come up with some creative idea to promote your products so like i think that the biggest the biggest part of the time that goes into creating this campaign is the time that goes to research how closely do you work with the aes in being able to understand the pain points from from their perspective in terms of the conversations they're having yeah is always could provide some meaningful insights that i that we can use um that we can use creating the campaigns so we spend a lot of time communicating with each other obviously during this process having um access to the aes and having an understanding of what their conversations are with with customers is

super important you know what's that relationship like in terms of how you work with with the aes to understand those pain points and get those insights yeah we have to communicate constantly to get meaningful insights from ies and that's what what they do and we're really grateful for for their support because sometimes you can come up with the idea for the campaign just by talking with ie for five minutes it all it takes wow that's uh that's really insightful you know it's true though because i think that's an important lesson to understand right you know as marketers we can brainstorm what we like but unless we understand what a pain what what a customer is actually saying or what they want and what their pain points are you know that's how we make our marketing super relevant so i think that's a that's a great point um so thank you for sharing that cool so i you know jerry i'd be really uh you know i know we had obviously we had the 500 plus roi but can you take us through some of the granular results of the of the from the

campaign the campaign resulted in an average ctr of 0.74 overall we engaged 183 accounts reached nearly 7 000 decision makers and close to 60 of the engaged decision makers had c vp or director level titles so that's pretty impressive from my point of view from a conversion perspective we held 25 democrats we had nine direct conversions from the campaign and the author influence extended sales cycle the campaign achieved 581 percent error closing deals with closing deals to date with cisco mitova and sumo logic um the campaign was not only successful for influence but the value of it goes by beyond this um it illustrated how include can be used for cohesive marketing and sales

orchestration and by different ways for example working together to determine target accounts delivering relevant marketing messages through the panel in support of sales and engaging key decision makers and influencing the border group buying group daria those are amazing those are amazing results even if i don't say so us i'm guessing that you are very happy with those results and that that outcome from that campaign yeah that's true this starts the time yeah great so can you tell me um i'd like to know you know through this experience and what you've been doing and what you've learned over you know over the past couple of years um you know what are the things that you would you would um tell to someone else who is approaching their campaigns like this what are the things that they need to know about um about setting setting this type of campaign up and what they need to do so first of all you have to have a thorough research before you do any

before you make any conclusions on what kind of messaging you have to deliver to specific accounts so um you have to not only do a good research you also have to communicate with your sales team because sales team brings a lot of meaningful insights and they could also challenge your ideas and it's and it's all and it's always good when they're trying to challenge your ideas because like with this uh beckon back and forth communication you're getting to the idea that would actually work and another thing is that you have to clearly determine what kind of accounts you're going after you have to understand what accounts you're trying to reach it's so important isn't it i mean that's essentially the fundamentals of account based marketing but it goes beyond just um i think looking at your list and determining what those accounts are um it's really understanding okay well what are the segments because i know when we when you're talking to me earlier with the different segments that that we that you

were expanding the verticals that you were expanding into you were telling me that um you adjusted the advertising based on the segment so it wasn't just like one size fits all you know you're really actually thinking about okay well what is relevant to pharma what is relevant from a pain point perspective what's relevant from those customers that have an abm program already so yeah i totally agree with you um one last thing for you um before before we sort of wrap up we you know we often hear these case studies and it's like oh uh the amazing the journey was amazing the results were amazing but you know we know that that's often not true um i'd like to know what it is that you learned during um during this campaign and executing this campaign and what you would change if anything um i wouldn't say that i would change anything but what i've learned for sure is that not every idea that you think is really good would actually work so that was some kind of revelation for me at some point because at some point you can

come up with some brilliant idea from your perspective and it just won't work so the only thing for you to do here is basically to set to put it away and try thinking about how is is there any way is there any other way that i could reach this account is there is there any other message that i could create for this account so that's basically was my biggest take out yep yeah no i think i i hey i learnt it with this presentation i i'm trying to make this this uh font work and i got feedback that i was like it's the font is the best one so you know be like now to change it and you know so it is what it is but no i appreciate that i think you know all jokes aside that is it's very true and i think what you what you really highlight is that you need to be flexible and open to listening and to change um which it was just absolutely important you know especially in the world we live in today

cool well that that does bring us hopefully if this slide um changes over maybe it's not going to oh okay there we go that takes us to the end of this presentation so thank you so much daria um for our audience that for our audience that's listening uh daria is based in kiev and it is pretty late uh for her there so um i you know i want to acknowledge you and and say i'm so appreciative of you of you sharing these insights with me and with the audience i want to thank you for for taking the time out to listen to influential and if you have any questions both my contact details and diary's contact details are here we also have a digital booth so if you would like to reach out to us there and book a demo or a meeting to find out a bit more um then you're more than welcome to but thank you everyone for joining us and we wish you all the very best with the conference thank you thank you

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