How to Automatically Personalize the Buyer's Journey with Ads | Playbook by Influ2

well thank you everyone for joining we're psyched for another Forge X ABM workshop and today we have back for round two we've got Anna symbolist who is the head of ABM over at influ Tu and today we're going to be chatting all about how to personalize your ads at scale automatically and the big emphasis on this webinar is very much around real world practical examples that you can steal so yeah format for this as well very relaxed toss your questions in the chat I'm going to be interrupting Anna all throughout with a few questions and we want this to be as conversational as possible so Anna I'll pass it over your way for a quick intro and to kick this off okay thank you for the intro David Davis um so I've been running ABM at in fluu for more than a year and I joined

the company like more than two years ago and today I am going to share uh some of the things that we came up with throughout the years and keep in mind that all of the examples that I'm sharing have been tested in the trenches we use them on our audience and this is just our understanding of how you can use um ads to personalize the buy Journey let me start the slideshow for you so okay one of my favorite slides B2B buyers expect personalization and there is a simple um it's very simple there's a simple answer to that um we are all very used to this term of a buying committee right now and we like to treat um accounts as accounts and buying committees as a unified creature but actually I'm just going to State the obvious the buying committee consists of people and outside of being B2B buyers they are also b2c buyers and

they have the regular experiences in the b2c just uh just like all of us and I just want to give you a very short example of what is the modern b2c buyers Journey right now that I'm personally just recently experienced so I moved into a new apartment and I need a new desk I don't have a desk there and it took meta very little time to figure out what kind of desk I want and that I want a desk and it served me ads of things that I liked for the entire weekend and I felt like I'm doing research honestly so at the time when I purchased the desk I felt like I was doing an informed decision I was very proud of myself to be honest and I think that's where B2B bars journey is really behind because then on Monday I log into LinkedIn and these are the ads that I'm getting so the first one is on boarding your clients just got faster well that's good but I don't do that um I work in marketing and then I got an amazing ad

from rubber faab that they're going to an event in Frankfurt just great but I don't need rubber and I don't live in Frankfurt so first thought I was like wow this is amazing for my presentation then they had to pay for it you know um so let's uh discuss what I think personalization in B2B can look like because of course I gave you an example of a b2c experience which is a lot more simplified and with B2B you're not dealing with one person you're dealing with the entire buying committee and I think that personalization in B2B is all about adjusting your content and messaging and aligning it with the individual buyer needs and the journey stages so I'm sure most of you already do this by serving and creating content based on Persona based on industry you know we design our website this way but I think that that approach only partially addresses the buyer's Journey needs because the buyer committee consists of multiple people there's usually this champing

that's researching everything and collecting things about different products from the market but then there are many people who have no idea your product even exists because they are not that into the purchase themselves but they are you know they are on the buying committer they can be the decision makers and um my favorite stat I think the stat has been around for a while that 70% of the Bary Journey happens before prospects agree to talk to sales and I think that number is going to grow as Millennials Are Climbing their career letter simple example our head of marketing decision maker she recently missed her parcel because she doesn't pick up her phone from unknown numbers you know the and people these days they like going on review websites they like reading your websites they look at product comparisons and um a simple maybe not very simple but a tradition answer to that would be creating as much content as possible that would answer

the hypothetical questions of your hypothetical prospects but that works that's a great approach um but that's also a betting game and well sorry a guessing game because you can never guess how their how the prospect is behaving and no person is the same so you're just hoping there they got the right ideas and the right value props from the content that you have and we think that ads in automation can be a tool that can help you take the prospects out of the dark and help you build trust and plant the right ideas and show your product value educate them in the right way by literally serving the right content at the right time and you should do that again our opinion I think that you should do that by advancing content at your prospect space and by that I mean uh the following here is a very simple example in the first ad we are setting up the problem we're trying to identify a pain point for us

this would be asking our audience whether they are reaching the right people in their target accounts because we are a person-based advertising company and what I like doing is I like selecting a lot of pain points and serving them at the same time to the same audience and seeing who engages with what to figure out what their intent and what is their interest and then based on those engagements and um reactions I would move them to a more targeted ad that addresses the paino and on the very right here it's um trust content trust content or any thought leadership content that actually supports your value prop and gives it give gives it more credibility because here we say that you Target only decision makers by name and here we say what is the benefit of it and to do all that you already have the CRM data point the data points in your CRM and um let me just explain when I say that you have to treat individuals

as individuals of course you also treat an account as an account because that's still a B2B um purchase so there are data points that can be applied to accounts and there are data points that can be applied to specific people in the buying group so for the account you can have a system of account statuses you can move um People based on the pipeline stage they on let's say um of course you're not going to keep the rest of the buying committee on very top of the funnel ads like um you know talking about different things uh when for the top of the funo basically uh when you already have an open opportunity because that makes no sense but there are individual stages of content consumption um individual steps I would say of content consumption on that middle of the finnal stage again renewal approaching or maybe an account ownership change that think of it let's say you have sdrs in account owner then there is an open opportunity

your AE is the account owner and then you win the deal and you have the customer success manager owning the account and for the people in the buying committee you can have let's say Outreach has been detected so you want to push your SDR space to to to to their feed or maybe there's no Outreach detected in a number of days and it's time to remind about yourself or there is a Cod taking place there is a Cod being cancel they didn't show up or maybe you have developed a system of contact roles that help you identify what content is the best at what stage to what person and of course there are add Impressions and clicks that show you that give you this information of how how much content they've consumed and which content they've consumed and which content they like and dislike and I am now going to move on to the best part of the presentation where I'm going to share real life examples that we used um for our own ABM uh depart ABM

uh program and I've divided them into three stages for pipeline generation deal closure and poast sale expansion and every little bar here presents a content type not necessarily a um how your journey is going to look like let me get it so water okay so the first one is not um drw breaking value proposition um it's uh really to just explain the why behind your product as you can see here I like weird ads I'm the one who approved it but we definitely also have um a little bit more conservative images to uh match the taste of different audience segments and have you tried or leverag memes for some of the value prop ads yeah yeah we we've done that and I'm um I'm a Tik Tok

girl so I detect Tik Tok and Instagram real Trends and we like to change them into pain points of our target audience and serve it to them and what I've seen is that uh memes they definitely have a lot higher CTR so people like engaging with them and you know you're not very used to memes in the B2B yet uh so it's more engaging for the audience but when you measure um when you're not just measuring the CTR but you're also measuring um convergence memes is not something that um I'd say converts really well and Trust content and really high quality content is something that can help you achieve conversions but memes definitely can freshen up your whole program and the experience of your target audience okay and then social trust and overall I'm going to talk about a lot of

a lot about trust content and different types of it so here what you see is um it's two approaches the first one is us talking about us and boasting that we are the leaders because we're very happy and then also so we use um our reviews on the ads just to support um the claims of value props that we make and we like serving them at the same time and then thought leadership uh the trick with this one that we do is some leadership is posted on our website so the link that the CTA it would lead to our own website and then some podcasts or webinars or events and things like that um the most of the information is hosted like on the third party website and we are very happy to lead our audience there just to give them this genuine experience of you know who posted it and what they're saying and a quick question on this one for leadership what's interesting is we're kind of seing we have we don't have a

mass mass data set behind this but from the initial findings we've seen thought leadership be something that you know definitely makes an impact all the way through the entirety of the buying cycle through expansion as well and when you think about thought leadership when is the best time to run this do you continuously have this in an always on motion or do you really push it in you know this initial phase yeah yeah uh for me and uh what we believe believe in is that um it should be always in motion and we run it throughout the entire um journey and uh we also have active engagement cycles for our accounts and then we have nurtur cycle for our account and nurture is built out of brand messages and and Fa leadership basically because especially after your account has been in active Outreach and

a lot of um ads and going through different Journeys that you built for them and let's say they didn't convert but they already have this knowledge about you but you don't want to be pushing it into their face all the time I mean that's what I think that's my subjective I don't want to be I don't want to push our value props to them all the time because maybe it's just not the right timing and it makes no sense for them but then by continuously remaining in their feet with a very low intensity of Impressions gives you this connection gives them this opportunity to first of all be reminded and not forget about your existence and all of the things that you try to push into their brain with your engagement cycle and that and maybe they liked you and it was just not the right timing and when the timing is right they engage and we follow up and you get a deal out of it so yeah I'll be I'll be covering a lot more of um thought leadership content later on in my presentation as well amazing

thank uh the next one is a disable strap if you think back to the DAT data triggers that I mentioned this is for instance when Outreach detected we like to push ads that introduces the face of the um SDR that's reaching out to this person and um well that gives a little bit of an advantage to um you know get recognized in the Inbox and especially when you're prospecting like C Level or VP level they you know sdrs get uh information about investment and you have to block everyone on the email uh demo show up campaign is something that we've covered in our previous webinar with Davis so there's a lot of automation behind it but basically the idea here is that can you set up your system to show ads in between in the time frame between the call being booked and the call taking place so basically we show the ae's face

and we give additional information about the product just to keep them engaged and remind them that this is coming up and so they don't forget and we actually after that we based um based on this uh play we did a noow Chase so there is also a way to automate your ads and show um show them to people who didn't show up to the call because sometimes people Miss calls and don't even know about it maybe they didn't get notification maybe they reset their computer or they got a new computer and they didn't have everything set up yet um so this gives them an additional Avenue to reconnect with you and schedule another meeting and then um let's move on to deal closure because we serve ads all the way and here is the trust content again I'm starting with trust content and um uh this is where we think it's important to reinforce and um you know

give this additional P push to the decision makers that they are doing the right thing because probably your sales cycle is long and they're evaluating a bunch of vendors and this is the time where you have to really really earn their trust and uh get them to like you even more and the difference if you think about it um if you look at it the difference here is that I'm trying to State their paino again because that's something that is going to remind them why they're even looking for the solution in the first place and I'm also here I'm more confident serving them long content like guides or case studies or like long reads because when it's just top of the funnel I don't know how they feel about me I don't think that anyone's going to read a a white paper honestly unless it's something super exciting with a lot of independent research but when they're already in the deal they they're interested in this use

cases for use cases um there are two ways uh to approach this sometimes it's better to show one use case that you are selling and it's really based on the health of your deal and sometimes you can show more use cases to make the deal bigger or you know give them more options if they're not very excited with a first use case that you are suggesting they purchase and of course case studies that's um I think everyone does that just giving them ideas and proving that you've done it with other companies is important and for stalled opportunities um again it depends sometimes you can just again show some pain points add throw in some personalization maybe try to show them the value prob that made them convert in the first place and sometimes add is this only channel of influence when for instance you have the you know once in a

while you get the uh opportunity where there is this person who's in every email thread on every call with their mics off with their cameras off they never respond to anyone to any of your Outreach and there is nothing you can do honestly and they could be they could be the deal blockers um an ad is an an ad channel is an Avenue that you can they can use to influence them or if you know the specifics of you know maybe they have objections for us this can be something you know sometimes prospects say I can do it with an ABM tool and we have a campaign dedicated comparing what is account based targeting what person based targeting because those are different things that serve different purposes sometimes and because we are hooked up to the CRM people you know it's natural for people to worry about safety and so that's when we push them ads about our compliance and things like that and we are approaching the end of

the buyers Journey as soon assuming that everything goes well and everything works and you close the deal um adoption campaigns this is something I partner uh on with our customer success Department because when especially when you have a product well it's not we have a different uh thing but when you have a product let's say when you have a decision maker who wants this um introduced into the workflow but then the users were not part of the decision and when the users are not happy maybe their tax te is already overloaded and they're like I'm not learning another thing and when the solution then gets re-evaluated it gets a bad evaluation because no one used it so and you really don't have the connection sometimes to the actual users so running an adoption campaign to those people can be crucial and help you um avoid churn basically because you show them you give them tutorials or you show them um results and just to give them some inspiration of how how they should be using you

and then when you have new feature or add-on announcements and let's say you want to sell them you charge for them um you can serve Those ads to specific people and when they interact this could be used as a signal for your customer success to reach out and um you know track it as an as intense signal and of course case studies from similar Industries but that's also something you should definitely do in the doal closure stage and ad hoc for any stage because I'm sure that you can come up with a lot more things and a lot more stages based on on how your deals are progressing and how you're requiring customers for us we like to do event promo um and just show to our audience that we are going to be at this event just you know to build credibility and announce it and what is the result the result is very simple that with even by implementing some things from the

Playbook I think your ad Journey can do a lot better um and meet your customers expectations because when you serve the right content at the right time that addresses their specific needs it definitely helps you to shorten the sales cycle and succeed so yeah that's um that's really it um let me know if you want to go back to any specific examples that we have and uh Davis I know that we have also posted this on Forex and it's available for you to look at with a lot more detailed explanations and cases where you can use the ads and the messaging this was amazing Anna thank you so much and uh I know I've got some questions for you any questions from the audience we will absolutely make sure that we have get answered in the next seven minutes or so uh the first one I have Anna you mentioned the I forget what specific uh ad type it was but it

had G2 reviews in there lot of the we we get a lot of questions about G2 and some lookalike companies as well how do those perform from an ad investment standpoint and would you would you you know advise others to also invest in G2 and leverage them as well let me go back to that slide [Music] um wait a [Music] second share my screen yeah so this slide here um so I was surprised by people people care honestly I was like I just want to try it out I want to see how the audience reacts and they do react and why I like using G2 Snippets or any review Snippets because we also use Snippets of reviews on our website that we have collected

separately from G2 because you can do that too as well you don't need a review site for that um is it works on an emotional level especially when um you can collect reviews on different pain points let's say for us it's when we're targeting ammers that's one paino here there's no other ABM platform they call us an ABM platform because because they think we are really know what we are um then uh when we're targeting sales you can get a review from a salesperson that shows how they're using so you have a lot of free content um that you can use and it's like very short Snippets that are very easy to consume and that they get they get to people plus you have the face and the reviewer so you get you get the third party opinion as well and um I like using them on top of the funnel as well because they're short and they don't take you like prospects don't need to spend too much time interacting and

reading it to get the idea of what we're trying to get to them totally Mak sense thank you and we have a question from Ed uh all around what tools are you using to automate and Trigger the ads so I use our own tool to do that uh davus I think we've discussed it you could do similar things I think by using Google ads or you can try linkend Custom audiences but uh personally I use our our own tool influ to for that and yeah yeah that's that that's basically the what we're trying to do that's the meaning of the product is it is it a heavy lift as in there are so many different ad types that you have in here are you doing it personally do you have a large team running this um the ads that I showed to you they took a lot of time and we developed them gradually and uh we do I do have a

team I do have people on the team helping me out and outside of the team also helping me out sometimes we Outsource like a design um agency to help us with creatives um building this entire journey and planning every step I'd say it's time consuming I think it's it requires a lot of analytical thinking to see how people are moving what are the trends and what do you think are the gaps that you could fill in with ads basically yep and we have another question from Michael uh he asked tactically how can a company Target specific named accounts similar to matched audiences on LinkedIn across many platform forms from the initial campaign launch maybe that's a complicated question can you can you repeat that technically or tactically tactically can you repeat that question

totally uh so tactically how can a company Target specific named accounts similar audience uh to match audiences on LinkedIn across many platforms from the initial campaign launch I hope I understand the question right so what happens is um you get a list of your ICP accounts that you want to sell to and but I really want to pitch the products I really want to pitch the product here and how I do it but I have a list of ICP accounts that I then separate I can separate into Industries I can separate them into personas and I create audience cohorts and then I upload um my creatives in different sizes and with all those the texts in there and then the platform takes care of serving them to the platform where um my person you know my target spends time basically online I really hope that answered the

question because I don't think I'm getting it Michael toss in a followup if uh if you have any clarifying points oh he does awesome so he said for example we have 5K accounts we know their specific paino they're experiencing because of their incumbent software which is their competitor and they want to Target only those accounts yeah you can do that with [Laughter] infu I mean um you could definitely try out um LinkedIn matched audience but that is not going to I tried doing that I tried doing it at my previous company where I didn't have the luxury of using our uh product um um and we did match audiences there but LinkedIn um is very slow with personalization to be honest because personally I have all of the settings allowing uh to Target me with anything specific and collect any data

that they want about me on LinkedIn but um LinkedIn is not very personalized so when you're going after specific accounts I'd suggest using person-based advertising but then apart from using person-based advertising you also have to make sure that your sales team is ready to work with this specific segment maybe there's something you know um ideally have a deck that attacks your competitor that um you know highlights there where you win uh because sometimes you know it's it's a very good indicator of how your pitch should look like and how your ads should look like that's also very tricky with content when you are trying to address if you're going after a competitor you have to be very careful of course I mean I think it's bad practice to just attack your competitor uh so um going through going through the paino is I think is the right idea if you think that they're experiencing it

yeah amazing I know we're a minute over time uh any last questions from any of our listeners anything about the content do you guys agree with everything do you think what do you think about my messaging I need to know Qui messaging poll yeah should we do a messaging poll because I'm like was really trying there I I well I can tell you right now I love your ads I think that they look and um we'll definitely have to do what I think might be interesting too is a followup that gets really deep into the person-based advertising like contact based advertising versus just account which really leans into what I think is part of the power of influ too

and you know it's not just getting granular in terms of hey we're going to go after these you know thousand accounts but as the deal progresses throughout and you have the names of those contacts who are part of the buying group or the buying committee sending really targeted ads towards those contacts which I think first com first comment you should have the names even when you have that 1,000 accounts you should have the names of the buying committee because he only because you only want to Target the buying Committee in the account you shouldn't be going after the account you should be going after the buying committee so then when it moves uh when your deal progresses and you get to work with the committee it's then um for me uh the challenge is here to segment that audience and because you don't want to be setting up specific campaign for a specific account unless you are very invol like you're very you really want to close them it depends on the deal size and the capacity that you have but for most

marketers I don't think that's a realistic scenario where you go after each account individually that would be like a tier one program with 10 accounts but that's not how you how I would build a um dou like you know an ABM machine basically yeah totally agree all right Anna we have another question from an anonymous attendee who wants to see how the tool actually works so I think we need I think we need round three we could do like inart demo chat about the specifics of the contact base and moving away from the fullon accounts and just going really narrow in the actually targeting the specific buying group but but um awesome well thanks so much for joining us today Anna thank you for for attending all who joined in live and um look forward to our next one as well thank you very much everyone and thank you for sitting through a lot of creatives