Crafting multi-touch campaigns for maximum impact in account-based marketing (ABM)
By Eve Kelly, Marketing Executive at Accelera
B2B marketing has changed drastically over the past decade, and many businesses are starting to hone in on more targeted strategies for better outreach and effectiveness. Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is one powerful approach that allows tech companies to focus their efforts on specific accounts, so that they can align their sales and marketing messages for the key decision makers they’re working with.
According to SiriusDecisions, organisations that use ABM see an average increase of 24% in revenue and a 10% increase in win rates compared to those using traditional marketing methods. Multi-touch campaigns play a major role here, as they allow businesses to use various channels to engage prospects and nurture relationships throughout the buyer journey.
In this guide, we’ll examine why you might consider implementing Account-Based Marketing (ABM) and how to effectively plan, execute, and measure multi-touch ABM campaigns.
What is account-based marketing (ABM)?
Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is a more strategic approach that focuses on individual accounts rather than a broader market. B2B companies can target specific high-value key accounts and customise their marketing campaigns for key decision-makers and stakeholders. As a result, messaging is more personal and better addresses the needs and challenges of each account.
Research shows that marketers who use ABM strategies report higher ROIs about 85% of the time. So, incorporating a target account list and ABM tactics into your marketing efforts could make sure your next campaign is put in front of your ideal customers, rather than just casting out a wide net.
What are multi-touch campaigns?
From there, we get into multi-touch campaigns, which create a more cohesive experience for buyers by adopting a wide variety of touchpoints. These touchpoints take form in different ways, including email, social media, webinars, and content syndication.
The more channels a business can reinforce its messaging through, the higher the likelihood of strong conversion rates.
Why multi-touch?
Advantages of multi-touch campaigns
There are several notable advantages of multi-touch campaigns, though one of the most obvious is increased engagement and reach. When a business employs various channels for a single marketing campaign, it can connect with prospects where they are most active.
In the end, this repeated exposure helps foster brand recall.
Another major advantage of multi-touch campaigns is that they offer choice. There isn't a one-size-fits-all formula for which channels to use, as every business has unique marketing needs and goals.
By understanding where and when you will most likely be online throughout the day, marketing teams can improve the chances of your message being seen.
Addressing buyer behaviour
It’s equally important to understand the behaviour of the modern buyer and define key personas in the context of a multi-touch strategy.
Today’s buyers consume content on multiple platforms, and around 81% conduct thorough online research before making decisions. As such, having multi-touch strategies to help you stay relevant and in consumer feeds is key.
Multi-touch vs Traditional marketing
So, how do these two forms of marketing differ?
While traditional marketing can mean many things, it’s often characterised by a conventional, single-channel, broadly targeted approach, such as a print ad or a television commercial. We don’t often see high levels of segmentation here (if any at all), and while you can still generate brand awareness with a broad approach, it’s often not as personalised or engaging to the individual consumer.
This brings us to one of the primary differences between multi-touch campaigns and traditional marketing — targeting. Multi-touch campaigns concentrate on specific accounts, while traditional marketing often casts a wider net to appeal to a general audience, even if it doesn’t align with the company's “ideal” customer profile (ICP).
The level of engagement is another significant distinction. With multi-touch strategies, businesses can facilitate personalised, ongoing interactions and nurture relationships with potential buyers over time. Traditional marketing, on the other hand, often lacks the depth for meaningful connections, as it primarily relies on one-time interactions.
Key touchpoints across the buyer journey
Knowing how your multi-touch campaign can make a difference starts by having a clearer picture of the buyer journey, which is the typical process potential customers undergo. This journey consists of three main stages:
Awareness: identifying a problem or opportunity.
Consideration: evaluating different solutions and vendors.
Decision: choosing a specific solution to address their needs.
Touchpoints play a key role at each stage, as they offer moments in time when potential customers interact with your brand. These moments shape their perceptions and guide their choices.
From here, we have to look at the types of touchpoints you can leverage to make the buyer experience more meaningful.
Types of touchpoints
So what are the different touchpoint types we can consider for our multi-touch campaigns?
Email sequences
Email marketing is still favoured by more than 31% of marketers, which should tell you something. To this day, email sequences are still incredibly effective marketing tools, as businesses can send carefully tailored and personalised content to segmented audiences that address their specific needs.
Social ads
Social ads play a major role as well, allowing businesses to send out targeted advertising on popular platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Different social platforms have specific demographics with specific interests, so you can better curate your ads to capture the right attention on each.
Content syndication
With content syndication, you can distribute the same content across multiple channels, which helps establish authority and provides insights to what might be larger markets than you alone have access to.
Webinars
Webinars are a surprisingly powerful touchpoint for many marketers, as they focus on leveraging educational content to generate leads and increase engagement. Unlike many other forms of marketing, webinars are unique in that they offer direct interaction with prospects. As such, people can answer questions or concerns that prospects may have in real-time.
Importance of omni-channel engagement
Of course, if the goal is to provide a more cohesive experience for prospects, you need to consider whether or not they can interact with your brand consistently across different platforms,
This is omni-channel engagement.
This strategy creates a unified customer experience, making sure you’re never out of reach from your customers, as they can always engage with your brand through their preferred channels without losing context. As an added benefit, you get more customer tracking time, meaning it becomes easier to analyse interactions across all channels to get deeper insights into their behaviour and preferences.
However, you can’t have effective omni-channel engagement without cohesive messaging and branding. In short, you must make sure your content reflects a similar tone, style, and key messages, regardless of the platform.
Note that we said “similar,” not “same,” as it’s equally important to develop unique messaging for different touchpoints.
Unique messaging for different touchpoints
Personalised messaging is everything in modern marketing. In fact, McKinsey says that 40% of companies that excel at personalisation see significant increases in engagement and revenue.
People tend to feel more valued and understood when communications are relevant to their specific needs. Finding the right strategies for personalisation at different touchpoints is the hard part. Luckily, there are several tried and true strategies you can use, including:
Data insights: nothing can give you a clearer understanding of your audience than data. Your basic factors might include behaviour, preferences, and pain points, which help you create more targeted messaging.
Tone and style: you’ll also want to adapt the tone and style of your content to suit each channel. For instance, while your formal voice might work well over email, a more casual and engaging approach might be better suited for Twitter or Facebook.
Context: as the cliche goes, context is key, and in marketing, you must always consider context. For example, while an email can provide in-depth information and resources, messaging on social media should be quick and impactful.
Using account insights to personalise content
If you want to make your customised messaging more impactful, account insights can be incredibly helpful. These include detailed data and information gathered about specific target accounts, including their industry, company size, challenges, and engagement history.
You can collect this information from various sources, including CRM systems, web analytics, and social media.
If you want to effectively leverage your account insights, you must integrate this data into your campaign strategies.
To do so, you can segment your target audience based on demographics and shared characteristics for more targeted messaging or find ways to be more timely with your content.
The importance of pacing and timing for strategic touchpoints
Timing is one of the biggest factors in multi-touch campaigns, as every buyer moves at a unique pace through the decision-making process. When you have this information, you can determine how frequently to engage with each account, and, in turn, stop yourself from either overloading a prospect too soon or missing the moment of highest interest.
Aligning touchpoints with where a prospect is in their buyer journey is one of your main goals.
For example, during the awareness stage, informative touchpoints like ads and webinars should be spaced to build familiarity. As the buyer moves into consideration, more frequent and personalised outreach, such as emails or interactive webinars, can keep the brand top of mind.
Recommended tools and technologies
ABM platforms
To create an effective ABM campaign, you need the right tools to manage, track, and optimise interactions across multiple touchpoints. Some of the most popular ABM platforms for streamlining campaign planning include:
Marketing automation tools
You should also have access to a multi-touch marketing automation tool so you can automate repetitive tasks, such as email sequences and social media scheduling. Some of our favourites include:
Data analytics tools
Lastly, we have data analytics tools, which help evaluate the performance of ABM campaigns. Some of the best tools to get insights into engagement rates, content performance, and account progress throughout the funnel include:
Final thoughts
Multi-touch campaigns have become a key component of ABM. With strategic multi-channel campaign, you can optimise your engagement and give your highest-value accounts a more structured approach.
If you want to take your ABM strategy further than ever before, that’s where we can step in. Our media buying services maximise lead generation and ensure each campaign reaches the right audience at the right time.
With the added benefit of intent data, we enable marketers to prioritise and target accounts based on real buying signals for relevance and impact. Learn how Accelera can help your business drive growth and elevate its ABM results.