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ServiceNow’s Approach to Webinar Program Innovation (Part II)

ABM

This is part two in a two-part series on how organizations can extract more results from their webinars. For part one, click here . To learn more about Webinar World London, click here .

The push towards account-based marketing ultimately is about creating the capability to personalize go-to-market strategies and outreach. Webinars – both generic and targeted – play a vital role in ServiceNow’s focus on the Financial Services market.

There are many definitions of Account-Based Marketing going around – it’s a hot topic in Marketing these days. At ServiceNow, ABM is one of three Go-To-Market programs, in addition to Executive Programs and Campaigns.

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Figure 1: ServiceNow Go-To-Market Model

 

Market and Account Segmentations

We segment our markets along a number of axes, and decisions on marketing spend are related to our country tiering model (Tier 1: UK, Germany, France and The Netherlands), the 50 largest accounts for ServiceNow in EMEA, the Executive decision makers (CxO level) within the Top-50, the broader market segment of Large Enterprise organisations, specific industries that historically have proven lucrative for ServiceNow, like Financial Services.

In 2018, we increased our focus on Top-50 accounts. In the first phase of our Account-Based Marketing program, we target 17 Financial Services accounts (banks and insurers) within our EMEA Top-50 account list.

Guided by our London-based ABM agency McDonald Butler Associates, we’re working side by side with Sales leadership and Client Directors to understand how marketing can help accelerate the sales strategy execution within these 17 accounts.

Financial Services: 3 go-to-market modes

To understand the role of the ON24 platform as part of our ABM strategy, I will outline our thinking on a high-level. If we take the triangle from figure 1 and we put it on its side, we see figure 2, where three go-to-market modes in the Financial Services market are identified:

1.    Content Marketing for the largest segment in the database. These are the accounts that are in the Financial Services industry, but they’re not strategic enough yet for ServiceNow to focus investment.

2.    Account-based marketing for the 17 Financial Services Accounts within the EMEA Top-50 of largest accounts, critical to the future growth of the company.

3.    Target Account Marketing for those accounts within Top-17 FS which require even more focus and investments, for instance, because they have been included in a global focus program, or because the sales strategy requires additional marketing investment.

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Figure 2: Industry-to-Account-Based Engagement Model 

Content Strategies Per Mode

Now that these three modes have been established, we can start devising the content marketing strategy and resources, systems and data services we require per phase over time. To summarize six months of conversations between our sales teams, agencies, and colleagues around the globe:

Seventeen of the EMEA Top-50 accounts our sales organization is going after, are in Financial Services. If we create a content marketing strategy for our target personas in Financial Services, we can start creating an active database in Financial Services within our Tier 1 markets and track who is engaging with ServiceNow, test new ideas, and generate initial demand.

Part of the mix of assets and tactics we employ for this FS content strategy are industry-based messaging frameworks, demo environments, sales decks, blogs, position papers, storybooks, and FS industry event sponsorships – all developed in close cooperation with industry experts and Client Directors.

The ON24 Pillar

In the case of our Financial Services focus, one of the key content strategy pillars is a series of live webinars, running on ON24, reviewing the various parts of our FS value proposition with large FS customers featuring as panel speakers. The recordings of these webinars are used to populate an ON24 Target landing page, with a branded header visual, targeted introduction and the call-to-action to engage the FS discussion groups within the ServiceNow Community.

For the 17 FS accounts within the EMEA Top-50, we go the extra mile by increasing the level of localization of the content and assets. The messaging framework is reworked based on account insights shared by the account director. Co-branded design templates per account show our commitment to work with them. Our executives proactively reach out to their counterparts.

Not only is this a very scalable model, but it also feeds industry-specific content into the long-tail of accounts in the same segment, which are not yet in our Top-50 focus.

In line with the webinar performance metrics we track internally, some of which we shared in Part 1 of this two-part blog, we have seen a significant increase in target account engagement and pipeline influence. The use of ON24’s Target product for ABM has been key to creating the focused content experience, while enabling our marketing metrics to easily demonstrate the increased consumption and engagement via the real-time sync with our CRM system.

Bid Marketing Menu

Once we get to the RFP/bid stage of the engagement, a special programme of activities kicks into action, our so-called “Bid Marketing Menu”, including a targeted brochure aligned with the value themes outlined in the RFP, a branded ON24 Target landing page with messaging and video assets relevant to the offer, email and social media programs to driver further engagement in the account, and real-time engagement monitoring.

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Figure 3: Account-based ON24 Target page – account logo blurred out in header visual

Targeted, Personalized Webinars

ON24 Target has enabled the ServiceNow team to introduce targeting and personalization techniques into our webinar programs. We already had the ON24 platform integrated with our website, our Eloqua marketing automation platform and our CRM system, and Tableau already has the dashboards in place to visualize engagement and business value down the funnel, which basically means that these targeted investments are automatically tracked and reported on in our systems, too. So, without much extra effort in the infrastructure layer, we’re able to create actionable insight and higher value for our sales and account teams.

Baseline for 2019 growth

Today, we can show which contacts from our target accounts are engaging our webinar program, including the stage of their engagement and propensity to pipeline and bookings – which is a great baseline for continued growth in 2019 and beyond.

The post ServiceNow’s Approach to Webinar Program Innovation (Part II) appeared first on ON24 .

To view our Partner blog, click here

Webinar World London: A Q&A with SiriusDecisions’ Isabel Montesdeoca

Best Practices

This story, among others, will be featured at Webinar World 2018 in London. To learn more about Webinar World London, click here .

What makes for a good marketer? How can the industry adapt to a post-GDPR world? Isabel Montesdeoca, Director of EMEA Research at SiriusDecisions, will answer these questions and many, many more at Webinar World London 2018 this coming September. To get a sample of what she’ll discuss as Webinar World London’s keynote speaker, we sat down with Isabel to discuss today’s marketing environment. Here’s what she had to say:

What are you speaking on at Webinar World London, and what are you most excited about this summit of marketing leaders? 

I’m going to be speaking about a topic that is near and dear to my heart, buyer-centricity. As marketers, we’ve come such a long way since the early days of digital marketing where the focus was 100% on increasing the range of digital tactics we could support in order to reach more people. Today, we recognise that in order for marketing to deliver results, we also have to deliver value in every one of those interactions. Achieving that is a tall order because what buyers perceive as valuable changes over time. To meet our goal of 100% value, 100% of the time, marketers need to develop a systematic process for listening to buyers and acting on that information. At SiriusDecisions, we love helping marketers get started down this path and one of the ways we do that is by sharing the insights we gain through our SiriusDecisions Buying Insights study. That’s what I’ll be covering at Webinar World London.

How do you think B2B marketers can better leverage webinars in order to increase engagement and drive revenue? 

The data from our SiriusDecisions Buying Insights study shows that in the Education phase of the buyer’s journey, live vendor-hosted webinars are the second most consumed tactic in Europe. Furthermore, European buyer’s rated live vendor-hosted webinars as the most impactful provider-led interaction they had at that early stage. That finding proves that webinars have the power to deliver real value to buyers when and where they need it most. In order to capitalise on that opportunity, marketers need to ensure they think through and personalise every aspect of their webinar experience.

It all starts by selecting webinar topics that are relevant to specific segments of your target audience. The more you sub-segment the audience, the more you can tailor your message making attendees feel as if you are answering their questions before they’ve even asked them. During the webinar itself, marketers should focus just as much on driving interaction as they do on delivering content. This can be done in a variety of ways including video, polls, quizzes, and always including time for Q&A. At the end of the webinar, link to a survey that offers attendees a choice of additional resources to support further exploration – extending the value of attending and giving you another opportunity to request opt-in consent. All of these are ways in which marketers can make every webinar feel relevant and personal to buyers.

What are some of the trends in marketing today that excite you most?

One of the trends I am most excited about is bringing together of multiple data sources – market data, persona profile data, first and third-party behavioural data, performance data, customer data, and more – to help us model and analyse more accurate views of our buyers. To really deliver value, we have to take the time to learn about our buyers more fully and use those insights to drive real-time programmatic actions. Today’s customer data platforms are starting down that path and I can’t wait to see how these will evolve and be leveraged to drive better and more relevant engagement.

What about GDPR might marketers have overlooked or need to watch for? Is there a silver lining? 

While companies have done a great job getting ready for GDPR, many have treated it like a race to the finish line on May 25, 2018. The truth is that May 25th was just the beginning. Waiting in the wings is the e-Privacy Regulation (currently going through the trilogue process) which will provide more specificity around electronic communications. And beyond that, we can be sure that data authorities around the world will continue to review and strengthen data privacy legislation.

The truth is that compliance is not a one-time clean up job and it’s not something we can edict within our organizations. Long-term sustainable compliance requires marketers, tele and sales reps alike to understand the intent behind the need to protect personal data and their role in safeguarding that data. Without that understanding, employees will always regard compliance as something that stands in the way of them doing business rather than realising that embracing consent practices actually allows us to identify who is really interested and most willing to engage. That’s the silver lining!

Beyond GDPR, what are the marketing challenges of the EMEA region? 

Many of our European clients struggle with the cost and effort of localising their marketing programs across the range of countries and languages they support. True localisation, not just translation, can be a daunting task when you have 20+ countries to cover. Once again, this is where understanding what your buyer wants and needs can help. Data from studies like the SiriusDecisions Buying Insights study can help marketers identify and prioritise localisation of the tactics buyers are actually consuming. Further upstream, it also helps content teams prioritise their content creation to ensure every asset created is activated. In a recent SiriusDecisions study, almost half (47%) of respondents told us that their organizations activate 50% or less of the content they create.

What’s your one prediction about how marketing will fundamentally change in the next decade? 

I don’t have a crystal ball handy but I think as our data insights and instincts improve, a number of things will happen. First, we will be able to identify a more granular cohort of characteristics (beyond industry, size and revenue) that uniquely define our target customers, allowing us to better map and find opportunities to engage with them. Within those organizations, we will stop hunting for single leads and start identifying group buying behaviour as an indicator of an emerging need for our services. Finally, rather than designing long and complex program flows that try to cover all the bases, we will use fully dynamic logic to select the optimal next step based on the actions of the buyer group and guided once again by insights.

What’s one piece of advice you’d provide for a young person who wants to pursue a career in marketing? 

Buyer data is important but it’s nothing without someone to interpret it. For anyone wanting to go into a career in marketing, I would strongly recommend getting comfortable with data modelling and learning how to interrogate that data. Equally, I would tell them not to hide behind the data. Grab every opportunity to talk to and understand buyers to help you interpret what you see in the data. The best marketers I know are the ones who stay curious and stay sharp throughout their career. The tools they use may change but their mindset does not.

What’s the most important change you’ve seen in the marketing industry in the past five years?

Easy! It’s the shift from product to audience centricity. In the last five years, companies around the world finally started to acknowledge how much buyer behaviour has changed. While digital marketing, social media and millennial trends had been grabbing headlines long before that, it wasn’t until B-to-B companies realised these trends heralded a much deeper change in how buying decisions are made that they understood they needed to change or risk losing ground to newer and more nimble competitors. That shift in attitude paved the way for investment in B-to-B persona profiling, the growth of B-to-B content marketing, and the development of more sophisticated engagement technology, just to name a few things. Change was coming fast and furious and it hasn’t stopped since.

The post Webinar World London: A Q&A with SiriusDecisions’ Isabel Montesdeoca appeared first on ON24 .

To view our Partner blog, click here

3 Quick Tips for Buzzworthy Webinars

Best Practices

Building buzz around webinars is a process. It takes time, perseverance and a lot of internal collaboration. It also takes a bit of know-how to pull off — the secret knowledge, if you will. In this edition of our Summer Series Reading List, which runs adjacent to our Sumer Series Playlist, we take a quick look at the secrets behind buzzworthy webinars.

So what are the secrets to building buzzworthy webinars? There are a few, but first, you need to have the right webinar platform in place. You’ll need a platform that can scale, provide analytics and reporting, can issue certifications, provides attendees with downloadable resources and provide easy-to-promote materials.

1. Build Your Scale

First, you’ll need to plot out how you’ll scale your webinars to address your audiences. Included strategies should target multiple buyer personas and hyper-target vital aspects of your field such as certification, continuing education, and industry-relevant deep-dives.

For example, Paycom, a payroll, and human resource provider use some of its webinars for certification across its clientele’s different demographics. At almost any time, the company can issue certificates from HRCI, SHRM or NASBA to qualifying attendees. For Paycom, putting in the extra work to become an industry resource is a great investment. It creates advocates, increases attendance — by roughly 155 percent — and boosts their marketing efforts.

2. Engage Thought Leaders

Every industry, every vertical, every team has their celebrities. Seek these audience-pulling names out and bring them into your webinars. Good thought leaders provide with more than just a name — they provide your program with topics, co-marketing opportunities, and content.

Potential thought leaders can include your co-workers and internal experts. Product team members, internal speakers at company meetings and even department leaders — all are viable webinar presenters that can drive audience attendance and contribute to your program. Sit down with them, plan your event and practice, practice, practice.

3. Be Relevant

General topics are great and perform well over the long-run, but timely and relevant webinars catch attention and bring your expertise to the forefront. Keep an eye on any industry-related news — or even general news — and use those developments to inspire and inform your events.

For example, if your audience is affected by significant policy moves, like the General Data Privacy Regulation or The Affordable Care Act, then producing a newsworthy event explaining the policy’s impact will likely bring your audience in. Remember to coordinate with your PR and legal teams to make sure your messaging is on-point, accurate and objective. Nine times out of ten, you’re helping your audience understand an aspect of their industry — not selling.

And that’s it. Three quick-and-dirty tips on buzz-worthy webinars and how you can start building the buzzing foundations for your own program.

What else can you do to make your webinars pop? You can check out our entire Webinerd Summer Playlist right here. You can also check out our summer reading list for this track:

Reading list:

1. Increase Webinar Audience 30% with Twilio’s On-Demand Strategy

2. Using Big Marketing Event Ideas to Drive Pipeline

3. Your Checklist for a Successful Webinar Program – For Newbies!

4. Q&A with Alex Blumberg, CEO of Gimlet Media

5. Webinar Best Practices Series: Spice Up Your Webinars with Video

The post 3 Quick Tips for Buzzworthy Webinars appeared first on ON24 .

To view our Partner blog, click here

Webinar World London: Q&A with Dave Chaffey of Smart Insights

CMMA Blog

This story, among others, will be featured at Webinar World 2018 in London. To learn more about Webinar World London, click here .

When it comes to content and its role in the marketplace, Dave Chaffey has a few opinions. The founder of Smart Insights — and prolific author on all things marketing — will speak at Webinar World London. Before his day, though, we sat down with him to suss out a few insights on what he’ll talk about, what he’s looking forward to and which marketing trends are catching his eye.

Tell us a little bit about your role and how you got into the marketing world.

I’m co-founder and Content Director at Smart Insights, co-ordinating creation of our marketing strategy advice. We have other 200 guides, templates and e-learning resources that are used by members in over 100 countries.

I originally got into marketing in the mid-1990s when the Internet was first being explored as a marketing channel and have enjoyed sharing best practices, initially through my books, training and consulting and more recently via our learning platform.

What are you speaking on at Webinar World London, and what are you most excited about this summit of marketing leaders?

I’m looking forward to talking on Integrating Webinars into Modern Lifecycle Marketing, reviewing examples and best practices of integrating webinars with other inbound marketing activities

How do you think B2B marketers better leverage webinars in order to increase engagement and drive revenue?

I think all too often, webinars are treated as a separate campaign activity without the integration to get the best results from them. I’ll describe our RACE planning system which gives a framework to integrate them.

What are some of the trends in marketing today that excite you most?

Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning are the most exciting, but I still love learning about the latest across all content marketing techniques.

What about GDPR might marketers have overlooked or need to watch for? Is there a silver lining?

Well, the silver lining is that we have to be more transparent about how we use customer data and the customers are looking for.

Some aren’t aware of the follow-on ePrivacy Legislation which will add further details on how we communicate via website and messaging – it’s an update on the 2003 Privacy and Communications Regulations and will have much in common with GDPR.

Beyond GDPR, what are the marketing challenges of the EMEA region?

In a word, ‘Engagement’. Finding the best communications strategy to keep visitors engaged.

There’s a constant struggle for marketers trying to scale personalized, human engagement. What are the steps you’ve taken to try to make every marketing interaction meaningful?

We’re a big fan of using personas to understand our audience interests more and then using content mapping linked to Marketing Automation so that we can best customize our communications.

What’s your one prediction about how marketing will fundamentally change in the next decade?

Although we talk about automation a lot, much automation is rules-based with creative and messaging set up in advance. True automation will select the most relevant contextual communications. We’re a long way from this at the moment.

What’s the most important change you’ve seen change in the marketing industry in the past five years?

In larger businesses, many have belatedly realised the need for company-wide digital transformation programmes to determine changes to marketing operations for them to remain competitive.

The post Webinar World London: Q&A with Dave Chaffey of Smart Insights appeared first on ON24 .

To view our Partner blog, click here

Account-based marketing is no fad: How and why CMOs should commit

ABM

This article was originally published on MarTech Today .

Less is more. It’s such a simple phrase, and yet it holds so much truth.

In the business world, we’ve all experienced how much things improve if we focus on fewer tasks at a time. It makes us better marketers and salespeople — more focused, effective, thoughtful and empathetic toward those we are selling or marketing to.

A lot of jargon is thrown around in sales and marketing. There are even more fads, so much so that it can be hard to keep up. But Account Based Marketing (ABM) is neither jargon nor a fad. It’s an important trend all marketing and sales teams should take note of. It’s based, after all, on the premise that less truly is more.

Why should you move to an ABM approach?

Part of the problem today is that we often operate in silos in business. We get caught up in numbers, quotas, leads and revenue. These benchmarks can create incentives to hoard individual credit and distinguish ourselves, rather than align strategically with others and make larger gains and get bigger wins together. These benchmarks also encourage a quantity-over-quality mindset, because employees are constantly trying to get more leads and more wins. This is to an organization’s collective detriment and hurts its bottom line.

In the past, many marketing and sales teams took a “spray and pray” approach to generating as many leads as possible. It was a volume play. Some organizations could get away with this, simply because their solution was best in class. But now there are too many startups and too many worthy competitors for any organization to take this antiquated approach — a company can’t distinguish themselves just by spamming potential buyers with generalized content.

Furthermore, buyers have access to unprecedented information. Just as a diner would check out Yelp to see a restaurant’s reviews before booking a reservation, a prospect today will do extensive research on potential solutions — often before they even make contact with a salesperson.

In fact, 78 percent of buyers now spend more time researching purchases in an effort to mitigate risks, with many spending up to three months researching vendors anonymously, according to the 2017 B2B Buyers Survey Report by Demand Gen  Report.  That means they won’t be receptive to vague sales pitches that don’t address their specific pain points.

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Source: Demand Gen Report 2017 B2B Buyers Survey

An ABM approach, if executed correctly, solves these issues. It brings together teams and individuals to focus more deeply on what truly matters: your highest value customers and prospects. And it engages these high-value targets in a manner that’s truly meaningful.

What exactly is ABM?

The core premise behind ABM is that you treat each individual account as its own market — that means you tailor your outreach and go-to-market strategy and make it as customer-centric as possible. At the core of ABM is empathy — you have to truly understand your audience — what their goals and fears are — and you have to constantly put yourself in their shoes.

I even like to imagine what my prospective customers’ personal lives look like. What kind of car do they drive; do they have kids and a family; are they liberal or conservative? What do they do outside of work for fun? You have to truly empathize with them to get inside their heads and be able to effectively market and appeal to them.

The results speak for themselves: 87 percent of companies using ABM report it offers higher ROI than other types of marketing: According to the Information Technology Services Marketing Association, 69 percent see improved annual revenue per account.

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But why is that? The Pareto Principle (or 80/20 rule) states that 80 percent of a company’s revenue comes from 20 percent of its customers. This is particularly relevant in the context of ABM. Using this principle makes sense because it emphasizes why focusing and nurturing high-yield customers is so vital to marketers.

ABM programs are most effective for targets with complex, long and sometimes political buying processes. In contrast to lead-based programs requiring engagement with thousands of companies, ABM’s effective audience ranges from dozens to hundreds.

How do you move to ABM?

If it’s too difficult to entirely shift from a lead-based model to an ABM model right away, then do it slowly.

Identify the highest value prospects in your pipeline, and make sure your touch points are tailored to them. If there are certain industries you sell to that you know have more extensive buying cycles, prioritize an ABM approach with them. This gradual rollout may even be advantageous: You’ll learn how and where you need to be personalized throughout your sales funnel, and where you can get away with a more systematic method.

Additionally, I think it’s important to avoid limiting your ABM approach to just marketing and sales. Envision the other ways a personalized, customer-centric mindset can benefit your team. For example, when it comes to managing people, I used to take the same approach for all my direct reports: weekly one-on-one meetings, annual reviews, the potential for bonuses at the end of the fiscal year — you get the idea.

It wasn’t until I started incorporating ABM into my marketing approach that I realized it was a smart way to manage employees as well. I started treating each employee as an individual customer who might value more vacation or educational training over a monetary bonus, for example. Some needed more or less feedback than they received during a weekly one-on-one meeting.

After incorporating the ABM mindset into management, I found my marketing team to be more engaged in their work — and our prospective customers to be more engaged with our outreach as well. And that’s a true win-win for any business.

Want to learn more about AMB marketing? Discover the basics — and how webinars can enhance your ABM efforts — in “The Webinerd’s Guide to Account-Based Marketing. ” 

The post Account-based marketing is no fad: How and why CMOs should commit appeared first on ON24 .

To view our Partner blog, click here