The word “campaign” is defined and used in many ways by B2B marketers, and sometimes the term can be confused with what are truly single assets or disjointed activities. This confusion and a lack of concentration on buyer needs are contributing to declining metrics and engagement with targeted audiences.
Tips, best practices and innovative frameworks to address some of these campaign challenges will all be featured on the agenda for this year’s Campaign Optimization Series. Demand Gen Report’s annual webcast series, taking place April 23-27, is designed to help marketers evaluate their current campaign performance and identify opportunities to improve the performance of core strategies across online and offline investments.
SiriusDecisions will kick off the week-long series with a session titled: The Five Elements Of A Best-In-Class Integrated Campaign. During the session, SiriusDecisions’ Craig Moore will share its framework to a complete, efficient campaign. One of the elements Moore will address is the concept of rolling up content and delivery tactics into “program families” tailored to focus campaigns around the goal rather than the content fueling it. These program families include:
- Reputation, or the building of awareness, interest and urgency around a theme;
- Demand Creation, the sourcing and nurturing of demand based on the theme;
- Sales Enablement, the help with progression of opportunities sourced by the theme; and
- Market Intelligence, the knowledge building of external targets and internal audiences.
Here is a sneak peek at other sessions that will be taking place during Demand Gen Report’s annual Campaign Optimization Series.
Streamlined Campaign Integration Beneficial To ABM Orchestration & Execution
A common theme throughout the series is the idea of proper integration between marketing, sales and the campaigns being executed throughout the buying journey. This is doubly important to ABM practitioners tasked with targeting and engaging multiple stakeholders at top-tier accounts.
In a session presented by Demandbase, titled: Analog Strategies For ABM Success: Digital Channels And Integrated Programs, the company will spotlight two case studies that show how prioritizing the fundamentals can boost the efficiency and performance of ABM campaigns. Specifically, the session will cover how to:
- Align your marketing team to create a truly integrated campaign;
- Apply analog strategies to digital channels like SEM; and
- Measure the results that count.
Proper interdepartmental alignment continues to be a talking point with B2B organization and is cited as a pivotal part of perfectly executed ABM programs. In the session titled: 6 Steps To Orchestrate Successful ABM Campaigns With Sales, Radius’ Vignesh Subramanyan will provide a step-by-step guide to build and launch an ABM program that meets the sweet spot of precision, ROI and scale. The session also will provide a behind-the-scenes look at how to create a high-touch, high-value 1:1 campaign for top accounts.
Initial alignment should begin with the most important person to marketing and sales teams: the buyer. Pivoting to focus on your key accounts and what matters to them, and not focusing on vanity metrics that are only helpful to your team, is essential for successful ABM. In a session presented by Full Circle Insights, titled: Optimize ABM Campaigns For The Demand Unit, Not MQLs, attendees will get a rundown on the changes to process and operations you’ll need to shift your team towards for ABM effectiveness. He will also share tips and best practices to empower yourself with true insights to optimize ABM marketing performance.
The webinar will share how to:
- Track and measure demand unit engagement and progression;
- Utilize attribution that is account-comprehensive; and
- Compare ABM campaign performance versus legacy campaigns for optimizing your ABM strategy.
Accurate Data Capture and Measurement Remain Critical For Campaign Success
Without good data and the right tools to measure results, you’re only setting your campaigns up for failure. The series will address key ways to ensure your campaign will succeed from start to finish, including:
- The best methods for campaign planning;
- How to ensure contact and company data is accurate and complete; and
- How to use data to simultaneously scale the quantity and quality of leads.
Marketers have a bad habit of jumping into campaign planning without first setting and defining clear-cut goals. The best way to brainstorm for your campaign is to start by gathering resources, establishing common numbers and language and understanding conversion rates for the funnel. In the session Measure Twice, Cut Once: Set Your Campaign Up For Success By Starting At The End, Katie Staveley, VP of Marketing at Mautic, will outline everything you need to get your campaign started on the right foot.
Once you’ve got a plan in place, it’s time to focus on the data – which has been shown to impact campaign performance at every stage of the process. Marketers agree that it’s imperative to collect rich, accurate data. Yet far too often, they find themselves with incomplete lead capture forms, inaccurate contact and company records and personal emails from leads. Data cleansing and enrichment is table stakes when it comes to B2B marketing, but it also takes the right tools and tactics. In the session, How Current & Complete Data Drives Higher Campaign Conversions And Actionable Demand, Vincent Fontana, VP of Global Marketing, at Selling Simplified, and Debbie Qaqish, Principal and Chief Strategy Officer at The Pedowitz Group, will demonstrate how to address these issues head-on at the point of data capture.
Having good data at your disposal is key to nurturing leads and getting the right message in front of the right audience. In the session, Demand More From Your Data: Scale Quantity And Quality Of Marketing Qualified Leads, DeAnn Poe, VP of Demand Generation at DiscoverOrg, will detail key ways to scale MQLS and offer helpful tips on data collection. Tune in to learn how to:
- Better segment and enrich leads;
- Gather accurate contact information and updated professional profiles; and
- Create an outbound strategy that both sales and marketing will love.
By combining preemptive planning with better data capture and measurement strategies, you’ll soon see the engagement and success of your marketing campaigns soar.
New Channels & Tactics Fueling 2018 B2B Campaigns
Everyone knows “content is king,” but it is becoming even more critical as marketers fight for audience attention. With B2B brands thinking outside the box to deliver relevant, personalized content experiences., marketers are turning back to channels — such as podcasts — as well as revamped traditional channels like webinars to engage target audiences. To top it all off, content must cater to buyer pain points at relevant stages of their journeys.
The Campaign Optimization Series will target three trending themes within content marketing:
- Incorporating “auditory storytelling” methods such as podcasts into campaigns;
- Building a digital marketing strategy with webinars at the core; and
- Personalizing content experiences at scale.
In a session hosted by Uberflip, titled: Why B2B Marketers Need To Personalize Content Experiences At Scale, President and CMO Randy Frisch will discuss what B2B marketers can learn from Spotify when it comes to serving up personalized content to engage buyers. Frisch will dive deep into how to:
- Identify content by topics and themes;
- Tailor expectations by delivering the right content at the right time;
- Leverage AI to organize content; and
- More!
In another session, the Content4Demand team will discuss everything there is to know about the latest content trend: podcasts. The presentation titled: Amp Up Your Content Strategy & Campaigns With “Auditory Storytelling” will showcase tips and best practices for adding podcasts to content and campaigns, including the tools and resources to fuel your process and a showcase of use cases from companies such as Cox Media, Oracle and more!
Finally, in his presentation, titled: The Modern Webinar: A Required Ingredient For The Modern Campaign, Neil Amsden, VP of Demand Gen for ON24, will talk about the modern webinar and how marketers should treat these virtual events as an ongoing demand generation campaign — not a “one-and-done” strategy. Webinars are still a great channel to deliver high-quality thought leadership and having a webinar-first mindset can:
- Drive engagement across the funnel, from lead acquisition to deal acceleration to customer retention; and
- Create powerful insights to inform nurture campaigns and sales follow-up.
“I’ll focus on how we at ON24 use webinars as a demand generation tactic, including the types of content we deliver across the sales cycle, how we integrate with our CRM and marketing automation platforms, the types of attendee engagement data we share with our sales team and how we do it,” said Amsden. “And even what’s on our to-do list for 2019.”
Check out the complete Campaign Optimization Series agenda and save your seat to get expert insights into developing killer campaigns that engage target audiences.
