Starting Small With ABM Tests

Running paid media to support B2B marketing can be tough. It’s often a balancing act between educating prospecting with longer buying processes, and proving out the effectiveness of advertising efforts in the short-term. Those goals can be contradictory in execution at times.

It can be tempting to try to boil the ocean, and build out a full funnel strategy to begin educating and capturing buyers all at the same time. In theory, this is great. In practice, it’s not always realistic, especially when working with smaller budgets.

As part of an effort to navigate these challenging dynamics with one of my own clients, I’ve started a small account based marketing (ABM) test to build out a proof of concept. If successful, the associated tactics can then be scaled to larger efforts, and lead into a more robust media strategy.

In this post I’ll dive into why I’m testing an ABM strategy, what my approach is, and how I’ll be evaluating performance differently than a standard paid media campaign.

My ABM Hypothesis

Part of the reason that B2B marketing can be challenging is that brands are trying to promote their product to a buying committee, not just a single individual.

Traditional sales tactics are great at creating more personal connections with a smaller portion of that buying committee. While on the other hand, paid media is more effective when it comes to reaching the entire buying committee, but does so on a more superficial level.

The concept I’m testing with this ABM approach is simple (and nothing new). Combine these efforts on a handful of targeted accounts to decrease the time it takes to:

• Move the members of the buying committee from a cold audience to a warm audience

• Socialize the offering among the buying committee so that they can make a decision on next steps

Throughout my career I’ve seen that when campaigns are run across multiple channels, they provide a greater incremental lift than when run on only one channel. I’m applying the same approach here, but leveraging marketing and sales owned channels instead of two marketing owned channels like paid social and CTV.

My Approach To Setting Up These ABM Tests

A big goal of mine is to keep things simple for this test. With fewer variables to monitor, the more easily I can help my client develop a clear picture of the impact of this effort on revenue.

From a paid media perspective, my execution has been fairly straightforward. I’ve collaborated with the sales team to get a list of their top targeted accounts for the next few weeks, and separated that list into a control and test group. The sales team will apply the same tactics to both groups from their end, but only the test group will be exposed to the paid media ABM efforts.

I used the target accounts in the test group to create a targeted company list on LinkedIn, then paired that with a few demographic audience layers. This campaign is then promoting a variety of different creative types across benefits, features, testimonials, and more.

We’re leaning on creative diversity to use a higher frequency to our advantage. We’ll be able to present the client’s offer from multiple different angles across the buying committee.

How I’m Measuring Performance

By keeping the setup of this test simple, it will be relatively easy to measure the impact that this paid media ABM campaign has on driving revenue.

While I will be looking at performance within LinkedIn, the best indicator of paid media’s impact here will be comparing performance between the two test groups in the client’s CRM. Not only will I be able to see which group engaged with emails more frequently, but I’ll also be able to see which group had more deals created and won.

When analyzing CRM data across clients I’ve seen that paid media efforts are often discounted in their impact on driving new customers. There will always be gaps in attribution based on third party cookies, or last click models.

The simple A/B test design frees me from relying on any individual attribution model, and it will allow me to statistically measure the impact that paid media had on group B vs group A.

Wrapping Up

The goal of this test is to better align sales and marketing, while simultaneously navigating the complex B2B buyer landscape.

If you’re working in a similar position, stay tuned for more updates on the results of this test!

Have questions, considerations, or critiques? I’d love to hear them! If you’re reading this via email, just hit respond. Otherwise, you can find me on LinkedIn and X (Twitter).