Extending ABM to Reach Specific Target Accounts

What it is

Even for advanced ABM teams, ads + emails are only loosely coordinated. The only factor they share in common is that they are trying to reach the same target accounts. Ads and emails are certainly not synchronized.

ABM isn’t easy to coordinate. It isn’t easy to do attribution. It isn’t easy to systematize. How do you actually reach the same specific target accounts, and the same decision-makers across multiple channels in a coordinated manner?

Simple in theory. Hard to put into practice.

With Primer, you can identify target accounts, market specifically to them, and win them as customers. Using this approach, we’ve seen 20%+ CVRs on accounts where ads and cold emails were synchronized.  

Who it's for

Anyone who:

• Is spending >$10k/month on digital ads
• Has an ongoing ABM motion

Metric

Expect to see improvements in reach, email engagement, and cost-per-lead efficiency

Relevant channels

• Outbound email, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google

How it’s done today

After sales and marketing agree on a list of target accounts, marketing does the best job it can to target decision-makers using built-in targeting on ad platforms (good luck!), low-match rate list uploads on social platforms, or IP-address based adtech (Demandbase, Terminus, etc.)

LOTS of ad spend gets wasted on unqualified leads/contacts.

Meanwhile, sales pushes leads into outbound sequences.

What to do instead

If the goal is to hit the same leads at specific target accounts across multiple channels and platforms simultaneously, we have a dead-simple solution that’s really effective.

Layering multiple data sources on top of each other can help you drill down into a tight audience of pre-qualified prospects. Enhancing this audience can help you boost match rates on B2C platforms, allowing you to reach your pre-qualified prospects beyond LinkedIn (aka everywhere). When you target these prospects cross-channel and quantify the impact of your spend beyond last-click conversions, you’ll see dramatic increases in growth and efficiency. You’ll have unlocked:

• Conversion rate: You’re serving messages to prospects based on filters and attributes that don’t exist natively in ad platforms. Better targeting = better results.
• Efficiency: Many ad clicks and form submissions are garbage. With more granular targeting you can pre-qualify your audience members and not waste ad spend.
• Reach: You’ve expanded beyond SEM and LinkedIn to serve ads to your B2B buyer on B2C ad platforms.
• ROI: By knowing exactly who is in your audience and looking at all your conversions, regardless of source, you can assess whether your ads are lifting conversions in other channels, like direct or organic traffic.

How it works

1. Plan

Get your target prospects organized in Salesforce. Pull all decision-makers at your target accounts into Salesforce. Organize them as contacts or leads. For example, here are three people we would want to target at Rippling.

We recommend using Salesforce campaigns to organize and track impact.

2. Build your campaign

Pull your leads into Primer using our SFDC integration

Integrate your Salesforce instance and create a new Audience in Primer, applying filters to pull in any of the leads/contacts you want to reach.

As more Salesforce leads match your filter criteria, Primer will continually import them, enrich them with ad network matching data, and sync them to your ad accounts as audiences.

‍With enrichment, match rates jump from 10%-20% to 70%-90% on ad platforms, making your audiences almost 1:1 with the records in your database (i.e., the folks you intend to email).

3. Launch with custom creative

Run ads to up to 90% of the prospects on your list

Plug the Primer-powered audiences into your campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, GDN, and Youtube.

Primer-powered audiences are almost identical across ad networks and are almost 1:1 with the data in your CRM.

We’ve run the exact same ads to the exact same people at the exact same time on both Facebook and LinkedIn:

Because of the high match rates, we know with strong confidence that we’re serving ads to these specific people…

…in every single major ad network.

Here’s an ad we ran for marketers and founders of Series B+ startups. Precise targeting allowed us to personalize the ad copy for our ICP.

Reap as many last-click conversions from these ad campaigns as possible.

At a predetermined point, push leads from SFDC into email nurture/outbound campaigns.

Not many B2B purchases are made last-click from an ad. So once you’ve primed your prospects with ads, the next step is to push them into email sequences.

Ads boost awareness and consideration, which increase email open and reply rates. Just look at these example email metrics from a subset of the leads that were in one of our ad audiences:

By carving out a control group, you can easily measure the lift and ROI of priming leads with ads before emailing.

• Group A (control) only gets emails.
• Group B (test) gets ads + emails

Here is the full breakdown from a combo Facebook & Instagram ad + cold outbound email campaign we ran:

16% CVR on $6.5K in spend. Pretty efficient, right?

‍Here are our recommended best practices for maximizing performance:

1. Be aware of audience size minimums (300 for LI, ~4K for Facebook, ~10K for Google)
2. Shoot for impression frequency >10 before sending cold emails/cold calling
3. Rotate in fresh ads regularly to maintain engagement, reach, and conversions
4. Use cohort tracking to measure success

We recommend having a Salesforce field that updates when a lead gets added to a sequence in your sales automation tool or signs up for a webinar — that way, they can automatically get added to a Primer-powered audience.

4. Measure results with audience cohort tracking

The best way to measure lift is with a control group and a test group.

Split your target leads/accounts into two lists. One of them is served ads before you reach out. The other is only hit with cold outreach.

You could also compare lift with a Primer-enriched audience versus an unenriched audience upload.

Attribution becomes radically simplified with Primer. When someone signs up, check to see if they were in the original audience/list Primer created for you. We call this ad audience cohort tracking.

Recap: Serving ads to the same people you email is not only possible; it’s now automatic with Primer.

About us

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