As the Ricciardi Group’s Head of Digital Strategy, Megan Creighton brings a wealth of experience in data-driven marketing and a passion for architecting strategic demand gen campaigns and processes that transform the bottom line.
We asked Megan to share her views on the current state of B2B marketing and best practices when orchestrating ABM strategies. To learn more about how Ricciardi Group and MRP collaborate, read the case study.
(The interview below has been edited and condensed for clarity.)
MRP: Given your extensive background in B2B marketing and your work creating and executing comprehensive digital marketing plans, what are the biggest challenges you see marketers facing now?
Megan: Even enterprise companies face resource constraints, especially with the variety of active channels for B2B marketers today. Often, there isn’t the bandwidth to cover all spheres of the marketing or maybe there’s lots of red tape or the need for multiple approvals. We try to get the most bang for the buck for their efforts and focus their resources.
What’s interesting is that, given our industry specialization, we still see varied success in the channel mix. It requires a lot of iteration and to have your finger on the pulse of creative solutions that can drive business and be relevant to the target audience. The ability to pivot quickly is essential.
Is there a particular strategy or marketing channel that’s currently being overlooked?
Everyone is looking to fill the pipeline for sales – so there’s a lot of focus on the bottom of the funnel, and it’s not connected to brand marketing at the top, which is also very important. Once you’ve established brand awareness, people are more secure and confident in downloading content and sharing their feedback because your company is familiar to them.
With MRP, we can connect brand marketing to the end of the funnel in the best way possible to engage and nurture new audiences, fuel high-value sales conversations, and ultimately help drive more revenue.
In your experience, how can marketers deploy ABM most effectively to drive results?
Sales want a pipeline – they want actual names to talk to, and for companies to get the number of leads at scale to hit business goals can be a struggle. That’s where a robust ABM platform like MRP has been showing up for our clients.
We’ve seen a lot of success with MRP in generating insights into target accounts and discovering new opportunities that fit our ideal customer profile. The ability to layer intent data with other filters to expand the program is extremely helpful – and of course, we use that intent data to prioritize who to focus on first. We can create target groups based on specific regions, personas, industries, and so on and validate those signals with firmographic and technographic data. The result is a timely, meaningful connection with a contact who’s a real person who fits the profile of someone sales wants to reach out to.
These connections can be integrated into large campaigns to educate prospects at the awareness level, then pulled back into MRP for mid-funnel targeting. One client who’s done this is seeing emails among the best performers they’ve ever sent, with very relevant matching and concrete results delivered against vertical account lists and whitespace accounts.
What can ABM marketers do to ensure they’re targeting relevant contacts with a growing focus on privacy and new practices that limit third-party data collection?
We’ve had good experiences with custom questions on the forms leads fill out to download whitepapers or other gated content. We can qualitatively evaluate these folks and understand their pain points better, giving the sales team more fodder to inform their follow-up calls.
Prospects and customers don’t need to answer an email or pick up a phone call to provide feedback. Instead, marketing can deliver data-driven intelligence up front to not only fuel more strategic sales conversations but improve subsequent communications to target accounts and buying groups.
Also, if we see patterns in job titles downloading assets or similar responses to a specific question, we can use that to inform future campaigns and even design content to match those needs. For example, we have a client that provides document automation tools, consuming unstructured data using natural language processing. Some of the questions we’ve asked are ‘what is your top data-related challenge?’ and ‘what would you say is most important – accuracy, managing risk, access to data, and so on.’ We can weave responses into our messaging in a way that validates the proof points of the solution.
Read the Ricciardi Group case study to learn more about their successes and best practices using MRP Prelytix. Then schedule a demo to see how MRP’s industry-leading platform can transform your ABM initiatives and drive results at scale.