With the development of one-to-many digital-specific account-based marketing technology (ABM), account-based programmatic ads have become an increasingly important part of many B2B media plans.
I want to highlight certain key points in this blog, which may help you improve your current thinking about ABM in programmatic advertising, or at least change.
1. Don’t try to make ‘one size fit all’
It is surprising how many programmatic advertisers I view throughout industry and regions to target account lists using the same creative method.
Given that account-based marketing aims at a highly targeted approach, creative messaging needs to be thought about more. The effects on one working for a software company won’t be the same for a CIO in the pharmaceutical industry.
The precise data gathered from your account-based marketing account data should be used by progammatic advertisers, even if only vertical and market-based, to bring personalisation.
2. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket
Various companies offer different solutions for programmatic advertising. There are several companies. All these solutions are based on various methodologies, have different strengths and weaknesses and often cover vastly different markets.
Publisher network buyers, for example, provide transparent and accurate data sources but are limited in scope. On the other hand, third party audiences have the desired reach but more opaque methods of building the audience.
Working with several partners gives you greater choice, additional testing strategies and ultimately greater scope to refine your audience with a specific focus on brands, products and markets.
- Don’t ignore job roles
You will want to target various work roles in your Account Based Marketing accounts. Of course, the ideal approach is to target by account and role such as an IP account list with overlaid segments of senior managers’ jobs.
Take into account the size of the companies concerned compared with the number of relevant decision-making roles. This results in a very low hit rate in many cases. The cost against the rate you receive at the key decision making audiences should always be taken into account.
Although not technically categorised as account-based commercialization, it can sometimes result in better costs per commitment for your target audience to target generic publics by combining job role and industry.
Consider the following approach for programmatic advertising
- Identify the industries and job roles that relate to your target accounts.
- Map these back to the relevant third party data segments in your buying platform.
- Target users at scale across a range of companies.
Although not all users will be working for firms on the initial account list, this approach still offers a strong alternative to pure account-based targeting methods and, in most cases, still a significant hit rate against the initial target audience (assuming you’re targeting the major companies in the given industry).
