ABM Voices: Reshaping Account-based Marketing

Canberk Beker | Head of Growth | Deepcrawl

Reshaping Account-based Marketing

ABM is much more than a buzzword now.

It is no longer a strategy reserved for enterprises with million-dollar ACVs.

The actual challenge facing us all today is how to get our companies ready for ABM and - spoiler alert! - this adaptation process involves blood, sweat, and tears...

The Deepcrawl ABM journey

I joined Deepcrawl in early 2021 as the first Demand Generation person in its 10-year history. One of my first tasks was to build an ABM strategy.

Prior to joining Deepcrawl, I had always worked for SMB-focused companies, meaning that I had to learn what ‘real’ ABM was from scratch. I started off having conversations with many of the leading Account-based Marketing technologies in the market.

Some of them were indeed very powerful. But there was something inside me about them that didn’t feel right.

These ABM tools were offering impressions from our target personas. Of course, it was ‘something’.

But, in my opinion, it was something much more for enterprise companies with million-dollar Annual Contract Value deals.

It was definitely not for companies like Deepcrawl that needed to grow exponentially in a short period of time.

On top of that, after all those Technology vendor calls, I discovered one thing - that if we could somehow take our LinkedIn audience and apply it to Facebook and Google, we’d probably reach these very same personas with a similar degree of accuracy anyway.

So what did I do? I took a step back.

The big picture for me was something much more than showing the “Grow your company with us” banners to our target audiences.

It was actually about building something that our target prospects would crave.

So it was all about building that compelling ABM strategy and leaving the tools for later.

It’s all about your ICP

Next step was to design an ICP scoring system based on the weighted averages on location, number of web pages, etc.

Let me explain this further, we’ve created more than 500 different scenarios with our findings from the historical data.

In some instances, a company with say 10,000 employees and $1bn revenue from a certain industry would have scored less in the ICP than a company with 500 employees and $250M revenue from a different industry.

This was very important because names can be deceptive (and logos), but data cannot; and, our ICP model was able to show which companies should be more ‘important’ and prioritized.

There was, however, a little problem.

There was no tool in the market that could allow us to target or filter companies by their number of web pages.

We didn’t let this stop us. We just needed to think of something else.

That’s when our CTO, Ali Habibzadeh, stepped in and built a tool that could return the number of web pages of any website. Poweful, right?

Pulling this data together of 10,000+ websites with the other weighted averages we discovered that less than 40 companies scored “PERFECT” in our ICP scoring model and less than 200 companies that scored “GOOD”.

So we now had a very strong ICP and Target Account list starting with the “PERFECT” set.

Next came the execution part

Certainly, the most important part was to determine which companies were going to be our target accounts.

And let’s be honest, everyone would love to see FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Alphabet) or Forbes500 as their clients.

But if you were to choose less than 5% of them; which ones would you choose, and how? The answer is always in your data.

After analyzing all the closed/won and closed/lost deals between 2018 and 2021, we found a pattern.

Properties like location, number of employees, industry, and revenue were obviously crucial; but there was another property, a game-changer one for us...

We discovered that companies with at least a certain number of web pages were three times more likely to convert than those that had fewer web pages than that amount.

And when you think about this it was a no brainer. Think about it companies with complicated website structures would need an enterprise technical SEO tool more than anybody else. It was there. It was obvious. We had to target specifically those companies.

Next came the value proposition

I won’t lie.

Our Product team came up with a great offer that we could use as part of our ABM strategy: The Deepcrawl “Website Health Check-up”.

In a nutshell, a tool that would give our target accounts a review of their website's technical structure and compare the health of it to their competitors.

Next was how to campaign this. Here’s where we ABMed them.

We were able to create campaigns for each one of the 40 target accounts where the campaign messaging and images spoke directly to THEM and to THEIR website infrastructure issues, i.e. Target Account One had an issue around indexability or Target Account Two had an issue around website experience.

The results

What we’ve discovered along this ABM journey is that if your audience sees you as genuine they will approach you and become customers.

Our main value proposition was a very strong website and infrastructure analysis that would potentially cost 1000s of dollars to our ICP on the open market.

We gave and didn’t ask. That was key. We knew there was a strong demand for our services.

We knew that if we could bring our value proposition to the market the market would respond. And they did.

So what did the results look like after 12 weeks?

Prospects contact us directly within two weeks of receiving a “Website Health Check-up”.

And some hard numbers on performance?

As I said at the beginning. ABM is no longer a buzzwork.

If you can forgive me on this occasion to use one buzzword - I coined our ABM strategy: UBM for URL-based Marketing.

I’d be more than happy to share with DashDot readers fa free website a check-up during the month of May. Please message me on LinkedIn.