Support Your Account Based Marketing Strategy with Personalized Presentations
Today’s marketplace is markedly different. Clients are tired of being bombarded with generic emails or direct message offers based on worn-out statements. To stand out, marketers need to learn how to cut through the clutter and be heard. After all, offering a unique value proposition isn’t that unique when the target market is inundated with what is essentially the same type of message.
Selling used to be a domain of the hardy and the persistent. The more cold calls made using a perfected script, the more chances of successfully landing clients. Modern marketers, though, are realizing that the ‘law of averages’ approach is totally out of step with the realities of the digital age and are increasingly leaning towards an account based marketing strategy to drive business growth.
Account based marketing (ABM) focuses resources to deliver personalized campaigns designed to engage accounts on an individual level. Account based marketing is the opposite of the marketing funnel. Instead of hoping that a few clients will eventually get the drift of a mass-mailed proposition, ABM allows companies to focus their limited resources to get to know their core clientele better and to enhance the customer journey.
ABM is about building a marketing blueprint – a cascading series of activities, messaging and interactions that speak directly to specific needs of specified individuals and at the right time. It is relevant, meaningful and timely, where clients are uniquely defined by finely-tuned solutions based on their unique needs. To achieve this, you'll need a blend of marketing tools and tactics infused with healthy doses of productivity, passion and perseverance.
Integration Leads to Better Account Based Marketing Strategies
Modern marketing teams require visibility, transparency and collaboration with other business units at every step in order to maximize information and response times. You need to ensure all of these teams are talking to each other and working together.
To achieve strong pronounced account based marketing results, it’s crucial for marketing and sales to be on the same page. Marketing and sales are like two wheels on a bicycle. Like macaroni and cheese. Like peanut butter and jelly. Yes, they are ok on their own, but the magic happens when they come together. Much of the tension between the two groups stems from their perceived differences: perspectives, objectives, timelines and metrics. Not concerned with their opposing outlook, management demands of both divisions to drive revenue growth.
It's hard to be ‘integrated’ when the pieces of your marketing plan are developed in silos and popping up randomly in the marketplace, creating what integrated marketing strategist Mike Gospe terms ‘marketing popcorn.’ A phenomenon where marketing tactics are planned and executed independently with no interaction or cross-functional coordination.
When sales and marketing work together, there’s potential to provide greater value for their customers. If both sides are on board with asking smart questions and mining insights, then everyone will get the big picture on how best to serve these needs. This is nigh impossible if anyone is shut out of the conversation.
Aligning both camps to adopt a unified account based marketing strategy can work wonders in better understanding client needs and developing effective sales enablements tools, In fact, Forrester Research reported that companies that feature aligned sales and marketing teams can expect 32% annual revenue growth on average. Conversely, companies that have yet to align their sales and marketing teams experience a 7% decline in growth on average.
Optimized Marketing and Sales Using Personalized Presentations
The results of active cooperation between sales and marketing often manifest themselves in sales presentations. A one-size-fits-all approach to developing presentation materials suggests a lazy attempt to connect with clients with an uninspired product pitch. In contrast, a dynamic presentation that shows a unified account based marketing strategy covers what the client specifically wants.
“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results?” Remember the famous phrase? This best describes the efforts of using and reusing a tired and generic presentation and hoping it will have an impact at some point, which also harks back to the ‘law of averages’ approach. Today’s clients are looking beyond products and prices, putting a premium on superior customer experiences and marketers need to be agile to adapt to the prevailing realities.
Being in tune and in touch with your target customer (or account), the more relevant and authentic your story will become. This understanding will inform all aspects of your ABM strategy, even before the first presentation slide is developed. Without this knowledge or without tailoring messages appropriately, businesses risk appearing random and incoherent, and seemingly out of touch and out of tune.
Account Based Marketing Means More Personalized Content
Creating compelling presentations involves creating content around a particular client’s specific needs. Hoping to catch a prospect’s attention using a catchy opening line or dazzling graphics is an amateurish approach. Instead, your content should be relevant and primed to demonstrate that your proposed solution aligns with the desired outcomes of the client.
Teams should avoid centering their presentations on information that can easily be gleaned elsewhere. While important, your deliverables should not be dominated by your features. The right amount of emphasis must be placed on outlining how you plan to resolve your clients’ pain points. Don’t stop at listing your solutions. Present a complete picture of your interventions, including follow-up plans.
As for the visual narrative part of the story, there are several ways to improve the look and feel of a presentation. This includes creating a consistent and compelling narrative that starts with a powerful introduction, then some meat on the bones and a solid call-to-action (CTA). Adding high-quality, relevant images and providing a consistent and palatable color scheme can also prove useful in highlighting the positives.
Controlling the visual pacing while encouraging engagement via interactive tools can further heighten viewer interest. Finally, determine a presentation’s sweet spot in terms of length (keep it around 6 to 15 slides) and file size (under 1 GB file size for easy sharing over the web). This provides the audience with just the appropriate dose and mix of material to spur action without bombarding them with too much information.
Track Customer Behavior to Improve Presentations
Presentations shouldn’t be static and it should be standard practice to review your presentations regularly. They should remain open for further tweaks and adjustments and goes beyond data updates or removing dated product offerings.
Using an in-app analytics feature, such as the tool built into the Ingage platform, allows you to determine which presentations and users are most active within the Ingage suite. The data will help you determine which presentations are your top performers and can further be leveraged to help other team members improve their output. Importantly, it offers insights to better understand the type of presentations customers want to see, ultimately helping you to dial up your content and design.
Having an in-app analytics tool that tracks presentation performance can also create more awareness on which ones can lead you closer to the prize. Collecting data on how customers respond to each presentation can help build on the popular ones. At the same time, it also allows the means to improve the presentations that could use some tightening or polishing.
Presentation software that generates analytics accessible via reports is an effective way of collecting insights on what makes a great presentation. Data tracking features can help identify which off-the-shelf presentations are used more often by salespersons in the organization, and of course, if these are meeting stated objectives.
Ingage: Personalized Presentations Using Account Based Marketing Strategies
The Ingage Suite is a cloud-based presentation-creating platform that makes it easy to produce dynamic and engaging presentations that sell. Being cloud-based means your team can always access the latest versions both on and off-line.
With the Ingage platform, you can quickly design interactive pages with your images, videos and text; instantly share the on-brand, up-to-date content on any device; and measure the real-time results and understand the impact on your business through rich analytics.
Whether you're creating sales decks or presenting quarterly numbers to your team, Ingage empowers you to build professional and polished presentations and close more deals. Visit Ingage now for a free demo!