Accelerating the ABM customer journey

“Ensuring our brand is consistently visible to our target audience is critical. Deploying an ABM strategy ensures we can not only reach key accounts with precision targeting but also engage them through a multi-faceted approach across all stages of their buyer journey.”

A neat summary of why so many B2B strategies these days are simply ABM strategies. The summary came from Maura Smith, Senior VP Marketing at Pepperjam, in the context of some questions about how they’ve been leveraging Madison Logic’s new Journey Acceleration Measurement solution in beta.

Pepperjam is a leading affiliate marketing lifecycle management platform. It helps brands, advertisers and publishers discover quality affiliate partners, track their performance, and pay them through an aligned commission/attribution model. It also provides affiliate marketing support to agencies.

Madison Logic’s ABM outlook

For Tom O’Regan, CEO at Madison Logic, Journey Acceleration Measurement, generally available today, reflects changes in the nature of B2B marketing. “Even before the pandemic,” he told us, “B2B marketers were becoming more responsible for not just marketing and branding, but being a growth engine. They were aligning more closely with sales and focused on shared revenue targets. The new marketer is a growth marketer, and those are the individuals we work with.”

Dig deeper: ABM is a critical tool, but it’s not the whole tool-kit.

For some time, of course, B2B marketers have been investing in digital: “During the pandemic, the increase in digital, performance-based ABM was dramatic. What that did was put even more pressure on the marketing organizations to fuel the pipeline — especially given that the number one pipeline generator, face-to-face events was gone.”

Marketers now face a demand for transparency and accountability when it comes to spending marketing dollars. “What we’ve been able to do is provide a unified measurement platform that sales and marketing can view to see how the marketing budget is impacting a target list of accounts across three distinct paid marketing channels: content syndication, display advertising and LinkedIn.”

Acceleration paired with measurement

Journey Acceleration Measurement is part of the ML platform and is integrated with Salesforce CRM. It delivers metrics on marketing performance across channels, offering insights into which touchpoints have most impact on pipeline and the customer journey, which in turn creates opportunities for optimization.

According to O’Regan, there are examples of brands sending the same messages to prospects as to accounts already some way into the funnel, wasting effort and marketing dollars. “That’s not efficient if you want to move those deals through the funnel. With Journey Acceleration, you’re able to see whether a company already has an opportunity in Salesforce, and decide whether to serve a more personalized message rather than a prospecting message.”

Saving hours on data analysis

We asked Smith at Pepperjam to list the benefits they’ve seen with the new solution. “Measuring the effectiveness of paid media channels in reaching target accounts, accelerating pipeline activity and influencing revenue are critical,” she said. “Additionally, clear views into leads generated and their downstream impact to revenue are necessary in demonstrating marketing’s direct contribution to new business growth.”

Pepperjam could do some of these things before, of course, but with greater difficulty. “We’ve been able to save countless hours per month that would otherwise be spent on data aggregation and analysis,” Smith told us.

O’Regan explained: “Existing clients, that aren’t in beta, what they need to do is work with the marketing ops team. They need to do data aggregation; they need to look at engagement with the marketing efforts; they need to pull together spreadsheets; they need to manually pull together engagement, then look at the CRM and when those accounts were engaged, and piece it together. With the time it takes to do that, you’re no longer able to optimize.”

The solution also helps show ROI, especially on elements of Pepperjam’s ABM strategy, she said. “Journey Acceleration Measurement has given Pepperjam’s marketing team a direct view into how our ABM campaigns have contributed to new business growth. With a single data view, we’re able to easily understand the influence ABM has on accelerating pipeline activity.”