• September 19, 2016
• Demand Generation, Sales Enablement

Want to Eliminate Account Based Marketing Waste? Publisher Partnerships Could Help

For the last 5 years (or more in some cases) B2B tech marketers have made strides to adapt to a new inbound reality where buyer connections were clear. The promise was that if you developed content and made it readily available for consumption, you could generate leads and new prospect relationships.

The standard inbound strategy calls for you to leverage your own content creation (white papers, blogs, webinars, etc.) and SEO to drive inbound visits to your site. However, moving forward, as 53% of B2B firms focus more on account based marketing (ABM) and Martech makes the marketing stack more complicated, succeeding with inbound on your own is becoming increasingly difficult.

While this is far from a new answer to the problem, partnering with publishers could be your best bet to realize the potential of ABM while simplifying the modern marketing stack.

ABM Mistakes Can Lead to Unacceptable Waste

Account based marketing is, at its core, a call to optimize inbound marketing efforts to target only those accounts that are likely to buy from you, ultimately eliminating waste and improving marketing ROI.

However, we recently talked about the common pitfalls of ABM, one of which is ‘flaws in identifying the right accounts’, pointing ABM efforts in the wrong direction and creating waste.

Identifying the wrong accounts is just one common ABM pitfall, but there are others that also lead to wasted investments and work against the promise that ABM can improve marketing ROI.

To address these ABM and inbound marketing challenges, B2B marketers have been introduced to an ever-evolving world of martech, which has proven to be both a blessing and a burden.

Why Martech Is a Blessing and a Burden for Some B2B Marketers

Martech has emerged to provide B2B marketers with a wide range of tools and tactics to incorporate into their standard marketing mixes. The goal of your marketing stack should be to eliminate marketing waste by refining targeting and accelerating pipelines.

The martech promise would seem to fit perfectly with increased interest in ABM; but if you look at the current martech landscape, it’s easy to see where B2B marketers can become overwhelmed and start to see diminishing returns on marketing technology investments.

What once seemed like a simple connection between content creation and inbound lead generation has become an intricate stack of marketing functions that can lead many marketers to actually increase waste. In addition to ABM, some of these new functions include:

• Audience definition and persona development
• Native advertising
• Media consumption insight
• Harnessing intent data
• Outbound content marketing
• Qualified project identification
• Data targeting
• And more

Finding success with ABM means getting back to a simpler marketing stack—but this is easier said than done. However, partnering with publishers offers a great opportunity to truly eliminate marketing waste and achieving the promises of ABM.

Where Does a Publisher Fit into the Modern Marketing Stack?

The new complication of the marketing stack may seem like a new phenomenon for B2B marketers, but publishers have actually been successfully employing these tactics for years.

Trying to reinvent the marketing stack is similar to reinventing the wheel—and Paul Strikwerda once said, “Those who wish to reinvent the wheel, usually end up going around in circles.” If you want to get back to a simple marketing stack, start leveraging an experienced publisher’s own stack.

Before you partner with a publisher, there’s an important distinction to make. Leveraging a publisher’s marketing stack can yield immense savings for your inbound and ABM efforts, but it’s not a replacement for your own efforts. Get back to the direct buyer connections you once enjoyed with inbound and partner with experienced publishers to achieve:

• Real-time access to your in-market prospects
• Robust contact information for all leads generated through content marketing
• Account research reports with research insight and influencers
• Account-based advertising to buying teams, including account-specific click and impression reporting

As the leading B2B tech publisher with over 75,000 annual IT articles delivering more first page Google results than other publishers in the space, TechTarget offers a unique partnership opportunity that can help you simplify your marketing stack and start eliminating waste.

If you want to learn more about TechTarget and the InstantABM solution that drives efficient, full-funnel ABM services for clients, contact us today!

ABM, ABM strategies, Account-Based Marketing, marketing technology, martech, TechTarget