Advertising to in-opp accounts

Kfir Pravda

Some companies, especially where marketing and sales teams don't vibe, have this notion: marketing stops once sales starts its magic. This essentially means they only use their marketing bucks to generate MQAs. And once a sales rep jumps into the conversation with a potential customer, marketing pulls back on the ads.

Oddly enough, this happens a lot in companies selling intricate solutions and big-ticket items. It's super important for these places to get everyone in the buying committee on the same page to seal the deal. Still, they leave sellers to multithread on their own. 

So, here's a cool thing we did for a client: we bucked the trend. We splashed some advertising cash on those still-in-the-early-phase deals. We repurposed content we already had and went full throttle, targeting those accounts on various platforms. The whole point was to boost engagement. We didn't put any gates on the content, and we didn't obsess over lead-related numbers.

The results - those deals moved along 30% faster. 

It's just another way to use account-based advertising and get results that hit closer to revenue than just building the pipeline.

How do you manage your ads spend? Is it all pipeline generation? Do you invest in acceleration and are you measured on it?

KP

Kimberly Conklin

@Kfir Pravda I love the one team mentality 👊

Brandon McBride

@Kfir Pravda Thanks for this! I'm curious. What types of content did you use in this effort?

Kfir Pravda

We used only regular thought leadership and other content pieces, which were not tailored specifically to this buying stage. To be honest, I was surprised that this worked well, as it goes against the whole "personalize your content" philosophy. This just shows that knowing best practices can help you to do the opposite and see what happens :)

charlotte.spangler

We've done a few plays for open opportunities, including custom ads that subtly referenced the brand or product (i.e. a gaming company got "why zeta is best in the game") and have done industry-specific case study ads for open opps.

Haven't been able to track deal velocity, but the gaming one did close recently!

I was able to pitch it to sales by reminding them that our competitors are likely hitting them with ads during this time still - so wouldnt we want our brand in front of them too?

Adam Kaiser

@Kfir Pravda this is fantastic! And great you've seen a lift on deal velocity.

This is a great way to get in front of others in the buying committee who may need to be engaged.

We recently ran a similar play to CFOs within open opportunities. We had some fun with it! I've attached one of the ads.

Thanks!

Adam