When it comes to marketing, there are three things that should never be siloed from one another in your marketing plans, or among the people working on them. They are:
- Drift
- Account-based marketing (ABM)
- Digital paid media
They’re the perfect mix. Why, you ask?
It’s simple: These three tactics have shared tools and processes that work in tandem to create a single, unified strategy. And ultimately, isn’t that the goal of all successful marketing practices? (Spoiler: Yes!)
So, what do we really mean when we’re talking about ABM, Drift, and digital paid media? For this conversation, let me lay out the following definitions for you:
Account-Based Marketing
Technically defined as key account marketing, ABM is a strategic approach to business marketing based on account awareness, where you communicate with individual prospects or customer accounts as individual markets. In other words, you target specific roles within that account to drive your marketing dollars and efforts.
Drift Revenue Acceleration Platform
Drift combines Conversational Marketing and Conversational Sales to bring your go-to-market teams together and accelerate revenue. It provides real-time personalization with custom chatbots, email, video, and AI to powerfully scale one-to-one customer experiences.
Digital Paid Media
Paid media is one method by which organizations can promote their content through social media posts, digital display ads, page search results, SEO, and other promoted multimedia.
Targeted One-to-One Marketing
About 10 years ago, I had the privilege of working with Don Peppers, the guy who literally wrote the book on one-to-one relationships and marketing (The One to One Future: Building Relationships One Customer at a Time).
Since then, I have been trying to actualize the dream of one-to-one conversations with each customer. Over the last few years, that dream is being realized at scale with excellent results.
Putting It All Together
In order to create (and automate) personalized one-to-one conversations across multiple platforms, deep integration is required at the strategic level.
All too often, we see the above three tactics handled very differently and often siloed.
“Despite investment in tooling and processes, marketers aren’t operationally equipped to build customer experiences at scale.”
Here is where Drift solves and shines. Making custom chatbots more human, Drift tactically applies processes, analyzes and interacts at scale, and gets the conversation going in the right place, with the right content, and the right people, one-to-one.
Paid media plans are not cheap, so make sure you take every advantage once you have people on your site. Connect with them where they are. Because conversations matter – and they help you solve problems for your customers much more efficiently.
Tapping into the Greater Potential
Well-experienced ABM strategists can build a holistic framework, with the understanding that strategy has to drive tactics and paid media. With a unified framework, you can then build programs using best practices based on a deliberate model that measures results – and then use those results to refine and optimize.
Drift actively links your website visitors to your people or your content, activating your strategy tactics, and targeted accounts providing invaluable insights into what your visitors are consuming and engaging with.
“Instead of checking the boxes, we need to check the experience.”
So in causal terms:
- Your ABM strategy identifies the correct people and correct roles to target for engagement
- Paid media experts lay out effective invitations to promote the cause in the right places, with the right content
- Drift gathers information and gets the conversation rolling through playbooks and AI chatbots
And at ROI·DNA, our goal is to employ best practices to help clients marry these tactics from the very beginning through strategic planning, integrated tactics, detailed metrics, and feedback. If you’re interested, you can click here for a deeper dive into what that process looks like.
Not only do we believe strongly in this trifecta, but we have also seen incredible results applying it. With a holistic approach, it’s possible to amplify success with ABM, Drift Conversational Marketing, and paid media, all working in concert towards a common goal.
Nancy Mayo is the Associate Vice President, ABM Technology & Partnerships at ROI·DNA. She has been heavily involved in the Salesforce ecosystem for 15+ years with a wide variety of experiences, mostly around marketing technology stacks. She is passionate about building fantastic customer experiences and relationships with the aid of technology and ABM strategy.
