"The best journey to take them on, to help them understand who you are, how you can help them, and how to easily evaluate your solution to their pain."
As the marketing landscape evolves, businesses are increasingly adopting Account Based Marketing as a targeted and strategic approach to engage high-value accounts. With its emphasis on personalized and relevant content, ABM has proven to deliver impressive ROI and foster long-term relationships with key customers. However, the effectiveness of an ABM strategy hinges on the proper implementation and execution of the right tactics. How can organizations optimize their ABM efforts to drive success? In this interview series, we are talking to marketing professionals, ABM experts, thought leaders, and successful practitioners about their “Top 5 Most Effective Account-Based Marketing Strategies.” As a part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Emma Lo Russo.
Emma Lo Russo is CEO of Digivizer, Australia’s global digital marketing technology and activations company, which she co-founded in 2010. Digivizer helps businesses make better decisions about their investment in digital marketing, across organic, earned and paid social, search and web.
Emma is also CEO of goto.game, a leading data-driven agency and destination for all things gaming and esports, which she founded in 2017.
A multiple award winning entrepreneur and CEO, she holds an MBA from the Australian Graduate School of Management at the University of NSW, and has completed further education in Leadership and Negotiation with Harvard University.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share your personal backstory with us?
My career first started in advertising, but quickly moved into marketing. I loved developing the strategy ahead of the program design and execution.
Although I worked in corporate marketing and leadership for the majority of my career before founding Digivizer, I did head up a design and advertising agency, and was General Manager of a manufacturing company for a number of years, before I discovered my passion for technology.
My last corporate role was as President & COO of ASX-listed Altium (one of Australia’s top-5 tech companies). It was here that I saw the impact that social media, mobile devices and cloud computing could have.
And so I left the relative safety of corporate structures and resources and founded Digivizer, in 2010. Our intent was clear from the start: to help businesses harness that massive change in the interplay between social media, mobile devices and the cloud I’d seen in my previous role, to help them work out the ‘new who, how and where’ of engaging their customers.
Over thirteen years later, Digivizer continues to help businesses grow, helping them understand the digital footprint of their customers (and those who should be their customers) across all digital platforms, with a deep speciality in social media, search and web. We deliver this through the Digivizer digital insights platform (our home-grown IP and technology), and our data-driven digital marketing agency services.
Can you share with us three strengths, skills, or characteristics that helped you to reach this place in your career? How can others actively build these areas within themselves?
The three things that have I think anchored my career so far are:
- A deep curiosity and a high learning desire — I always look to discover new opportunities, new technologies, new possibilities, new ways of doing things. I have also invested a great deal in my own personal development as a leader.
- Grow people and you grow businesses — I quickly learned that the greatest joy I derive, and the best and fastest way to grow a business, is to grow the people in your team. Help them develop and build their capabilities, their thinking, their confidence and empower them to take on new challenges. This builds great loyalty and great results.
- Think slow, act fast — I am a good planner, and like to research and develop a strategy, but once a good plan is in place, I am fast at making things happen. It is a good way to know quickly if your hypothesis proves to be true or not. And no-one wins if you only get things nearly there. Get plans out into market or live into the organization — then assess, refine and deliver progress.
Fantastic. Let’s now shift to the main part of our interview. What inspired you to focus on account-based marketing, and what results have you seen from this approach?
It’s something we do ourselves at Digivizer but my primary interest is on seeing how businesses deploy account-based marketing (ABM) successfully to grow.
We work with a number of B2B organizations of various sizes, around the world, on their business development, and we can see where ABM works, and where it can fail.
The best examples of how to make ABM work is when you have good coherence, coordination and cooperation between your sales and marketing teams.
What you want is 100% clarity on who to target, and align your campaign (in your targeting, and digital content and touch points) with the outreach of the sales organization.
Timing both to a tightly-defined audience with a program that genuinely takes them through a planned journey of helping them get to know you, to evaluate you and to buy from you (and on their timelines), delivers the best results.
Many organizations know that LinkedIn is the primary channel to foster B2B relationships, and to develop and deliver ABM programs. Yet many still struggle to understand how to craft, develop, run, and improve ABM programs that they plan to run on LinkedIn. Understanding which content and engagement is actually working, and why, represents the difference between growing an account and being left stranded.
Those that don’t have their sales organization plugged into the data — engaging with those who are responding in digital, to align around the common objectives — do not see the same results as those that do.
How do you identify the right accounts to target, and what criteria do you use to determine whether an account is a good fit for your ABM strategy?
You really need to understand where your prospects might be.
For example, LinkedIn boasts 900 million members, including a substantial number of decision-makers, so data really does have to be part of any organization’s strategy at some point. It’s a compelling argument for business development and ABM strategies.
And LinkedIn data indicates that 59% of B2B marketers feel an increased pressure to demonstrate the ROI of their tech investments. This is in a purchase cycle that is identified as a complex and lengthening process, with 47% of marketers acknowledging the growing complexity.
LinkedIn’s value proposition for B2B marketers is substantiated with data, emphasizing the platform’s motivated audience with a growth mindset. It has this advantage because of first-party data, where members willingly provide information, enabling precise targeting.
The key with all of this is to be highly targeted about who you wish to include in your ABM campaign — their location, their industry, the size of the company, the types of buyers (their roles). Then ensure your content aligns with them, and talks to them.
More programs are likely to convert when exposed to both paid content and organic content, emphasizing the importance of a comprehensive strategy.
To put this into practice, businesses do need to focus on three levers: targeting, budgeting, and content.
You also need to measure the performance of content, and refine this to build a moat around your proposition that, in time, becomes unassailable. Measuring who is engaging is also going to give you the best understanding of what is important to them, allowing you to refine even more.
What is your process for creating personalized content and messaging for each account, and how do you ensure that it resonates with your target audience?
When we run campaigns, we will be very targeted about the type of industry, company size and decision makers (roles in the company). We then design for a lot of content from initial brand awareness, through consideration and conversion stages, to those specific targets.
We know it takes multiple touch points — a minimum of 8–13 for B2B that, based on sales cycles, could be over 6–12 months. Best-performing creative and content comes when you plan for that entire customer journey. Plan the campaign as an always-on approach with multiple touch points and stories that answer the fundamental proposition: why they should engage with you.
We also align our sales outreach to coincide at the same time as they are engaging in marketing. For example, a well-timed personal invitation to an event from an account manager to align with a paid campaign to drive new accounts to an event can increase registrations and attendance, and create conversations at the actual event that are more-meaningful.
Sharing content, having the sales team engage and comment on the end target content — when timed to create maximum relevance — also increases engagement and success measured by (as examples) meetings booked, pipeline created and revenue booked.
The point of ABM is that it should be seen as a personalized, targeted approach, not a spray-and-pray approach.
What role does technology play in your ABM strategy, and how do you leverage tools like AI and machine learning to improve targeting and personalization?
We use our own platform (Digivizer) to measure the impact of our paid media campaigns and the performance of each piece of content.
The incremental leverage comes from our investment in the weekly discipline of reviewing data between our paid media, growth and sales teams. Our teams use the data to measure and work out what has brought the biggest change and largest impact in driving consistent improvements and success in our results (and for those of our customers).
How do you measure the success of your ABM campaigns, and what metrics do you track to evaluate their effectiveness?
We look at everything through the lens of our actual target accounts and roles:
- How many have seen our campaign, who are they, and what elements have they seen.
- How many engaged with our campaigns, who are they, and what were the elements they engaged with.
- How many have responded to a call to action, who are they, and what was the precise call to action.
- The number of direct trial starts (of our platform), demo bookings, booked conversations.
- The number and value of conversions (and revenue).
- The total ROAS (return on advertising spend) based on annual value.
The insights from steps 1–4 help us make decisions about whether to upweight content (for example with more paid media dollars), or which prospects should be contacted by one of our sales team, with additional engagement in the way.
Can you please share your “Top 5 Most Effective Account Based Marketing (ABM) Strategies.”
Build a strong scenario based on a clear hypothesis, then test it. Questions to build into a typical hypothesis will likely include:
- Who the target industry is.
- Size of company.
- Roles within the company.
- Their pain points.
- Your value proposition and how you can solve their pain points.
- The best journey to take them on, to help them understand who you are, how you can help them, and how to easily evaluate your solution to their pain.
For instance, if you are targeting the financial industry, use financial case studies and talk specifically to their industry and pain points using their language, leading to an industry-specific landing page.
Build multi-touch campaign creative that takes your target account from the stages of discovery, through to evaluation and consideration, and then to taking an action — a formal enquiry, or purchase. B2B marketing requires many touch points. At any time only a small percentage of your audience will be “in market”. For the remainder, you need to build the case for them to consider you when they are actively looking, or register the need to take action now.
Your content needs to be engaging, interesting, valuable, and to help them build the case internally. With most B2B purchases, there is more than one buyer. You need to be able to meet all the criteria of every buyer. This includes reference case studies, use cases, providing helpful assessment tools, great data points that help them see the genuine problems or costs to their business in not changing, and genuine ROI scenarios so they can assess the benefits of changing.
You also want to make sure it is easy for them to see your solution in action at times that suit them.
Ensure the right level of continuing investment in LinkedIn Sales Navigator and in paid media. It is important to ensure you have a budget allocated to your campaign and that you see it as an “always-on campaign” rather than a short term campaign that has a short ROI window.
Digital marketing cannot change the average sales cycle time to take someone from first contact to sales. It can help put more into your funnel, and it can help to nurture them through the stages more efficiently.
You therefore need to see that, if your sales cycle is over 6–12 months, your campaign is over 12–18 months. You need to invest in all stages, and to promote all types of that multi-touch creative that you have prepared, refining as you go.
You also want your sales organization to have LinkedIn Sales Navigator to watch for updates from the target organizations and contacts in those organizations, and then use these as reasons to engage, comment or follow up with relevant and timely messaging. If your budget is small, then go for a tighter target set of customers. You must ensure your budget can touch each target in a multi-touch, long-term campaign for best results.
Creating weekly cadence to review the campaign data and insights, incorporating both marketing and sales to agree to next steps. For best success you want to ensure you are feeding insights in two ways between marketing and sales (and from sales to marketing). Review who has engaged and with what, and when sales activities can be used to drive a more well-timed relevant outreach engagement can lift results. Ensure the tools you build by way of content work both in your campaign outreach but also with your sales team contact points. ABM really comes to life when you have both marketing and sales teams committed to the success of converting a particular set of named accounts.
Create a culture that sees the value of using data. The more you build an awareness and understanding of the value of data, the larger the success. Share actual insights about who has been targeted, who has engaged, what they have engaged with, then agree on new personal touch points and what new digital touch points should be targeted. This will drive greater customer value and successful outcomes.
You want to share the learnings and results with the broader organization. What was your hypothesis, what was proven or disproven, what were the key learnings and wins? This helps everyone learn the value in investing in ABM and allows them to trust the results.
How do you see the future of ABM evolving, and what new strategies or technologies do you think will be most impactful in the years to come?
There is still room for sales and marketing teams to work more closely together. The greater the intelligence being shared between each group, the greater the value that can be delivered from both sides.
Measure the revenue impact of ABM — from a pre-campaign pipeline or revenue to a post pipeline/revenue based on the targeted accounts. Whilst the final deal may be very dependent upon the account manager or sales function, what we have seen when this is measured is a pipeline larger by a minimum of 25%, and more revenue when marketing touch points have been involved. Pipelines can also be built from incoming data and prospects that are not the result of an outbound sales function. Recognizing the role of the entire ABM program is key.
AI-driven campaign creative, measurement and recommendations of touch points will be more valuable in the future.
What is certain is that the more data-led companies become, and the more they build accountability and capabilities in their teams, the more successful their ABM efforts and investments will be. It’s certainly true that data accelerates and acts as a catalyst for growth.
What would you say is the most valuable marketing software in your tech stack?
It would be remiss of me if I did not mention our own marketing software, Digivizer. We literally built an insights platform to help businesses who invest in digital marketing to grow and get more from their investment. It helps everyone in the marketing ecosystem know exactly what content is working and what customers actually care about — from organic social and search, to paid social and search, to earned media, what is driving the most valuable website traffic and what happens when they are there. This is the foundation to all we do and all the businesses we work with (and over 3500 users use our software)
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good for the greatest number of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
I strongly believe in building strong “accountability buddy” mentoring relationships in my business, my networks, groups and associations.
If everyone acts as an accountability buddy to someone, and they themselves seek an accountability buddy, then it promotes great self-learning, personal growth, goal achievement, and positive results.
If it also coincides with a personal commitment to a given, defined number of learnings per week, it helps everyone learn (including how everyone can be a better mentor to someone else).
The value I have seen in promoting this learning, growth and accountability mindset is powerful. It is like that great saying “a mind once stretched cannot go back to its original size”. I also believe that everyone should pay things forward. For everything you are grateful for, give it “or pay it forward” to someone else. It promotes kindness, gratitude and positivity. It feels good when you know you have had a positive impact on someone else, especially to someone who needed that extra support or unexpected gift to propel them forwards.
How can our readers best continue to follow your work online?
I’m very active on LinkedIn and on the Digivizer blog site where I talk often and at length about how businesses can use data to grow, and about the experiences I’ve had in growing a number of businesses over the years. Readers can find me at https://www.linkedin.com/in/emmalorusso/, https://twitter.com/EmmaLoRusso and https://digivizer.com/blog/ or sign up to my Linkedin Newsletter, Emma’s Endeavors: Leading in the Digital Age.
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.
This article was originally featured on Authority Magazine.
What are your experiences with account-based marketing, and how has it worked out for your business? What are your thoughts about the relationship between marketing and sales teams? Do you feel that stronger collaboration between the two yields more positive results?
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