If you’re targeting mid-market or enterprise companies, you can't rely on a single channel to drive engagement and qualified leads. Here we share examples of campaigns with solid ROI and show how to integrate different channels into a unique workflow.
If you’re targeting mid-market or enterprise companies, you can't rely on a single channel to drive engagement and qualified leads. You must engage several decision makers per account on multiple channels, online and offline. Here we share examples of campaigns with solid ROI and show how to integrate different channels into a unique workflow.
An integrated marketing campaign is a marketing program that leverages multiple channels simultaneously, while maintaining a cohesive message and objective. The difference between multi-channel marketing and integrated marketing is that integrated marketing uses all of your different channels for the same objective and with the same message. You may be running campaigns on Facebook, LinkedIn, Webinars, etc -- but the key is how do you make them play together?
The goal of an integrated marketing campaign is to create a unified and seamless experience for prospects to interact with your brand. It is designed to ensure that all messaging and communications strategies are consistent across all channels and centered around the customer.
If you are an enterprise or mid-market SaaS company, you need to be running your marketing across multiple channels. In the SaaS buyer’s journey there’s multiple decision makers and stakeholders involved in the process, and the journey from prospect to customer can be quite long. If you’re not leveraging multiple channels to reach your customers, there’s a high chance you are missing out somewhere.
It’s highly unlikely that a prospect would see your ad on Facebook and immediately convert. They first need to become aware that your product/company exists, then they might engage and learn more, and then finally sit down with your Sales team. Throughout all of these stages, the goal is to have different “touches” across several channels. For example someone might (1) download some of your content on LinkedIn, then (2) they see your ads on Facebook, then (3) they sign up for marketing emails, then (4) you send them a nice direct mail package requesting a meeting, then (5) they request a demo. Meanwhile, you are retargeting these prospects across social media channels and possibly OOH/digital ads.
Here are two examples of niches we targeted in our own ABM efforts at SaaSMQL. Instead of broadly targeting types of companies, we narrowed down to the specific person at a specific type of company, with a specific problem, and looking for a specific result.
It’s important to define your program goals ahead of time, preferably per niche. For example, you want to target 800 accounts, your goal is 35% engagement, and you want to book 65 meetings with a $5M pipeline goal. Once you have these goals in mind, you can work on the budget.
To define your budget, work backwards from your goals using your conversion rates. You’ll want to use these win rates to understand your Customer Acquisition Cost and make a realistic calculation of the budget you’ll need to reach your goals. Once your budget is defined, divide it between your target niches.
If you are selling a high-ticket solution, the best approach involves both digital and offline channels. While the digital channels are important, also having an offline touch makes it more likely that a prospect would convert. Below are some examples of digital and offline channels. Once you’ve chosen your channels, you will need to build assets. All of your assets should be consistent in messaging and branding across each channel.
Before launching your program, you will want to draft a funnel map for the campaign. The funnel map should match your engagement stages (cold, aware, engaged, opportunity, closed), and include all of your channels. Segment your channels by funnel stage, and visualize how they interact with each other. For example, your billboard might not directly bring in conversions, but if someone sees your billboard 10 times in 2 weeks and then receives a cold email or direct mail package, they will immediately recognize your brand. You can estimate engagement rate and conversion rate from each stage, and use that information to help allocate your budget for each channel. You can forecast your funnels using your estimated conversion rates and win rates.
If you live in San Francisco or New York City, you have probably seen one of Brex’s giant billboards or subway ads. Brex is a startup that provides corporate credit cards for other startups, and went from a $0 to $1B valuation in just under 2 years, (valued at $2.6B more recently). They spent $300k to cover San Francisco with ads on billboards, taxi cabs, bus stops, buildings, and more.
From the Founders:
“The thing about billboards is you have to buy a lot of them to work, because marketing is about repetition. It’s about awareness and people hearing about you many times and it’s really hard to attribute, but a lot of times when we went to do outbound, we reached out to our customer, and we talked to them, they’re like “Oh, I saw your billboard already.” We had actually a higher response rate on outbound emails because we did this billboard campaign and that was super powerful.”
These out-of-home ads had an incredible impact on other channels. When the Brex team began reaching out to prospective customers after the campaign launched, most of them had already seen the billboards or other OOH ads. They also saw a higher response rate on cold outbound emails.
But the campaign didn’t stop there, it also involved a lot of targeted digital and display ads that ran at the same time. These ads carried the same message and branding, and served as a complement to the billboard campaign. Around this time Brex also launched a podcast called “Brex in the Black”, which is “a crash course in financial operations” and one of the only podcasts about finance and accounting in startups. This podcast appeals to their biggest niche, the startup CFO.
Rounding out these efforts, Brex also launched a webinar series paired with email marketing.
These billboards, out-of-home ads, podcasts, and webinars complement Brex’s digital marketing efforts and help maximize awareness for the young company.
SaaSMQL is an Account-Based Marketing agency that helps SaaS companies scale recurring revenue with high-impact multichannel campaigns.
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