You might be surprised to learn that nearly two-thirds (64%) of Account-Based Marketing strategies used by B2B brands have been created and launched in just the last five years. Increasingly, ABM has become the go-to method for a brand to generate new business and demand with 94% of B2B marketers now using the strategy. Here are just a few reasons why:
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- 97% of marketers report that ABM delivers a higher ROI than other strategies (WARC).
- 91% of brands increase their average deal size when using ABM — 25% of those brands see increases over 50% (Cyance).
- When employing an ABM strategy, a brand can see a 170% value increase of annual contracts on average (WebFX).
- 83% of marketers say ABM drives up target account engagement (Demandbase).
- Brands attribute 79% of opportunities and 73% of total revenue to ABM strategies (Terminus).
By researching accounts and getting to know who you’re targeting, a brand can then begin to reach out in a more personalized way and build bridges with prospects. What’s amazing now is the role content can play in building that bridge, and in a fast-paced B2B environment, a podcast (with expert guests discussing intriguing topics) has become one of the more valuable content channels — not just for marketing in general, but for ABM strategies in particular.
But ABM requires you to really know your audience. According to HubSpot, the top three challenges ABM marketers face are delivering a personalized experience, understanding how to choose target accounts, and knowing the best content to leverage.
This is where Casted can help your ABM efforts most by showing you the details of who’s engaging with your podcast, what they’re interested in most, and how you can build a relationship with brands who meet your ideal customer profile requirements. In fact, this was why we built the Casted platform.
How Casted Insights Enhances an ABM Strategy
A B2B podcast can do so many things for your brand that other marketing channels can’t. It’s one of the most powerful ways to achieve brand awareness and show your audience what your brand is all about. But the challenge for some companies has been being able to track how a podcast contributes to pipeline and drives revenue.
However, when you leverage a podcast as a part of your account-based marketing strategy, you can see new ways to use the channel that lead directly to business relationships and well-targeted outreach.
When building our podcast marketing platform, Casted set out to create something that didn’t exist before: Better analytics that went beyond downloads and subscriptions. We call this Insights, and with Insights, you can match 65% of your listening audience data with the brands that engage with your show.
Insights analytics uses firmographic data to:
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- Identify company name
- How many unique individuals from each company have engaged with your content
- Which content they listened to and how much of the content
This provides a solid launching point for your ABM strategy and allows you to reach out to these brands and begin building a relationship. Let’s take a look at the data Insights gives you and what you can do with that knowledge.
See Who’s in Your Audience
Within Insights, the Audience Table presents a wealth of information about the brands listening to or viewing your podcast. Regardless of whether they come to your show through a web player on your site or one of the major podcasting apps and platforms, you can see how your podcast content resonates with your audience and how it ultimately impacts your business goals.
The Audience Table gives you a breakdown of who’s engaging as follows:
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- Company: The name of the company associated with the engagement data.
- CRM: If you have integrated Casted with a CRM like HubSpot, Marketo, or Pardot, this column indicates if a member of that company was matched with a known contact record.
- Engagements: The number of times this company has listened to or watched your content within the selected date range.
- Last Engagement: The last date that this company listened to or watched your content within the selected date range.
You can also filter by contacts for more information. For instance, if you have integrated Casted with HubSpot, you can show only Matched Accounts and see if an audience member matches one of your known CRM contact records. Then via reporting within HubSpot, you can see exactly who was tuning in, plus other engagement data.
Explore the Company Profile
When you click the company name in the Audience Table, the Company Profile uncovers deeper insights into how and what this particular brand is engaging with.
Within the Company Profile, you’ll see the following valuable data and information:
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- A brief summary of who the company is and what they do.
- The date range defaults to the last 30 days, but you can customize it to any range you want in the dropdown menu.
- Time Spent with Content: How long the audience associated with this company listened to or watched your content within the selected date range.
- Unique Contacts: How many individuals from this company engaged with your content, no matter how many times they engaged in a single session or how many times they returned within the date range.
- Total Engagements: The number of downloads and plays from the company within the date range.
- Total Impressions: The number of downloads, plays, and visits from the company within the date range.
- Company Metrics: This chart helps visualize this particular company’s engagement, showing Impressions, Listens, and Watches over the selected date range.
Now with listener behavior data in your hands, you can start researching the brand, understand the topics that interest them, and build an effective data-driven ABM strategy for each unique brand you want to target.
Tips for Targeting Your ICP
So how does a B2B podcast and ABM strategy work together in the real world? Here are a few ABM tips from a recent guest on The Casted Podcast, Jim Gilkey, Senior Account Executive at Terminus and host of the Account Based Beverages podcast, for how to define your ideal customer profile and then target prospects engaging with your podcast.
For Jim, Step One is all about:
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- Identifying common characteristics to develop your ICP and create your target list.
- Connecting with these brands online (for example, on LinkedIn).
- Joining online communities where these brands engage with each other.
- Doing your research and learning as much as you can about a brand through their content.
Once you’ve activated these strategies, you look for the best possible candidates for your ABM program. As Jim shares, “Then when you see those people that tend to shine because they have a great perspective or maybe a unique perspective, or they're so passionate about something they're willing to die on that hill, then you're able to reach out to them.”
However, you should be very thoughtful and creative about how you engage with the brand, as Jim points out: “Step Two is starting to engage with them, not just ‘That's cool!’ or ‘Great work!” or one of these comments that's easy to kind of glaze over, but showing that you read it. Maybe asking another question, maybe giving a piece of your insight begins a conversation, and that makes it really easy for me.
“When I start to look at an individual that I want to be working with, I can see a post that they have online. I can comment on it, but then I take that to my direct messages with the individual. I mention the podcast that I have. I mention that I want to bring them on and dive into this a little bit more or get a real life example.
“The key for me has been reducing the friction as much as possible, so having a form that they can fill out, giving them ideas of what they can talk about on that podcast, and making it really easy for them to book time based off of their schedule.”
Let Casted Insights Fuel Your ABM Strategy and Use Listener Data to Take Action
Podcast audience data provides all the fuel you need to begin building relationships with the brands that are your ideal customers. With Insights as your foundation for ABM, the next step is putting all that firmographic audience data into the hands of your revenue teams and taking action: See which ones are new brands and which ones are already in your funnel, and reach out with the right content at the right time to nurture these company relationships and expand your brand’s new business pipeline.
This is where the Casted platform and Insights can really work for your company and identify not just the brands engaging with your podcast but identify your top-performing podcast and video content to really understand the topics and themes that resonate best and therefore are the most effective for your ABM strategy. If you’re ready to know your audience like never before, reach out to us and take a look at what Casted can do for your brand.
