A closer look at account-based marketing
Marketing often focuses on lead generation. Transcend’s strategic account-based approach instead begins with identifying and targeting your highest impact referral sources.
A powerful way to build and reinforce your referrer relationships
Account-based marketing (ABM) presents a new opportunity to support high-value engagements with the referral audiences you want to reach the most. Unmatched in the laser focus it provides, ABM empowers you to target the most important individual decision makers with a true one-to-one level of personalization.
Especially as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to limit face-to-face contact, it is critical to find innovative alternatives to communicate and deliver value to referrers – now and into the future. Taking these steps now will meaningfully deepen your relationships and sustainably increase your referrals for the long term.
Achieve an unprecedented level of personalization and insight with:
- One-to-one targeted outreach to designated leaders at specific organizations with highly customized messages.
- In-depth data on prospect engagement that can be used to inform relationship
development strategies and provide critical intel to referrer liaisons. - More efficient use of marketing budget – rather than spending money on a big list of leads that may be a poor fit, ABM serves targeted, personalized ads to only the most qualified ones.
How It Plays Out
Let’s look at how ABM could work in a common referral source scenario: Reaching family practice physicians. Often, it’s the office managers or other individuals on staff who are making the actual referral recommendations. ABM allows you to target the right people at the right practices, focused on the specific topics they care most about.
1. Identify
In this scenario, you would start by defining a list of target family practice providers who are the best fit for your organization, agreeing with your team on the profile, or common traits that signify a highly valuable prospective referral source for you. One way to do this would be to look at the top 10% of your referral sources base – the ones with the highest total value to you – and identify what it is they have in common.
ABM enables building an audience profile based on:
- Position/title
- Geography
- Size of patient base
- Number of employees
- Budget/funding
- Organization or technological maturity
- Technology used
- Annual revenue
2. Expand
Next, Transcend takes your ideal referrer profile and list of target accounts and expands these profiles with the information of key individual stakeholders and decision makers. For example, in this scenario, it might often be the physician’s office managers, NPs or PAs who are the ones actually making referral recommendations.
3. Personalize and Engage
We then target the individual as much as possible, developing tailored messaging and creative that will reach specific decision makers with a one-to-one focus. Let’s say you want to communicate how you can support their patients and family caregivers, such as with pain and symptom management at home. We could then tailor variations of this message to the specific types of patients or disease-specific requirements most relevant to each individual physician group.
4. Activate and Connect
As your audience interacts with the ABM campaign, we begin to gather rich engagement and intent data that tells you which people are expressing interest, and what topics are interesting them the most. This intel can be handed over to your liaison team, who can use it to build on their personal relationships and have more valuable conversations with their prospects – ones focused on the topics of greatest importance to them.
5. Measure
Transcend continuously analyzes performance data focused on account-level key performance indicators (KPIs) which are used to fine tune your ABM campaigns as well as guide other referral relationship communications and activities.
How each individual engages with the campaign, their online habits, and even their interaction with your liaisons can be fed into the ABM platform, which then uses all available data to determine a relationship score that helps further inform your relationship development strategies.
Right-Size Your ABM Campaign
Transcend offers three levels of ABM campaign development that lets you balance the ideal investment and ROI potential. All options include account strategy, audience profile development, regular reporting, analytics and recommendations for optimizations. We also strongly encourage a digital audit prior to kicking off an ABM campaign to ensure you get the most from it.
Integrated
|
Advanced
|
Pilot
|
|
|---|---|---|---|
Creative
|
Up to five unique designs and messages over the course of the campaign.Development of custom landing page destination for the campaign to drive traffic. |
Up to three unique designs and messages over the course of the campaign. |
A single set of ads with the same design. Up to three copy revisions over the course of the campaign to adapt performance. |
Media Analysis
|
Ongoing monitoring, with monthly report outs. |
Ongoing monitoring, with monthly report outs. |
Ongoing monitoring, with quarterly report outs. |
Investment |
Reach and Focus |
Personalization |
|
|---|---|---|---|
ABM |
$$ Can be as little as half the cost of a traditional advertising campaign. |
Ideal for highly niche audiences like referrers. Focuses on the individuals you want to reach – high-value leads, qualified by organization, job title, intent, relationship data and specific location. |
Enables proactive one-to-one messaging addressing each individual’s specific pain points, supplemented by personalized liaison outreach. |
Traditional Advertising (TV, Radio, Print) |
$$$$ Includes involved production of materials and pricey media buys. |
Best for general brand awareness and recognition aimed at patients and families. Allows targeting demographically and geographically. |
Overarching message to a wide audience. |
Other Digital Advertising
|
$$$ Costs can vary based on specific placements/channels used. |
More precise than traditional advertising, able to target based on inferred interests and search/browsing behavior. |
Can speak to general areas of interest based on behavior, but not one-to-one marketing. |
One-On-One Visits/Events |
$$$$ Cost of full-time employees to attend or visit, mileage reimbursements, travel costs, leave behind materials, and more. |
Engaging, proactive one-on-one interactions. Limited by geography, accessibility, availability of staff and currently by the COVID-19 pandemic. |
As personalized as it gets. |
Reframe Your Advertising Mix
ABM is unparalleled in the level of focus it provides to preselected, highly qualified leads, allowing you to proactively identify the accounts with the greatest opportunity for growth. It can play a vital role in a successful media mix, especially ideal when you want to reach a narrow and niche audience like your referral sources.
Potential Revenue Growth
Building value with referrers tailored to what they care about most can more quickly grow their confidence in your agency and increase your number of referral opportunities. In fact, mature ABM programs achieve at least a 10% increase in opportunity creation.*
*Gartner
** Based on the 2016 national Medicare reimbursement rate of $153 per patient day
Implement ABM the Right Way with Transcend
ABM’s power is its ability to deliver a new level of specificity to individual recipients. To maximize your marketing budget, it’s critical to lead with a strategic foundation that ensures you are targeting the right people with the right message at the right time. Find out how Transcend’s strategic approach can help you reframe your value, more meaningfully connect with key decision makers and grow to your potential.
Discover how ABM can help you grow.
