Enterprise Playbooks
Enterprise Playbooks
Some ideas & playbooks you can execute
The problem with most A.B.M., aka Enterprise Marketing conversations these days is that they either lean too much toward ‘intent data & display ads’ (DemandBase / 6sense) or high-high-level ‘alignment of sales & marketing'.’
Below, we hope to share some tactical playbooks as a follow-up to our earlier essay on Enterprise Marketing that outlines some non ‘run display or LinkedIn ads advice on enterprise marketing/ABM:
Sample Playbooks & Campaign Ideas:
Here are a couple of playbooks to consider when doing Enterprise Marketing.
Playbook 1
Use Clay to build the LookAlike of your best customers:
Enrich the data with LinkedIn URLs/ Company URLs / etc
Import as a custom audience.
Reach / Video Campaigns to them with basic creative about what the company is and what it does.
Identify Decision Makers.
If they are active on social media (LinkedIn/Twitter), thoughtfully follow their content, add value, and build rapport with them.
Send them a connect request with a nice message about their content + something that might help them.
Playbook 2:
Copy steps from Playbook One.
Invite them to co-create content like a podcast or article.
Invite them to speak at a customer event.
Host a lunch and learn at their company (you bring the lunch and learning, make it genuinely interesting for them).
Playbook 3:
Buy a billboard in the city where your Target Account is:
Run the same creative on social / display and other ad platforms.
Send them a box of cookies to the office.
Design a custom landing page just for that account.
Create hyper-personalized content (i.e., X guide for Account Y on how to do ABC).
Arm your AE team with sales enablement materials like business cases, one-pagers, and ROI calculators.
Playbook 4:
Use geo-fenced ads to get on their radar, especially during industry events.
Use SDRs to do outreach and invite them to a wine and dine.
Invite customers & critical prospects.
Mirror their executives. For example, if you sell to a CISO, bring your own company CISO to build rapport.
Playbook 5:
Expand existing customers and departments/business units within large companies like mini-companies.
Leverage internal case studies, lunch and learns, and other marketing activities to expand from Google's Cloud business to the SMB division or a different regional HQ.
Playbook 6:
make a magazine featuring your target accounts
Write a series of content featuring your prospects (interview them)
CFO Series that features the CFO of your target account with other CFOs.
Print & ship hard copies to the account & use the content to develop a relationship with the prospects.
Playbook 7:
Research your target accounts & key decision makers; identify where they went to school
Buy school alumni swag (like hats/t-shirts) & ship it to them
Enable tracking notifications so that when they receive the package, you can send them an email + LinkedIn invite.
Playbook 8:
For Accounts that are with a competitor or were closed lost due to a competitor
Use Builtwith or other tools to identify when the new ‘tool’ was first detected on their site
Typical contracts are 1-2 years, so you can either:
Time a competitive offer based on some G2 / Capterra reviews
i.e., I noticed you have been using the X tool for about eight months now. A lot of users notice these things lacking in the tool (quote reviews; these can be scrapped or pulled via Clay)
Offer to buy the rest of the contract out (i.e., you have three months left on the contract - we can buy it out + give you an incentive to switch)
Playbook 9:
For industry events where you expect your accounts to be in attendance, treat the event as an experiential brand activation versus just tradeshow booth scanners.
Search ads on the event name + event name/agenda, etc
Scrape the list of speakers/sponsors to identify if any of your named accounts/prospects are speaking or sponsoring. If yes, build out a custom audience.
Buy OOH around the event venue or airport:
Hire a truck billboard to go around the venue
Print flyers & hand them to the people coming to the event (you can hire someone from Craiglist)
Have some temp graffiti on the sidewalks
Sponsor a food truck.
Host a giveaway for sharing pictures on social media.
Playbook 10
Measure brand recall via LinkedIns native brand lift studies
Measure brand recall via Dave Rigotti’s Hack
Create a list of accounts you want to target. Ours were just our target accounts. Since we did ABM that was the universe of companies we really cared about.
Spin up a basic LinkedIn page to run ads against. Ours was called "marketing survey" (we didn't want people to know it was from Bizible as it would sway results)
Create and run ads to your brand survey. This is what ours looked like. Super basic, I know, but it worked!
Run the LinkedIn ads to the account list you created. Sit back and relax for a few weeks. And you’re done!
I always asked for a demo at the end. We’d pass them over to sales, who would follow up with them and turn them into the pipeline. It paid for itself.
It cost $4,000 for somewhere between 100 and 200 submissions (I don’t remember exactly). This is definitely enough for us to have a pulse on the market.
The following essay will be on Brand vs. brand, echoing Dave Kellog's Advice: “Do you want to build a brand? Go sell some software. Want to improve your brand perception? Go sell some software….” 1
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