How much has the Account-Based Marketing evolved in the last 12-18 months?
ABM is still a work in progress. It is a growing trend and there has definitely been more interest towards it in the industry. More companies are devoting resources to ABM, both people-wise and budget-wise. However, there is still a lot of confusion in regards to ABM‘s impact and how to measure it.
I’d say there has been a lot more experimenting with ABM in the last year and that created even more demand for a more precise data and actionable results.
How does Influ2 serve contextual content to customers? How does website strategy differ from mobile customers – what benefits Influ2 has over the non-users?
Influ2 has a unique take on serving content through ads. Person-based advertising approach Influ2 uses, means that you select specific people to show your ads to, and you control which content they see and how often. So, you can create different ad campaigns for different personas and contextualize content for every persona.
Our starting point is the person our clients want to reach. Different people have different habits in their online behavior, our job is to understand that behavior and serve ads across platforms and devices that are typically used by each particular person. Sometimes it means serving ads on mobile, sometimes it means sticking with desktop, we employ algorithms to optimize campaigns for each particular user.
How do MarTech and Programmatic Advertising converge at Influ2? What kind of integration are we talking with your ABM solutions for Customer Acquisition?
MarTech is all about Conversion funnels, Sales and Marketing alignment, it has a person-based mentality if you will, while programmatic is about deliverability, CTRs, frequency and accuracy optimization. Influ2 merges these two concepts by doing all the heavy-lifting that comes with programmatic, like navigating DSP, DMP, etc. This makes Influ2 a simple and understandable plug and lay element of a MarTech stack, which is easy to integrate and use alongside CRMs and Marketing Automation platforms.
Could you tell us about the changing nature of Marketing Campaigns and how much of it impacts Lead Generation tactics.?
As you have rightfully mentioned in your previous question – ABM is evolving. It means B2B world, more than ever understands the necessity of focusing their Marketing efforts on specific accounts. This is even more true for companies, whose target audience consists primarily of enterprise accounts.
Even those who have already tried ABM, understand that it is not the accounts, but people who make decisions. So, in their Marketing campaigns, companies are now trying to focus on people, on very specific people. So, I would say Marketing campaigns become more focused, hence more contextual. And the success of the campaign has now more to do with the precision of targeting and quality, relevance, rather than the quantity of leads we are so used to seeing in a lead generation.
What titles in the industry are you currently selling to? Which regions have been the fastest and most responsive to adopting ABM products?
We are primarily focused on high-tech companies, since they are very growth-oriented. Mostly we talk to C-level execs and their Marketing teams. They are more open to try new technologies, given the last ones can get them better results and are fast in implementation, which Influ2 is, so it works out perfectly.
Geography-wise Silicon Valley and NYC are clearly the head-runners. We also have lots of great clients in Israel.
Could you tell us about the impact AI ML capabilities have on your Marketing and Sales efforts?
AI has been a very fancy word for the last couple of years and lots of companies started using it just for the sake of it. So much so that it basically became a default word for describing any IT products. Many companies use the term, but don’t use the technology behind it. We stopped using these acronyms – ML in Python, AI in PowerPoint – we have no other choice, but develop in goland (j/k).
One crucial thing that MarTech companies fail to understand is that they can’t think deterministically, if they want to make a breakthrough. AI can help to see beyond the obvious and connect the dots that are hard to connect otherwise. For us it meant getting ads to perform 10x better by looking beyond the obvious.
What message do you have for MarTech CEOs and CMOs?
So many companies are trying to build an end-to-end ABM solutions today. They are trying to be great at everything at once – intent data collection, ABM orchestration, execution, attribution, performance measurement, you name it. You can’t be great at it all. It is time to take a look at and learn from developers – transform monolith end-to-end products to microservices. This way each element can become a part of a new and a more robust solution, suitable for the needs of each particular client.
So, to MarTech CEOs and CMOs I’d say let’s cooperate and use integrations to best serve the needs of our common clients.
What efforts are you taking to grow your business by using MarTech and SalesTech platforms?
Product-wise we have integrations available with major CRMs and Marketing Automation platforms and our product architecture allows for easy integrations with other MarTech and SalesTech platforms. Company-wise we are keen on forming partnerships with other platforms as long as it serves the interest of our clients.
Dimitri is a Co-founder and CEO of Influ2. Dmitri has more than 15 years of experience in advertising, online media and e-commerce.
He is a co-founder of BonusTec, an IT services company sold to GlobalLogic in 2006. Dimitri holds Executive MBA degree from Columbia Business School and London Business School.
Influ2 is the first high resolution ABM platform that boosts your sales development productivity with person-based advertising. Influ2 delivers ads to every decision-maker from your targeted account and tracks engagement of each person, who sees an ad or clicks on it.
Person-based advertising allows you to capture person-based buying intent signals at an early stage of consumer journey and use these signals to reach out to the right people at the right time. Sales and marketing teams, who use Influ2 get 3x better response rates to their calls and emails, increasing their sales development productivity by 30-50%
