According to CEO of Madison Logic, “Marketo Is Just the Right Size, and Its Leadership Lends Itself Well to Forward-Looking Organizations When It Comes to B2B Martech Partners Community.”
Earlier this month, the leading ABM company Madison Logic announced that ActivateABM Direct would be available to Marketo customers. The platform unifies the power of ABM with Marketing Automation, enabling marketers to reach and engage prospects at every stage of the buyer journey, accelerate growth, and prove the ROI of their efforts. Marketo is a MarTech 150 RADAR Company for 2018.
Post this announcement, we sat down with Tom O’Regan to better understand the expanding horizon of ABM customers and how the partnership with Marketo is actually a great opportunity for sales teams looking to quickly convert Target Accounts.
How important is the Marketo-Madison Logic partnership for the ABM ecosystem?
Leveraging Madison Logic for ABM, content marketing, and display advertising, customers are generating a high volume of net new contacts.
It is even more important now in light of Marketo’s recent acquisition of Bizible. Madison Logic has been the ABM platform of choice for Marketo for many years. For some time now, Marketo has leveraged Madison Logic and our data to reach in-market prospects who are actively researching marketing automation systems. We have helped the Marketo sales organization engage their top prospects and ultimately convert them into accounts. Leveraging our ABM, content marketing and lead solutions, they are generating a high volume of net new contacts.
In fact, our partnership has been so successful that they’re remarketing our solution to their own clients, through their CSM Customer Success Team. With the news of our ActivateABM Direct launch, Madison Logic is going to be able to satisfy a new segment of clients, beyond our enterprise client base. Through our certification with Marketo, which happened last week at The Marketing Nation Summit, now Marketo’s clients are able to integrate and authenticate directly into ActivateABM Direct, and launch their own comprehensive account-based marketing programs.
What’s Unique about Madison Logic’s ABM Platform?
The comprehensive nature is unique to Madison Logic: The client is able to identify the right individuals at the right companies and then upload their digital and native ads, videos, traditional display advertisements, in addition to all of their gated content (white papers, webinars, e-books, infographics), and they’re able to launch the campaign themselves through this new direct partnership.
As part of the launch, we are offering up to $10,000 in media credits, either in the display, digital advertising, or in content marketing, or split 50/50, as well as three months free on our ActivateABM Direct platform. Our clients will be able to measure their marketing activity to see how many digital ad impressions are delivered to the prospect accounts, how many people went to the website, and what types of content are resonating among the prospects.
Of course, for this limited time, the freemium model is going to enable more Marketo clients to take advantage of the ActivateABM Direct solution. This allows companies of all sizes to take advantage of the platform that so many enterprise technology companies — including Amazon, Google, and 400 other clients — have been taking advantage of for many years. It’s very important for the ecosystem — game-changing, really. We’re extremely excited about the launch.
I am not aware of any other account-based marketing platform that can globally deliver comprehensive ABM programs that integrate with marketing automation solutions like Marketo to deliver digital advertising and lead generation content across the buyer journey, and then measure the impact of those programs within their target accounts.
How are you ensuring that ActivateABM is widely adopted across industries?
Bizible and the Refined Approach to Marketing Attribution
We focus less on creating wide adoption and more on the ideal customers that could take advantage of our comprehensive solutions with ActivateABM. So, we’ve identified those ideal customers: organizations that have licenses to CRM platforms like Salesforce, one of our integration partners. They innately understand the importance of marketing automation and currently license a marketing automation platform, like our partner Marketo.
These ideal customers are typically within the enterprise technology industry, specific to or adjacent to the cloud. They have a revenue-focused marketer within the organization, and they need to understand their marketing ROI.
The most likely way of doing this is to license a multi-touch attribution company, such as our partner Bizible (now a Marketo solution).
Why has Marketo become the go-to partner for B2B marketing and sales tech companies?
Marketo is just the right size, and its leadership lends itself well to forward-looking organizations. Other marketing automation platforms are owned by much larger technology behemoths, and they are just one of many different software solutions. When you’re part of a larger organization, it’s harder to see where the market is going and to innovate like Marketo can.
Being independent now, as part of part of Vista’s private equity-owned portfolio, Marketo has been investing in its people and technologies. In light of the recent acquisition of Bizible, the company continues to grow and expand organically and through M&A, but it remains focused on one segment.
We license the Marketo platform. They’re really attuned to our needs as a business, and they’re really innovating. In addition, they have a robust network of more than 500 partners that can add value to their clients. ActivateABM Direct, our new solution that we’re going to market with Marketo, is representative of that.
How do you plan to extend the benefits of this partnership to your customers?
One of the benefits of working with Marketo and Madison Logic is the ability to optimize a journey, nurture the contacts and companies in real-time, and to be able to serve the right message to the right company based on the opportunity stage. So, whatever triggers our clients have set up in their marketing automation platform, we can create our own triggers in kind that will engage with them in digital ads and content marketing.
Which new technologies are you keenly following for better sales enablement?
In order to enable sales to communicate better with clients, you need to not only be using CRM but also be using it to your advantage. One of the great things about leveraging a company like Salesforce, as an example, is being able to provide your sales team with more information around the ad engagement and the content marketing that a company is doing.
Similarly, with Marketo, when salespeople have an understanding of how marketing is engaging with their sales prospects, they’re able to have more meaningful conversations. These aren’t new technologies, but they are new ways to use existing technologies, specifically CRM and marketing automation.
I talk with the most sophisticated tech companies in the world, and sometimes it’s startling to hear that they aren’t taking advantage of these types of opportunities to better engage with clients and enable stronger sales conversations.
How could marketing attribution models improve to justify sales ROI in the coming year?
Attribution has been a challenge for us, so we partnered with Bizible early on because we saw significant overlap in clients wanting to address the ROI question. Clients need to go back to their CFOs and be able to show that marketing is leading to conversions. Attribution models are extremely important, and companies like Bizible have solved for them.
As more organizations take advantage of these solutions, they’re going to become more confident in how they’re spending their money and how they’re engaging with prospects to ultimately lead to revenue.
Thank you, Tom, for chatting with us!
