©2017 Brightcove, Inc. All Rights Reserved.1

How to Align Your Marketing and Sales Teams Through Data

A PERFECT MATCH, ABM + VIDEO:Tactics and Planning for Beginners

Account-Based Marketing or ABM is a hot topic amongst marketers. Another

hot topic? Video. Luckily, these strategic marketing techniques can be used

together. There is no need to be intimidated! We’re here to assure you that once

your marketing team embraces ABM, you’ll be excited to utilize video as a way

to serve the most dynamic and personalized content to your target accounts.

We’ll let you in on a little secret: neither ABM

nor video marketing are new strategies.

The reason they’re so popular and newly

innovative is that modern technology now

helps us to build better, smarter campaigns

that scale easily. Ready to deliver a

significant business impact by embracing

the latest technology and piloting video and

ABM for your brand? Of course, you are,

now let’s ensure your success.

In this brief we’ll define:

• What is account-based marketing

• Why ABM aligns marketing and sales

teams

• How to plan an ABM strategy

• What video marketing integrated into an

ABM campaign looks like.

Let’s get started.

©2017 Brightcove, Inc. All Rights Reserved.2

1. Sweezey, M. (2014). The 5 Things to Know About Account Based Marketing. ClickZ.

2. Engagio (2016). The Clear & Complete Guide to Account Based Marketing.

Account-based marketing allows you to cut through the clutter. As with any digital marketing

medium, you only have a few seconds with an attentive audience, and you need to deliver.

Video is dynamic, engaging, and the closest medium to the human experience. Once we watch

a video, that experience becomes part of our own memory and we are more likely to remember

it. When you pair ABM with video, you have an attention-grabbing vehicle for account level

engagement.

WHY ABM IS VITAL TO YOUR ORGANIZATION AND MARKETING-SALES ALIGNMENT

What is ABM?Before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s define ABM. Account-based marketing is a strategic

marketing technique in which marketing and sales teams align to select high-opportunity

accounts for targeted, personalized demand generation programs. ABM embraces collective

decision-making, helping sales and marketing teams work together1. For example, your business

may have been identified by a salesperson as a “hot prospect” because of your company’s

size, annual revenue, and use of a competing and/or complementary product. But what’s this

salesperson to do if you and your colleagues have never visited his/her website or interacted

with the brand at a trade show or event? You’re not a “marketing qualified lead,” and therefore,

there’s a “no-fly zone” above you and your business. ABM solves this problem. ABM rectifies the

disconnect between marketing and sales activities by aligning both teams while simultaneously

closing the gap on time “wasted” waiting for an individual to self-identify as a prospect.

Now, using a variety of tools (internal data, predictive data, firmographics, etc.), marketers and

salespeople can work together to determine which prospects are best suited to be customers

of their business. Harnessing internal information from various marketing programs and

tech stack integrations from website analytics, marketing automation, customer relationship

management and an online video platform are great starting points. But third-party data will

help you measure intent, so collect additional information from sources that allow you to tap

sources like web searches, social media listening, online communications and digital content

consumption. With this, you can then proactively target multiple personas/users within the

same account while still treating them as individuals2. This will spread awareness and create

demand within the organization.

©2017 Brightcove, Inc. All Rights Reserved.3

How ABM Addresses a Cluttered Landscape (and the Problem with Inbound Marketing)

Why We’re Moving Beyond the Funnel

In the digital marketing landscape, we’re all competing for attention and budget. The marketing

tools targeted to businesses are limitless, but budgets are finite. Becoming a priority in the eyes

of your target or prospect is no easy task.

With inbound marketing, we’re waiting for discovery, which means there will always be a

passive element to it. We’re waiting for the right search query; we’re waiting for a video play;

we’re waiting for a form to be filled out; we’re waiting for them to open/click into our emails. We

use inbound signals to try to monitor buyer intent in a natural, unintrusive way. But sometimes,

when our campaigns stall, we realize we’ve just been waiting, haven’t we? ABM gives the

marketer back control.

Fill the funnel! Fill the funnel! We need more pipeline!

The funnel has been a tenant of marketing for nearly a

century, but even more critical in the past decade with

the advent of inbound marketing and the importance

placed on driving traffic and converting leads. There is

an urgency to keep filling that pipe, gaining awareness

with a large (sometimes unspecified audience), with the

hopes that our conversions will increase. This is mostly

around that fear that marketers have of seeming passive

or inefficient. Unfortunately, through no fault of their

own, most are. We’ve all been taught to operate from

this model! But this way of thinking is dated because

while the total numbers of conversions might increase,

chances are conversion percentages will stay roughly the

same.

After all, since only 15% of website traffic is within

our addressable market the only way to break this

holding pattern is not through more traffic, but through

optimizing and personalizing the experience for this key

group3.

Beyond setting up the campaign itself, technology

removes the mask of anonymity. This means that interest

is identified sooner and resources can be devoted to

marketing to higher priority prospects/accounts through

personalized, more relevant campaigns. No more waiting

for the prospect to prioritize you.

3. Isaacson, P., Krawchick, A. (2016). ABM Fundamentals.

©2017 Brightcove, Inc. All Rights Reserved.4

Why Video is One of the Most Perfect Mediums for ABM

HUMAN AND EMOTIONAL

The combination of sight, sound, and movement is powerful.

Nothing compels us as much as our experiences. This is

why video’s next foray is virtual reality—and why it’s set to

explode in the next few years. Not since the modern movie-

going experience have we, as humans, been so captivated

by a pastime. Characters and situations come to life, and

audiences empathize or relate strongly because of video.

Video is the most social of all communication methods4.

INFORMATIVE AND EFFECTIVE

Words can be spoken more quickly than they can be read,

which means video can convey more information in a

shorter timeframe. Furthermore, longer videos have the

advantage of utilizing visuals to add another layer to the

story and keep audiences engaged. Another benefit of video?

Even non-verbal cues are detected by your audience.

PERSONAL

“One to many” messaging is over. When we speak

of personalization, we say we’re using technology to

create a customized experience. With advancements in

marketing automation and interactivity, we can use video

viewing data to create a unique “video thumbprint” for

your target. Personalized content can be sent, at the

right time, addressing him or her by name. Add to this

interactivity, where the viewer can choose their path or

spend more time on the content that interests them, and

you’ve generated a memorable brand experience.

The combination of visual and auditory is so powerful.

4. Clarine, B. (2016). 11 Reasons Why Video is Better Than Any Other Medium. Advanced Web Ranking.

©2017 Brightcove, Inc. All Rights Reserved.5

Everyone sells. Marketers are on the hook

for generating revenue and showing value in

the spend on their campaigns. ROI! Where’s

the ROI? Put ROI in an event session title and

watch your room fill with marketers, some

savvy, some desperate, all keen to make their

marketing dreams come true.

In these same sessions, we often hear: slow

down, focus, and use the appropriate tools

for the job. ABM “gets it.” After all, marketers

tend to operate in the context of quantity.

But for sales people, they wonder: “How

quickly can I get into the accounts I care

about?” Understanding this mindset, with

the knowledge that valuable time is being

wasted, should shift ABM strategy to the top

of your list. Marketing and sales alignment is

important.

Don’t pass leads, pass intelligence. With ABM

we can focus our efforts on the accounts

with the highest propensity to buy and leave

most of the rest behind. Sales people love

this information because they find it to be a

gateway to better conversations.

HOW ABM ALIGNS MARKETING AND SALES

©2017 Brightcove, Inc. All Rights Reserved.6

1. PREPARATION: assess/conduct a

content audit and map each piece

to a customer type or an account

problem. Set goals for each campaign.

Use this time to train marketing and

sales teams on their roles in this new

process.

2. PRIORITIZATION: identify

opportunities based on the ideal

customer, then select and prioritize

your accounts. Use business

intelligence to help you arrange your

accounts5 into tiers, considering

the potential growth of each, and

influence within their respective

markets.

3. PLANING: implement campaigns

that deliver the right content, at the

right time, to the (multiple) right

people. Figure out how each account

is structured and identify those key

influencers and decision makers within

the organization. Where can you

find them? In-person events, email

campaigns, retargeting, programmatic

display advertising, social media,

content and other ABM engagement

methods6 all come together in one

campaign with tailored messaging for

each record in the account.

4. EXECUTION: engaging across multiple

channels may also mean splitting

efforts across roles. Some channels

are more effective for certain roles or

industries than others. For example,

you may stop delivering your email

nurture to the CEOs but have found

it effective for CMOs7. Test, analyze,

and optimize your campaigns, and

then take this model and deploy it to

other products, personas, and pieces

of content— ideally working across all

three for even more specificity and

personalization.

5. MEASUREMENT: select the metrics

most important to you based on the

goals of your campaign. Of course,

you’ll be interested in the independent

metrics of each campaign, like email

open rates, click-through rates,

downloads, etc., but your ABM

campaign isn’t just one campaign, it’s

a series of campaigns over time. Look

to measure audiences, format/timing,

maturity and use these to create

benchmarks9. An ABM campaign

centered around awareness might be

looking for “lift” from an account, with

more activity on your site from these

targets, while a conversion campaign

will be looking at opportunities closed

and business won from your ABM

campaigns.

5. Heinz, M. (2016). Seven keys to account-based marketing success: A simpler framework for #ABM execution. Heinz Marketing.

6. ABM Leadership Alliance. (2016). Building an Account-Based Marketing Technology Stack.

7. PFL Blog. (2017). How Account-Based Marketing Enhances Your Customer’s Journey.

8. Cain, D. (2015). What Is Account-Based Marketing (ABM) and Is It Right for You. Marketo.

9. Sirius Decisions. (2016). Leveraging Predictive Technologies for Account-Based Marketing.

Account Based Marketing Steps, In Brief

©2017 Brightcove, Inc. All Rights Reserved.7

ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS AND NEXT STEPS

Conduct a content audit

• What existing video content aligns with

your targets?

• Do you have content that can be

repurposed or utilized in a variety of

ways?

Identify named accounts

• What do your current customers tell

you about your ideal customer? Look

through the data and create the ideal

customer profile. Your account list can

be comprised of large accounts, named

accounts, accounts in a specific industry

or vertical and/or accounts grouped by

their customer lifecycle stage.

Map specific problems

• Why does this ideal customer buy from

you? And why do they stay? Solutions

oriented approaches speak to the

consumer whether they’re B2B or B2C.

10. Thomas, D. (2016). How to Prepare B2B Marketing and Sales for ABM: Data, Content, and Engagement. Leadspace.

What You Need to Know to Get Started with ABM and Video Today

Modify or create account-specific content

• How will you personalize content to show

this account you understand them?

• Does this content really feel tailor-made?

Test it with a smaller group.

Provide your sales people with talking

points

• How will sales people be able to further

this connection? You’re a unified team

now, and thus, as sales pursues this

account in tandem they’ll need to know

how to stay “on message” with the

prospect10.

©2017 Brightcove, Inc. All Rights Reserved.8

• Awareness: Promoted, sponsored, and

organic posts on social media featuring

short-form video content

• Engagement: Vertical or persona-

specific email nurture programs can

lead to video landing pages with specific

content for accounts11

• Conversion: Personalized email follow-up

from sales post-event featuring a “video

voicemail,” or customized on-demand

demonstration for the account

• Retention: Curated galleries with on-

boarding videos created by account

managers for their customers, ensuring a

personalized experience and respect for

a new relationship

• Advocacy: Multi-pronged customer

appreciation campaign extending across

web, email, social, using resources to

help elevate their position. This may

even lead to user-generated content

(UGC) that furthers brand awareness and

penetration.

Using video in account-based marketing programs is easier than you think. Here are a few ideas

to get you started:

USING VIDEO AND ABM ACROSS THE CUSTOMER LIFECYCLE

11. Bondhus, C. (2016). Don’t Recreate The Wheel. Here’s Your ABM Orchestration Template Bizable.

Conclusion Account-based marketing allows marketers to be more active and efficient so they can meet

their goals. After all, in today’s modern organizations, everyone sells. Marketers have numbers

to meet. Video with ABM meets the marketer’s “right person, right content, right time” dilemma

head on, with a compelling answer.

©2017 Brightcove, Inc. All Rights Reserved.9

As companies try to improve customer

loyalty and retention, a very basic element

is often overlooked–the human element. In

a day and age when predictive marketing

and marketing automation are all the rage,

it’s important to remember we are marketing

to people, not Eloqua IDs, nor Salesforce

contact records with high lead scores. Let’s

build relationships.

Brightcove’s customer base includes

thousands of companies and thousands

of contacts within those companies. Our

customers range from Fortune 500 firms

like EMC, Johnson & Johnson, and IBM to

mid-market, fast-growth companies like

LegalZoom and Bazaarvoice. We’re also

proud to have many non-profit and faith-

based organizations as customers. Our

challenge, like many companies, was this:

how can we humanize our interactions with

customers to connect and get a response?

Regular html or plain text email is impersonal

while periodic check-in phone calls rarely

connect, or are hard to scale.

By building our ABM campaigns around

video, we were able to foster effective

conversations for conversion and retention

customers, but creating new relationships to

expand within existing accounts.

CASE STUDY: HOW TO DRIVE ABM SUCCESS AND REVENUE WITH VIDEO

©2017 Brightcove, Inc. All Rights Reserved.10

• We’re one of the nearly 4,000 vendors

in the SaaS/MarTech space12. In order to

reach the right prospects, we need to be

strategic.

• We’re piecing together information from

the digital customer journey and building

our campaigns around this data. ABM,

paired with video communications,

makes our multi-pronged approach more

effective.

• We’re not selling to just one person,

so we need to personalize the content

to each. At any given time a different

stakeholder could be driving the

12. Brinker, S. (2016) Marketing Technology Landscape Supergrapic. Chief Martec.

WHY BRIGHTCOVE LAUNCHED AN ABM CAMPAIGN USING VIDEO

purchasing process, and we must be

ready to anticipate their interest and

answer their questions.

• We’re ready to interact with our

prospects sooner. Much of a prospective

customer’s initial online research

occurs before they opt-in to become a

lead. ABM helps us recognize the top

prospects earlier.

How to Align Sales and Marketing to Launch a Video ABM CampaignWhile working on a programmatic process, you will also need to align your teams around

the concept of ABM selling. Here at Brightcove, we tackled this alignment with the

following steps:

1. Defined roles and responsibilities between sales and marketing teams

2. Trained demand generation and sales teams

3. Created shared dashboards with account activity, accessible not only online but

broadcast on a large monitor in the office, so everyone could review progress

4. Held recurring meetings to keep everyone on the same page and in the same direction

Our business reality is familiar to many digital marketers:

©2017 Brightcove, Inc. All Rights Reserved.11

When we began our ABM journey with a

video campaign13, we targeted our customers

with the goal of expanding in our existing

accounts. The “Meet Your AM” campaign

essentially introduced account managers “in

person” through video. Additionally, by using

a combination of personalized video and

interactivity to aid in communication and

create a 1:1 digital conversation14, we were

able to achieve impressive results for the

very first campaign. Here is our process, step

by step:

1. Shot individual videos of our account

managers introducing themselves,

explaining their role at Brightcove and

why they enjoy it. The videos came

across as authentic and unrehearsed.

This built a personal connection. Our

videos expressed personality, energy,

and a unique voice.

2. Crafted very short text emails, five

to seven sentences, with a thumbnail

of the AM’s video. The emails were

sent as if coming from the account

managers and were personalized

accordingly.

3. Led the recipient, upon email click-

through, to a landing page containing

the introduction video. The page also

contained some fun facts about the

account manager, like first concert,

spirit animal, and favorite Brightcove

video.

4. Recorded data through our Eloqua

integration, which enables us to

capture who watched the video, for

how long and how many times.

5. Set Salesforce alerts to “close the

loop” on video. Account managers

could see which contact watched

which video, for how long and follow-

up appropriately.

13. Bondhus, C. (2016). Video for Retention: How We Created a Hugely Successful Campaign, Generating Upsell Opportunities.

14. Brightcove. (2016). 1:1 Conversations with Video.

HOW TO CREATE A CUSTOMER VIDEO CAMPAIGN STEP-BY-STEP

©2017 Brightcove, Inc. All Rights Reserved.12

Additionally encouraging? Our qualitative

feedback. Responses ranged from the

friendly “so good to see and hear who

you are” to the more business driven and

immediately actionable, “let’s set up a

meeting.”

The Results: An ABM Customer Campaign with Video

CAMPAIGN RESULTS

Unique Open Rate 26.72%

Total Video VIews 483

Unique CTR 6.35%

Click-to-Open Rate 24%

Open to View Rate 29.34%

Avg Video Engagement

82.84%

VIDEO: Meet Your AM: Tara

Video Engagement

Today Yesterday Last 7 days Last 30 days This month Last month

40

30

20

10

00:01 00:14 00:29 00:43 00:57

Engagement

May 8, 2016 - Jun 6, 2016

Player

Engagement by Player Performance

Summary

Engagement Score Views at 1% Views at 25% Views at 50% Views at 75% Views at 100%

Video ABM Campaign ResultsWhat did the email campaign statistics mean

for ROI?

• 219 Responses

• 86 Meetings

• $200k+ in Pipeline

These video were a success. Our video

ABM campaign brought new contacts into

conversations with Brightcove. We led

with a human element, utilizing video for

engagement15 and established connections

with additional contacts in key customer

accounts. These same emails would not

have been nearly as effective in a plain-text

format. Video brought our collaborative

culture to life, and presented our AMs as

knowledgeable, helpful professionals who

make their customers’ video initiatives

successful. Our goals were achieved.

15. Murphy, S. (2016). How to: Content Creation and Promotion for a Video Engagement Campaign.

©2017 Brightcove, Inc. All Rights Reserved.13

ABM is quite effective when combining the digital with the analog. Another marketing

channel that pairs well with ABM? Direct mail. Direct mail, when done thoughtfully,

feels personalized and helps break through the digital clutter.

In another iteration of our video ABM campaign for retention and customer expansion,

we combined our digital efforts with old-school, direct mail send of View-Masters.

Recipients were sent both a digital experience and a physical package containing a

View-Master with branded reel, the latter a nostalgic reminder of the combined power

of visual image and text. The online experience concluded with a personalized account

director video to “land and expand” targets—alerting them that their company was

already a customer, and introducing the account director as the personal contact for

the team. Essentially, we took the account director videos we had already produced

and found another creative way to package them. Our 2,000 mailings have resulted in

over 1,200 active leads.

Key TakeawaysBy taking the time up front to align marketing and sales around the ABM model, working out

our programmatic strategy, and using video in multiple ways, we were able to exceed our goals.

We achieved impressive results for our early efforts, and we expect even greater return as we

refine our strategies. We’re excited to help you get started doing the same.

TAKING IT FURTHER: ABM AND DIRECT EMAIL

View-Master ABM Campaign