Snowflake Scales ABM Strategy With Personalized Content Hubs For Target Accounts
Content remains king even in an ABM world. In fact, the stakes are even higher once companies narrow their focus on buying groups within specific accounts and brands are expected to deliver tailored content that is easily accessible.
Snowflake, a cloud-based data warehouse provider, developed personalized content hubs for target accounts based on stakeholder pain points, topics of interest shared with sales reps and challenges commonly impacting specific account verticals.
But while ABM initiatives are often suggested by marketing teams as an opportunity to scale, Snowflake’s ABM efforts began with the sales team looking to continue ongoing success.
“In the beginning, a handful of sales leadership drove company growth on their backs,” said Daniel Day, Director of Account-Based Marketing at Snowflake. “They wanted to scale that process and position sellers to achieve the same success as their [leaders].”
To accomplish this, Snowflake developed its “Top 100” program, in which each sales rep chose 100 accounts that would comprise of their “territory.” Ultimately, Day and his team were tasked with driving engagement at more than 2,500 accounts to accelerate the customer journey for the sales reps.
Day stated it was critical that both sales and marketing were aligned around the wants and needs of their target accounts to be relevant in their buying journey.
“Since we work so closely with our sales organization, we’re positioned to accomplish a variety of things from a messaging standpoint,” said Day. “We can home in on specific pain points they suffer from, focus on the tech they use, or on what their data initiatives are. Working with sales, we can build ABM programs to speak to those business challenges and how Snowflake can overcome those challenges.”
Day stated that these specific programs are tailored for an individual IT operations manager or business intelligence contact within target accounts. The messaging focused solely around the contact’s interests and needs in data lakes, data sharing and other topics pertaining to cloud-based data warehouses.
“We have an engine to measure that ABM success through Engagio, and we have a model around intent and model fit to choose accounts through tools such as EverString,” said Day. “We partner with Terminus for one-to-one display advertising and are confident we can get it front of the people that matter to us. However, there was not a location where IT operation contacts from these target accounts could engage with our content.”
To scale, Day and his team had to have a place to present their messaging and meet the expectations of their target audience. “It was time to have landing pages where we had relevant, rich content for that individual account,” said Day. “We had to create that one location to control the journey and provide the most personalized, relevant content.”
Building Personalized Content Hubs With Messaging Tailored To Account Needs
Snowflake tapped Uberflip to create personalized content hubs that can act as the landing page for the company’s targeted display advertising efforts, as well as for follow-up content after conversations with sales reps.
Some examples of specific content hubs that Snowflake has created include:
- A partnership hub with their BI partner Tableau, where they provide content pertaining to the two solutions and their approaches to business intelligence that would be relevant to accounts that are current Tableau customers; and
- Bespoke instances of tailoring content covers and titles with target account names and logos.
To gather the insight required to make accurate decisions on what content to display in these hubs, the company turns to a variety of data points found in their Salesforce CRM, and tools such as DiscoverOrg and ZoomInfo. More importantly, the sales reps assigned to the accounts are expected to add additional insights.
“Sales reps have to be deeply involved,” said Day. “They can share specific details about conversations on challenges and topics of interest that are valuable to key contacts.”
Snowflake also creates programs called Intent Clusters, in which Day and his team bucket 20 intent topics together with help from Bombora. “We can see how accounts respond to these multiple intent topics and use that engagement to decide content that would resonate with a given account,” said Day. “This helps us understand suggested content for contacts at accounts we haven’t engaged with that much. Uberflip helps us understand who is consuming what, and we prioritize accounts tied together with account clusters to get a bigger picture of what’s going on.”
Day stated that adopting this process for sharing personalized messaging with target accounts has led to his team being able to create hubs for specific contacts in target accounts in 10 to 15 minutes. “It originally took five to six days to create these pages even having all the content at our disposal,” he added.
Day also contributes the success of his display advertising efforts — close to a 150% increase in ad conversion — to these content hubs. “We wouldn’t do this one-to-one targeting and messaging with display ads at scale unless we had these content experiences.”
Tech Toolbox
- Bombora
- DiscoverOrg
- Engagio
- EverString
- Terminus
- Uberflip
- ZoomInfo