CodeFuel was among Microsoft Advertising’s distinguished regional winners in EMEA before being selected as their 2021 global partner. This prestigious award and recognition is based on excellence in partnership with Microsoft Advertising across the board, including key partnership results such as engagement and revenue growth. CodeFuel is one of only five companies to achieve the status of a global partner. The announcement was made during Microsoft Advertising Elevate on April 27, 2022, the annual global partner summit exclusively for elite and select partners.
The collaboration with Microsoft Advertising
“We’ve had a partnership with Microsoft that extends more than ten years, and this recognition as Microsoft’s Advertising Partner of the Year is a moment of great pride in a long history of successes. Yet it is only the start,” said Doron Gerstel, Perion’s CEO.
“As consumers globally relied on e-commerce to an unprecedented degree – advertisers responded by investing more into search – which is the category where consumers demonstrate the highest degree of intent. Capitalizing on this generational shift required close collaboration between the CodeFuel team and the Microsoft team, and the results speak for themselves. Going forward, we will continue to build our network of publishers while maintaining the impeccable quality standards which matter so much to both of us.” Gerstel added.
Tal Jacobson, CodeFuel’s general manager, and his team worked to strengthen the collaboration with Microsoft Advertising through investments in technology and a focus on quality to maximize user engagement and growth. Working closely with Microsoft Advertising allowed the company to introduce new features while receiving the business and back-end support.
“The growth we have achieved in the last couple of years reflects the close collaboration and the teams’ dedication to our mutual success, year after year,” said Jacobson. “We look forward to further driving success for publishers and advertisers.”
“We are thrilled that CodeFuel, a Perion Company, has been named our Global Supply Partner of the year. This is an award that reflects the growth of the underlying business, which is the result of true partnership, close collaboration, and technology innovation. CodeFuel’s commitment to its clients has been noteworthy during a time of disruption and uncertainty. We look forward to our continued partnership and continued healthy growth of all aspects of the business,” said Sean O’Connor, International Marketing Director at Microsoft Advertising.
You’ve heard about the results companies are getting with account-based marketing (ABM) and you want to know what it will take to make it work for you. In particular, will it fit in your budget?
Like any digital marketing campaign, the cost of running ABM campaigns consists of multiple components with multiple line items within each component. ABM components include your tech stack, assets, channels, and the expertise to execute and orchestrate everything. What can you expect to spend on each? What variables come into play? What kind of return can you expect from your investment?
Let’s break it all down.
How to think about ABM budgets
You may have seen the Forrester report that found the average annual ABM budget is around $350,000 (excluding headcount costs) and pilot campaigns around $200,000. It found more mature programs with proven value have budgets of around $600,000, and budgets for established programs at large enterprises can run into the millions.
While these averages are a good jumping-off point, smaller organizations shouldn’t be put off by the price tag before learning more, and corporations of any size should keep in mind these findings may have already changed. Forrester found that 70 percent of organizations expected the average cost to rise.
The best way to think about ABM budgets is to understand its components, your ICP priorities, and the right budgeting methodology.
Start by understanding ABM components
Tools, processes, and people — like any digital endeavor, you need all three to run ABM campaigns. ABM components include:
Strategy development
Tech stack
Asset creation
Paid ad channels
Expertise to run campaigns and analyze results
The number of accounts and individuals within those accounts you want to target also drives your budget.
Determine the relative importance of insight and engagement
Are you primarily looking for insight or engagement from your ideal client persona (ICP)?
If you want to better understand your visitors’ intent and pain points, you’ll want to allocate more of your budget for insight. You’ll use this information to create targeted ICP content and give your team the perspective to make informed campaign choices.
On the other hand, if your targeted ICP is within the same industry or niche, you’ll want to allocate more of your budget for engagement because the insight provided will be similar for all accounts within your ICP.
Use the right budgeting methodology
You can use the same budgeting approach for an ABM pilot or 1:Many ABM campaign as you would for a traditional digital marketing campaign, but budgeting for 1:Few and 1:1 campaigns is more complicated and fluid.
Personalized ABM campaigns focus on targeting individuals within accounts — the cost is determined by account value and not a fixed budget. The more valuable a particular account, the more you’ll want to spend on it. Account values often reveal themselves during the campaign, so you’ll want to use an account-based methodology with more flexible line items.
How to price out technology and expertise
While the actual dollar costs of targeting specific accounts and individuals are too variable to cover here, we can quantify the cost of technology and expertise.
Budget for the tech stack you need
You’ll need to subscribe to a few key platforms to run ABM. The cost of your combined tech stack is based on the size of your organization and the platforms you choose — you can expect to pay $165-$325K in total for the annual licenses needed to run ABM.
Budget for the channels you need
Targeting accounts with the right messages at the right time means you have to get your assets in the right channels. ABM channels include programmatic, content marketing, paid search, SEO, paid social, email nurture, and online gifting. The total cost for each channel includes creating the assets and running them in the channel.
While spending for each channel is highly variable by campaign, determining an overall paid-ad budget is part of your campaign strategy.
It’s best to stay flexible with specific allocations so you can spend more on the channels that are proving to be more successful as your campaign progresses and less on the ones that aren’t.
Budget for the expertise you need
You can use the right tech stack and channels for your ICP, but it’s tough to get the right ROI without the right team. You need:
Tech stack integration specialists: Connect all platforms so they work together and convert data into dashboard visualizations everyone can understand.
Analysts and strategists: Translate ongoing campaign data into actionable tactics that ensure you’re targeting accounts most likely to convert.
Content writers and designers: Develop display ads, white papers, case studies, landing pages, and personalized assets for 1:Few and 1:1 campaigns.
Search marketers: Convert complex marketing plans and research into SEO and PPC strategies that get ads in front of buying committees at every funnel stage.
Remember to keep turnover in mind. Marketing specialists have a 19.8% annual turnover rate.
How omnichannel impacts ABM budgeting
Much more of the buying process and B2B marketing is taking place online now — the pandemic changed how the world does business. B2B marketers who embrace the change are reaching accounts where they’re already hanging out.
Omnichannel changes how buying committees make decisions
The new B2B buying journey doesn’t include a lot of talking with suppliers. Most of it happens online before buyers reach out and includes more people on the buying committee.
In 2017, you could engage in buying scenarios by targeting one or two buyers. Now, buying committees with two people represent only 18% of purchases while most have five or more people. These people are looking for solutions online and increasingly find them in social channels — B2B social sellers outperform their peers who don’t leverage social media by 72%.
Why omnichannel ABM requires insight
To know which channels will work best, you need to apply ABM insight.
For example, if you advertise on LinkedIn but the accounts within your ICP are more active on Facebook, your ads aren’t likely reaching your intended audience. By applying insight using an omnichannel approach, you ensure your ICP will see your ads while enabling you to target specific pain points. This dramatically increases the likelihood your ICP will follow your ad to your website.
How to optimize omnichannel ABM
More personalized ABM campaigns work better. The data prove it — 1:Few and 1:1 ABM campaigns deliver much higher ROI because they move accounts further down the funnel faster.
As you might guess, personalized ABM campaigns cost more because you need to create and orchestrate personalized assets. But if it’s ROI you’re after, the investment pays off. Make sure to be strategic during account selection and focus your budget on running campaigns that only target high-value, in-market accounts.
ABM investment strategies
While the bottom-line number for an ABM program deserves thoughtful consideration, keep revenue generation in mind as you deliberate. To realize the promise of ABM, look at all of your options and allow the strategy to play out once you start.
Patience is a must
The B2B buying process takes many months or even a year or more to move a buying committee from awareness through decision. The first ROI benchmark for ABM is usually around month six — by then, if you’ve invested wisely and your sales team is leveraging campaign data correctly, you should be seeing a return of three times your investment.
The agency alternative
The most sophisticated ABM agencies run full-funnel ABM campaigns that include sales enablement as part of their services. These agencies earn their clients up to nine times annual ROI for 1:Few and 1:1 campaigns starting with the first campaign because they already have the teams, technology, and orchestration expertise.
Agency results can be replicated in-house over time as you build the right team and a seamless operation. Consider comparing the budget you develop to the cost of partnering with an ABM agency by requesting demos from one of more agencies.
Ways to reduce in-house costs
There are a few things you can do to reduce the cost of running AMB in-house. The key is informed decision-making and careful planning:
Research your tech stack options so you choose the ones that match your needs the first time
Consider your data goals to cut back on costs associated with trying different products
Have the right team in place before you start
Establish SOPs to avoid obstacles
As you’ve seen, budgeting for ABM is complex but you can get accurate numbers when you understand what’s involved and apply a lot of forethought. Reaching out to peers and experts about their hands-on experiences with ABM budgeting is always a good idea, as is giving equal focus to the other side of your balance sheet as you make your allocation decisions.
It’s never been a more critical time to put your customers first. Delivering timely and relevant customer experiences separates your brand from the competition. But a CMO Council survey found that only 7% of marketers say they can provide real-time, data-driven engagements across all touchpoints.
Join Shutterfly’s Head of Marketing Tech Ops Neta-Lee Katz and ActionIQ’s Director of Product Marketing George Phipps as they discuss how Shutterfly achieved timely and relevant customer journeys in its CX strategy while streamlining operations and reducing resources dedicated to customer audience management.
How do you know when your marketing is excellent, important or had the impact you expected? Ultimately, it comes down to being able to measure marketing performance. Marketing performance is the key to knowing where to spend the next marketing dollar.
If marketers can’t quantify the outcomes of their initiatives, it will prevent them from continuing to receive funding for their marketing budgets. And those outcomes have to be told in a way that the business will understand, care about and believe.
In order to do so, marketers must first align their marketing goals and their marketing outcomes. The focus must not only be on successful execution, but also on accurate measurement. Once you have the data, you have to act on the results so that you drive better audience management, better activation, better modeling and an overall better customer experience.
How do you go about improving marketing performance and reducing cost per conversion as the ecosystem shifts and the effectiveness of third-party cookies continues to decline?
Join Acxiom’s Dana Goff, head of financial services strategy practice, and Gloria Ward, director of Identity Strategy, as they share real-world experiences on how to quickly access and leverage usable insights, create a long-term replacement campaign measurement and improve multi-touch attribution (MTA) results – with more visibility, more matches and better underlying data.
Watch the informative MarTech sessionand learn how you can connect individual-level data across website visitors, conversions, paid media, direct mail and other channels. You’ll also learn the three main components for measuring marketing performance and how you can cut through the noise in a very technology-dense industry. Watch the session here and be inspired to deliver more value to your consumers.
Anyone can argue that the popularity and successes of account-based marketing (ABM) are unmatched. Lately, marketers looking to get started with ABM are often flooded with terms like “strategy,” “thought leadership” or “best practices.” Thus, many B2B marketers are eager to implement the core tenants of ABM but are unsure of where to begin.
If you find yourself in this dilemma, join Jodi Cerretani, senior director of demand generation at RollWorks, for a refreshing ABM session. You’ll learn the steps you can take today to drive results tomorrow, including three tried and proven ABM plays to drive quick wins, the must-have ABM tech stack and the number one secret to getting buy-in from sales this quarter. You’ll also receive a copy-and-pastable ABM performance funnel.
In addition to these tactics, Cerretani also explains RollWorks’ three pillars of ABM:
Identify high-value targets
Engage buying committees through coordinated marketing and sales programs
Measure the impact against shared goals
With these proven tips, the right data and the right mindset, marketers can easily drive full-funnel impact against their targets, using the technologies they already have in their stack.
Leveraging a robust ABM tech stack with many channels can aid marketers with attacking and impacting every level of their funnel very precisely. View the session and build your framework so you can start to realize the actual value of ABM.
Marketers are still adapting to the major disruptions of the past several years. Buyers, though, still expect marketers to provide personalization and enjoyable experiences.
Luckily, the technology and data that can help are becoming more accessible.
In partnership with Ascend2, Oracle surveyed 853 marketers across the U.S., Canada, India, and the UK. The results showed what trends and technologies are helping marketers pivot where necessary, connect with customers, and drive conversions.
Top challenges marketers face in 2022
38% of marketers said maximizing performance across channels was one of their most difficult challenges. Audiences are now digitally everywhere. They consume and engage with content across a variety of channels and devices.
Somehow, marketers have to keep up with them, stay consistent and relevant with their messaging, and deliver value. Customers tell you everything you need to know about how to please them with their online behaviors. The right technology helps by taking in that data, so marketers can use it to connect with customers and adapt their strategies necessary.
Tactics and technologies for marketing success
43% of marketing organizations plan to offer more personalized content and offers in the year ahead. Videos and virtual events will make much of this content easier for customers to consume. Personalization will also help marketers put more focus on retaining customers rather than only acquiring new ones.
What technologies will help?
A customer data platform (CDP) allows you to anticipate customer needs
A content management system (CMS) helps you manage and create more innovative content
A customer loyalty program incentivizes and rewards customers that keep engaging with your brand
Go all-in on AI
59% of marketers who say they can’t live without AI have highly successful marketing strategies. 30% of marketers surveyed overall fear they’re missing out on AI’s ability to predict customer behaviors and adjust campaigns.
AI creates efficiencies and maximizes resources, especially with manual, repetitive tasks, such as:
Setting up campaign workflows
Testing different offers, subject lines, and copy
Customizing content
42% of marketers say they already trust AI to personalize content and offers in real-time.
Marketers look forward to big things in 2022
An impressive 94% of marketers thought their 2021 was successful. 37% are confident 2022 will also be a successful year.
Find out what trends and technologies will make it so.
28% of small business owners have no visibility into how their marketing agency uses their budgeted spending. The last thing your clients want to do is chase down reporting across multiple tools and channels and try and make sense of it themselves.
The biggest value you can provide to your clients as an agency is transparent and actionable reporting. And in this article, we’ll walk through the top pain points small business owners experience and how you can provide the right reporting to enhance trust and retain more clients.
Problem #1: Your clients lack insight into their most effective marketing campaigns and find it difficult to budget for the next year.
Usually, a marketing strategy involves multiple channels, such as digital ads, organic and paid search, marketplace listings, offline outreach and so on. But when you multiply that by the number of campaigns an average business runs in a year, reporting can easily get out of hand.
If you or your client lack the right tools to effectively manage and gather this data in one place, you have to pull from different reports from different platforms to piece together a cohesive data story. Therefore, the lack of insight makes it very difficult to properly plan next year’s campaigns based on the successful campaigns of this year.
The solution: Build a report with a tool like CallRail’s Multi-touch Cost Per Lead Report. It ties all of your lead sources’ data together across every channel where your client markets. The report will tie in your inbound calls, texts, live chats, and form submission data to attribute leads to online and offline marketing efforts. From there, you’ll be able to see which campaigns earned the most revenue for your clients, and those campaigns will help inform future campaigns.
Problem #2: Your clients aren’t clear on where their inbound phone calls are coming from and can’t tie them back to the right marketing campaigns.
Remember those days when sales reps would make between 50 to 100 calls a day, without proper reporting in place? And think about how easy information can get lost in the process, especially if your client is relying on their reps to ask “How did you hear about us?”
To understand marketing campaign effectiveness, you need to know where those inbound leads are coming from, whether it was your client’s Instagram ad, email outreach, bus wrap or any other channel. A full timeline of the lead’s journey can be incredibly helpful for understanding campaign success and improving the lead experience, too — turning more leads into customers.
The solution: Build a report that provides insight into the sources and interactions that drive traffic and generate inbound calls, texts and chats. With something like CallRail’s Call Attribution Report, you’ll be able to share the entire customer journey, which campaigns are most successful when it comes to generating new customers and revenue, and which campaigns could use some work in the new year.
Problem #3: Your clients aren’t able to identify which keywords are successful for their marketing program.
A clear understanding of ROI is crucial for marketers in any size organization. With call tracking and analytics tools, you can help your clients figure out which marketing campaigns and keywords are converting leads and driving new business.
But, it’s challenging — not only for your clients but for you and other agencies as well. You might not have visibility into your client’s interactions with their customers and might not be able to fully understand the common language of that business or industry. So, you can see how this makes reporting on certain keywords and phrases difficult.
The solution: Build a report that provides a full breakdown of targeted key terms and phrases that are used the most during your client’s business calls, such as a tool like CallRail’s Key Terms Spotted Report. From there, you can provide your client with a list of calls containing those key terms that were marked as qualified leads.
Quick tips when building reports
Use the right tools and grow with your client and their needs over time. Keep in mind that your reporting will change as your client grows revenue and expands marketing efforts.
Set the right goals from the beginning and establish a baseline. KPIs will help you and your clients track success and identify areas for improvement. And with a baseline, you can easily show growth and prove your agency’s value.
Make sure that your client’s data tells a story. Numbers are great, but what’s the meaning behind them? How do they tie into the bigger picture? Be clear on your reporting to your clients and actionable steps they can take from those reports.
Support your clients and grow your revenue with the CallRail Partner Program
Your clients rely on you to provide reporting that’s clear and transparent, actionable and translates to improved ROI. As a CallRail partner, you’ll help your clients succeed with all of the reports and insights we’ve discussed with the bonus of support from the CallRail team and a dedicated account manager. Earn a 20% monthly revenue share, become eligible for quarterly cash bonuses, and grow your business — and your clients’ businesses — by becoming a CallRail Partner today.
As a marketer, you know the importance of website conversion rate optimization (CRO), so you run A/B tests or set up personalization rules. But before you know it, you’re bogged down by setting up tests, monitoring them daily to see if they’ve reached statistical significance, and declaring winners (if you can even call them that). Even then, you’re stuck with the laborious task of baking these into your base site or pinging your engineering team to do so yet again for you.
And after all this work, you realize you’re still not meeting the goal you set out for in the first place: driving more conversions. This is because your visitors are still receiving a one-size-fits-all static experience and not the personalized, dynamic experience they’re expecting. At this point, you’re behind on your goals and wondering if there’s a better way.
There is.
What if we told you there’s a website optimization solution that replaces manual, developer-reliant testing and marries your great ideas with machine learning to help you easily turn website visits into money? It’s here now, and it’s ready to help you drive growth.
Meet continuous conversion
Continuous Conversion is a SaaS technology that turns static, one-size-fits-all websites into adaptive Learning Websites that optimize and personalize the experience for every single visitor in the moment.
Powered by machine learning, Continuous Conversion allows you to test a virtually unlimited number of ideas at once. It amplifies your better ideas and starves your losing ideas of traffic, as it continuously drives conversions. With ML doing the heavy-lifting for you, this gives your team more time to do what it does best: understand your audience and come up with creative ideas that would resonate with them. To take a deep dive into the ins and outs of Continuous Conversion, download our Introduction to Continuous Conversion eBook.
Interacting with consumers during major cultural events, like the Super Bowl or the VMAs, is not just for big advertisers. Digital channels act as virtual meeting places to discuss these events and for brands, this means it’s necessary to keep a pulse on conversations and trends at all times.
Register here to join Twitter, Talkwalker and Khoros in our upcoming panel on Tuesday, April 12 at 12 pm ET to find out how brands benefit from consumer intelligence to transform cultural moments into winning strategies.
Google recently released its Performance Max campaigns enabling businesses to advertise their ads across all of Google’s channels (Search, Display, Gmail, Maps, Discovery, YouTube, etc.) instead of creating specialized ads for each channel.
However, as with any automated advertising platform, it’s best to oversee and guide the overall strategic direction to ensure campaign success.
Join paid search experts from Adthena to learn three ways to boost your Google Performance Max campaigns to ensure they deliver real business results.
