information (rfi) template n.rich abm vendor request for · 2019-10-29 · introduction the purpose...

N.Rich ABM Vendor Request For Information (RFI) Template

October 29, 2019

http://nrich.app/

ABM Request For Information Template

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http://nrich.app/N.Rich ABM Vendor Request For Information (RFI) Template

IntroductionThe purpose of this RFI Template is to provide a standardized and objective framework of questions for evaluating ABM vendors. The template is not meant to be used as a substitute for your own evaluation, but as a reference for the key questions that should be asked to potential ABM vendors. For the sake of clarity, the template includes a short rationale for each of the questions and for example answers from the N.Rich ABM platform are seen in red letters.

ABM RFI Template Excel Download

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Empty RFI Template

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N.Rich RFI Answers

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https://n.rich/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/ABM_RFI_Empty_Template_(29-Oct-2019).xlsx

https://n.rich/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/ABM_RFI_N.Rich_Answers_(29-Oct-2019).xlsx





ABM Vendor RFI: Key Question 1-9

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1. What account-based advertising channels do you offer?

2. Is your platform self-serve or managed service?

3. How do you report ABM media spent?

4. What is your key delivery metric (e.g., ABM clicks) for advertising?

5. Which ad units does your platform support?

6. What level sales or measurable results can be expected with $10K/month or

$20K/month?

7. How do the ABM click results scale compared to LinkedIn?

8. Can you show credible Return-on-Advertising-Spend (ROAS) to sales opportunities?

9. Does your platform provide multi-touch ABM analytics?

ABM Vendor RFI: Key Question 10-18

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10. Can you use Eloqua, Marketo, and Pardot cookies for ABM targeting and analytics?

11. What advertising uses do you support with CRM integration?

12. What kind of Information Security (InfoSec) standards do you follow?

13. Are you using IP addresses for targeting?

14. Which IP address data provider are you using?

15. Are you using cookie based targeting for ABM?

16. Does your platform use 1st, 2nd, or 3rd party cookies?

17. Are you compliant with privacy standards such as GDPR, PIPEVA / PIPA, and CCPA?

18. What is the role of website personalization in your offering?

1. What account based advertising channels do you offer?

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N.Rich provides ABM clicks from Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and programmatic.

Why is it important to understand which channels the ABM platform uses?Historically ABM platforms have provided only display advertising using programmatic display, even though more than 50 percent of the overall digital advertising covered by Google and Facebook. If you want to maximize the ABM click volume, Google and Facebook should be included.

2. Is your platform self-serve or managed service?

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N.Rich is a self-serve ABM platform, which is much easier to use than Google Ads because optimization is automated not manual.

Why is it important to understand the benefits of managed-service vs. self-service and vice versa?In order to add long term business value, the ABM platform must integrate into your existing marketing and sales processes. A crucial component of an ABM offering is the scope of the service incorporated and the level on which your team can control the inputs and outputs on the platform. The upside of a managed service offering is the easiness whereas the upside of self-service is manageability and transparency. Generally, if you are looking for agency service for ABM, managed service is a great option, but if you are looking for an ABM software, self-service is far better. Finally, one of the biggest mistakes companies make is to omit their existing content assets when engaging in ABM - the first stage should always be to start with your existing assets instead of starting to create new, custom ones.

3. How do you report ABM media spent?

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N.Rich bundles media spent in the monthly license fees and reports the results of the overall investment (ROAS).

Why does the media spend have a critical role in platform selection?You need to understand exactly what are you paying for when investing in an ABM platform. If the media spent is bundled, you need to understand exactly what the return is that you can expect for that spending. For example, the number of impressions is a metric for distribution, not ABM returns. In many cases, you get a lot of software features such as additional reporting for the media spent, but in the end, it is highly recommended to keep the process simple and consider a simple Investment vs. a Return approach (e.g. ROAS).

4. What is your key delivery metric (e.g., ABM clicks) for advertising?

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N.Rich uses three ABM metrics; clicks, readers, and video views - every one of which measures active engagement, instead of passive impressions.

Why should the ABM program measure engagement instead of impressions?Impressions are an advertising distribution metric that may or may not correlate with the ad being viewable or more importantly being noticed. Impressions measure the distribution but don’t provide any insight into the interest in or relevance of the ad to the person. The ability to show and manage that data is why engagement metrics such as clicks are much more valuable. The only way for marketing to show the impact of the actual sales process is to use engagement metrics and map them to propensity-to-buy and purchase intent.

5. Which ad units your platform supports?

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N.Rich supports three ad units Unified Display, Native Articles, and Native Videos.

Why it's crucial to understand the role of different ad units?The “duopoly” of Google and Facebook generate more than 50% of all digital advertising volume and in those platforms “responsive display” and “text and image ads” have crucial roles. These ad creatives are constructed dynamically from the provided text, images, and/or videos as opposed to static images or custom HTML5 banners. The benefit of dynamic ad formats is that compared to static formats, they enable much more efficient use of Artificial Intelligence-based optimization algorithms to enable much higher returns. Google and Facebook discourage using text on images for this reason.

6. What level or measurable results can be expected with $10K/month or $20K/month?


Why is it important to understand how the ABM platform scales?Scalable ABM is the single most important factor when considering its a business impact. ABM is not a tactic, it’s a strategy. Ideally, you want to start with a proof-of-concept, but if that is successful, you need to understand upfront how those results can be scaled to other categories, business areas and/or regions. When considering scaling, it’s not enough to consider artificial restrictions like the number of targetable accounts or the number of campaigns, but you need to understand exactly how the results are expected to scale when you increase the investment.

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N.Rich provides reliable results estimates in advance. See the real-life $20K/month example.


Glossary of MetricsN.Rich Engaged Accounts = Target accounts with one or more people (cookies) that have watched videos or read articles N.Rich Engaged Cookies = Amount of people (unique cookies) from the target accounts that have watched videos or read articles N.Rich Clicks = Clicks through N.Rich advertisingN.Rich Video Views = Total times videos have been viewed 20 seconds or moreN.Rich Article Readers = Total times articles have been scrolled at least for 50%

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7. How do the ABM click results scale compared to LinkedIn?

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Because of using Google & Facebook, N.Rich scales roughly 50x compared to LinkedIn, but we always suggest using Linkedin as a parallel ABM ad channel.

Why is LinkedIn an important benchmark for ABM?Although LinkedIn is not an ABM channel per se, it is the only major channel that supports ABM. The biggest benefit of LinkedIn as a channel is the unmatched, trustworthy company, and job title datasets. On the other hand, the biggest challenges are the lack of scalability vs. Google and Facebook because of the infrequent usage of the platform (average 1 login/month) and the lack of accurate account-level web analytics. Still, when considering an ABM platform, the Linkedin delivery capacity provides a solid benchmark to use as a point of comparison for the scalability of the ABM platform.

8. Can you show credible Return-on-Advertising-Spend (ROAS) to sales opportunities?


ROAS is a key metric of N.Rich ABM customer journey analytics.Why Return On Advertising Spend (ROAS) matters?ROAS measures the efficacy of digital advertising. It is calculated by dividing the Gross revenue of Ad campaigns with the Investment. The biggest benefit of ROAS as a metric is that it leaves less room for interpretation compared to Marketing Return-On-Investment (ROI). In order to calculate ROAS, you need to understand the marketing Return, which in case of B2B can mean either e-commerce sales or won enterprise sales opportunities. In terms of opportunity value, ROAS enables you to go beyond lead-to-opportunity conversion by using level of marketing influence to attributed opportunities as its basis (e.g. 5% influence to $1M in opportunity value means $50K of marketing return).

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9. Does your platform provide multi-touch ABM analytics?


The N.Rich ABM buyer journey analytics include all digital marketing touches.

Why is it essential to get a 360-degree view of the digital customer journey?Marketing and sales funnel into long enterprise sales cycles that could take several years and there may be up to 50 people who influence the buying decision. Traditional lead-based customer journey analytics focuses on a single-person lead and lead conversion (scoring) as the sole window to understanding the customer journey. The challenge is that for large value enterprise buying processes, the amount of marketing leads that convert to Sales Qualified Leads is very small (on average less than 1%) and the vast majority of the leads are generated by the sales. When implementing an ABM strategy this approach doesn’t matter since marketing should be able to show it influences over the course of the entire customer journey through various account-level touchpoints measured in parallel to the opportunity stages.

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10. Can you use Eloqua, Marketo & Pardot cookies for ABM targeting and analytics?


N.Rich synchronizes cookie segments from all major marketing automation systems.

Why should ABM platforms sync cookies with marketing automation?Marketing Automation Systems operate on contact level and are not optimized for Account-Based Marketing. On all systems, the add-on ABM feature set is focused on categorizing your existing leads (known contacts) on the account level instead of providing true extensions to Account Based Advertising and Analytics. You are going to need an ABM platform if you want to transition to an Account Based Marketing strategy. The key benefit of MAS-ABM platform integration should be the ability to incorporate existing leads into Account Based Advertising programs and in adding the lead and email touchpoint data into the 360-degree customer journey analytics.

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11. What advertising use cases do you support with CRM integration?


N.Rich ABM uses cases for CRM including segment-based awareness, smart retargeting, and opportunity nurturing.

What CRM integration should deliver to ABM workflows?The main purposes of a CRM-to-ABM integration are 1) to automate the process of creating target account segments on the ABM platform for targeting and analytics purposes and 2) to incorporate the opportunity data including their stages into customer journey analytics. The most common ABM uses for CRM data are generating awareness for new solutions, CRM triggered installed-base targeting and opportunity pipeline acceleration.

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12. What kind of Information Security (InfoSec) standards do you follow?


N.Rich adheres to ISO/IEC 27002 standard for information security.

Why do you need to consider InfoSec when choosing an ABM vendor?The ABM platform must integrate into your existing sales and marketing data flows including CRM, Marketing Automation, website and advertising. This approach requires you to convince various stakeholders not only about the business benefit of a third party accessing sensitive data, but also to convince the teams that any data accessed will be processed with the highest possible security standards.

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13. Are you using IP addresses for targeting?


N.Rich Account Based Targeting is utilizing both IP addresses and cookies associated with target accounts.

Why is it essential for ABM vendors to target people with multiple devices?IP ranges can only be utilized for programmatic display, not on Google or Facebook. IP-ranges work pretty well for targeting desktop devices with programmatic display and getting related analytics, but not for other channels or mobile devices.

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14. Which IP address data provider are you using?


N.Rich uses its own, constantly refreshing first-party IP address dataset that is verifiable and based on publicly available databases.

Why should every marketer be able to verify its IP address data?In most cases, only 50-80% of the IP addresses can be validated using independent third party data. This situation poses a major problem for including “false positives” for an account- and segment-level reporting. Consider, for example, the negative impact of sharing account behavior data with sales that turn out to be invalid. It is highly recommended to require full auditability of the IP address-company association.

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15. Are you using cookie based targeting for ABM?


N.Rich uses account-associated cookies on Google, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Why is it important to understand the limitations of IP addresses based targeting?IP-addresses can only be used for targeting and analytics for devices within the targeted account’s corporate network. IP addresses are mostly not used to target mobile devices because they mostly use teleoperator IP addresses (so-called ISP, Internet Service Provider. Additionally, IP addresses can’t be used for the targeting or analytics of devices, e.g. laptops taken outside of the corporate network (e.g. while commuting or working remotely). Account-associated cookies are required if you want to engage target accounts outside the corporate networks and especially on mobile devices. As an example, 90% or more LinkedIn and Facebook clicks come from mobile devices.

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16. Does your platform use 1st, 2nd, or 3rd party cookies?


N.Rich uses only first and second party cookies, which are created through the N.Rich system or from client websites.

What is the difference between the cookie categories?First party cookies are cookies generated by your own domain. Second-party cookies are generated by a trusted domain, like N.Rich. Third-party cookies generated and managed by unknown origins. The biggest challenge with using third party cookies for targeting (e.g. industry- or job title targeting) is that they represent a “black box” - there is no way of understanding what is the source and basis of the association between the cookie, company and other data such as job titles.

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17. Are you compliant with privacy standards such as GDPR, PIPEVA / PIPA, and CCPA?


N.Rich complies with all the above-mentioned privacy standards.

Why should ABM project owners be aware of the privacy standard compliance?Many regions have enforced strict privacy legislation; the EU has GDPR, Canada has PIPEVA & PIPA and beginning in 2020 California is going to have CCPA. All standards have strict requirements related to personally identifiable information, especially email addresses, mobile numbers, and accurate positioning data. However, also cookies and IP addresses are personal data in “pseudonymized” format. Not complying with privacy standards can lead to severe legal consequences.

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18. What is the role of website personalization in your offering?


N.Rich content personalization automatically tailors the website experience of visitors from sales opportunities and measures an increase in website engagement.

Why do you need to understand the role of personalizationThere is no industry standard for ABM website personalization, so every vendor has their own approach and metrics for it. Because personalization is an important part of an ABM offering, and, at best, it can provide great results, it is crucial to understand the cost vs. benefit equation. In the case of personalization, the biggest cost is usually in the effort on the account level that goes into setting up the personalized content. Generally, there are three critical factors to understand: 1) What does it do? 2) How much effort does the setup require? 3) What is the measurable business benefit?

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Tips for Selecting Account Based Advertising Provider

Bypass the Buzz & JargonABM is a trivially simple concept that has been mystified. In most of the cases it means targeting companies with IP address targeting for display advertising. Are You looking for something else than account based advertising?

Think about your MarTech StackMost of the B2B Enterprises only have one engagement driving software in their MarTech stack: Marketing Automation System. MAS manages email based marketing data set. Think about ABM solutions that expand your stack to manage advertising data for all relevant channels.

Evaluate Beneficial Use CasesBuild value added use cases before you will start to invest. Each needs to have data sources and measurable KPIs. Each needs to have data sources and measurable KPIs. Best practise use cases are; 1) ABM Awareness Generation, 2) Smart Website Retargeting, 3) Lead Conversion Acceleration and 4) Sales Pipeline nurturing.


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Questions?

http://nrich.app/

Ville MailaCo-Founder, COO+358 40 561 [email protected]

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information (rfi) template n.rich abm vendor request for · 2019-10-29 · introduction the purpose...

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