You know that your company does truly great work. The level of expertise and quality of service you could provide to clients is far higher than what they’re getting right now, and you could prove it… if only you could get in front of them.

Here at BlueWing, we’ve long trumpeted the merits of Facebook as a B2B advertising platform. Although LinkedIn is fantastic, we’ve found Facebook to be the most cost-efficient way to reach senior executives using paid social ads. (Consider that 79% of senior execs check Facebook for thought leadership compared to only 68% who check LinkedIn.)

The duopoly of Facebook and Google has a stranglehold on the digital advertising market. In 2016, the two giants accounted for 77% of the growth in digital spending. Google is running things on the inbound side, allowing digital marketers to serve up contextual ads based on what a user is searching for. On the outbound marketing side, those same advertisers are using Facebook to push content into the News Feeds of highly targeted groups—and this includes plenty of B2B players. Facebook’s partnership with Dun & Bradstreet and outstanding custom audience tools give B2B campaign managers a wealth of creative options for getting in front of ideal clients.

Agencies today cite that 90% of new business leads come from referrals. In such a fragmented landscape, more channels must be adopted if agencies wish to grow in 2017 and beyond.

Growth marketing is a buzzword that has been floating around the startup space for quite some time now. According to Drift, growth marketing is about "attracting more engaged customers...while traditional marketing focuses on the top of the funnel, the growth marketing job description requires focusing on the entire funnel." Brand awareness is not enough; growth marketing is about repeatable and scalable customer acquisition.

Two of the core tenets of growth marketing are rapid experimentation and constant optimization. Most startups can quickly cite their cost-per-user across various channels, including Facebook ads, Google AdWords, organic SEO and cold emailing. Knowing the lifetime value of a customer, they tweak various campaigns to consistently increase ROI. Can your agency say the same?

The agency world is a referral-centric network that is ripe for disruption. It's time to take advantage of what growth marketing has to offer.

Account-based marketing has become the standard best-practice for B2B demand generation programs. Since mid-2015, interest in ABM has increased steadily. Take a look at the Google Trends data:

Building a list of targeted accounts is one of the most important elements of getting started with a list-based or account-based marketing campaign. It’s crucial to target the right leads early. It’s better to spend more time and resources upfront before you are deep into a campaign and realize you are producing and promoting content for target accounts that shouldn't have been on your list in the first place.

Here’s how you can set your company up for success by strategically researching and gathering a list of target accounts.

Despite account-based marketing’s recent resurgence, the foundational ideas of the approach have been around for years. According to ITSMA’s Bev Burgess, who coined the name “Account-Based Marketing” in 2003, Don Peppers and Martha Rogers first introduced the tenets of ABM in their prescient book The One to One Future. 23 years later, digital technology has given companies the tools to execute Pepper’s and Roger’s ideas at an unprecedented scale.

Account-based marketing (ABM) is all about designing a custom marketing plan for every account you are going after. If you are a company going after six-figure or more contracts, account-based marketing provides a framework for doing so. Before you dive into the tactics of ABM, however, there are important preliminary strategic conversations you need to have with your team.

To make life easier for you and your co-workers, here’s a simple checklist of things you need to decide on before you begin with account-based marketing.

In traditional B2B marketing, new leads and opportunities are the main metrics used to measure the success of a marketing campaign. But account-based marketing, a strategy used by companies going after a small number of large target accounts, takes a more realistic approach.

Unlike a lead-based marketing campaign, in which a brand measures its success based on the quantity of individual leads, the very nature of account-based marketing (ABM) is to focus on the quality of leads. The reality for most companies is that individuals seldom make buying decisions in a silo. CEB cites that on average, there are 5.4 influencers involved in the average purchase decision. As such, ABM targets multiple team members at key accounts in order to reach a larger community. As David Ogilvy, the “grandfather of advertising,” once said, “Don’t count the people you reach. Reach the people who count.”

When measuring account-based marketing, then, it is incredibly important to have a set of metrics that create a deeper context for who you are reaching. Thus the traditional metrics—and framework used to measure it—are much less relevant. Here’s what you need to know about measuring account-based marketing.