21/03/2022
Account Based Marketing
Account-based marketing (ABM) is a focused growth strategy in which Marketing and Sales collaborate to create personalized buying experiences for a mutually-identified set of high-value accounts. It is a marketing strategy where key business accounts are marketed to directly, as units of one (compared to the typical one-to-many approach). In essence, high-value accounts or prospects are identified, key stakeholders in these businesses are targeted, and then marketing strategies are implemented through various channels to appeal to their specific personas and needs.
Account-based marketing (ABM) is a business marketing strategy that concentrates resources on a set of target accounts within a market. It uses personalized campaigns designed to engage each account, basing the marketing message on the specific attributes and needs of the account.
Account-based marketing typically focuses on a few large and important accounts or those potential accounts that hold the greatest promise of adding to your bottom line. It seeks to kick-off the sales process with higher-value opportunities earlier, get the highest ROI possible from marketing campaigns. Hence it is imperative to have a high-touch and highly targeted message to these individuals, because of their revenue potential and impact to sales and marketing.
Must-Have Tips for Successful Account Based Marketing
1. Say Goodbye to Personas
2. Micro-Target as Much as Possible
3. Ensure Personalized Messaging Carries Through the Prospect Journey
4. Embrace Bionic Marketing
5. Think Beyond the C-Suite
5 Core Components of a Successful ABM Strategy
1. Build the Sales Bridge. A key part of implementing ABM is to establish alignment between sales and marketing leadership
2. Define Your Segments
3. Align Your Plays
4. Empower Sales and Marketing
5. Host Consistent Planning Sessions with Territory-level Managers
Should You Implement Account-Based Marketing?
Now that you’ve learned a bit about what ABM actually is, you might be wondering if it’s really worth it. One clear reason to pursue account-based marketing is that studies show it appears to be effective in delivering ROI. It has found to work well in a B2B marketing approach involving enterprise-level sales organizations. One advantage is that there are ways to automate account-based marketing as long as you have the right data and a system to communicate between sales and marketing.
6 Steps to Effectively Implement Account-Based Marketing
1. Define Your Strategic Accounts
Marketers are used to defining personas, but account-based marketing is about marketing to a whole organization rather than an individual. Start your account-based marketing efforts by determining the common makeup of organizations that bring in the largest monthly recurring revenue at your organization. For instance, define the industry, company size, location, annual revenue, upsell opportunity, profit margin, etc. for the accounts that are yielding your business the highest long-term profits. Those are the types of accounts you want to go after. This information you can gather from employees who work on the front-line with prospects and customers, as they would know your leads and customers best.
2. Attain Knowledge on Customer Accounts
Once you’ve identified some target organizations, learning more about how decisions are made at these target accounts, determining who the decision makers are, and learning more about how decisions are made, are the key components to this step. With account-based marketing knowledge really is power. strategize on how you can influence the stakeholders at each one. Some helpful tools to do this can be your own CRM (and the people within your company that have had contact with these organizations in the past), as well as social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook.
3. Create Personalized Content & Messaging
Now it’s time to put your investigational knowledge to use with content that speaks directly to these stakeholders and organizations. You should understand these stakeholders’ specific pain points and appeal to how you can solve them with your messaging and imagery. Work together with your design team, as well as sales, to ensure your content is visually engaging, but also communicating the right messages to these key stakeholders.
4. Decide on the Best Channels for Your Campaigns
Based on your research and specifically designed content, you are now ready to promote your campaigns and creative in the right places. You need to understand where these stakeholders spend their time online, and what their state of mind is when they’re on social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
For instance, if you are targeting someone within a graphic design organization, perhaps you know that these individuals spend time on Pinterest from your initial research. Or maybe you’re targeting financial executives, in which you’d be better off showing them targeted Google Display ads on Bloomberg and Market Watch.
Facebook and LinkedIn can be powerful platforms to target these stakeholders because you can actually run campaigns to appeal to specific organizations, as well as titles within those organizations.
5. Execute Your Account-Based Campaigns
Since this method of marketing is so targeted, it is critical to get your campaign right for the best results. It is important not to overwhelm your prospects by bombarding them with repeat messages across multiple channels. Be sure that you aren’t aggressively remarketing and hitting the same people with the same message time and time again. Also, please ensure that your channels aren’t set up to just speak to one or two individuals within these organizations. Remember that you’re targeting an organization and the stakeholders within it rather then a single person. You need to strike the right balance of catching your prospect’s attention without turning them off.
6. Measure & Share Your Results
Once your campaign has been running for 30 to 60 days, it is time to measure and evaluate the effectiveness of your account-based marketing efforts. Ask some critical questions like:
• Did your personalized content prove to be engaging? If so, how?
• Are these accounts becoming more engaged with your brand?
• Are you expanding the number of known stakeholders within these organizations?
• Did you move any of these targeted leads down the funnel?
• Did you generate any revenue from these campaigns?
• What could you do better going forward?
Keeping your business goals in mind, start building your Account-based Marketing Program and see the difference in ROI!
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