Account-based marketing is experiencing a surge in prominence, owing primarily to B2B marketers, bloggers, and market research agencies and a visible growth in business outcomes while using ABM. According to a study,in the last five years, about 64% of the ABM programmes that have started reported a significant(double digit) increase in their business, out of which 68% of them use automation for ABM.
The main goal of any ABM approach is to construct a fully integrated sales and marketing strategy that focuses on a small number of clients that are highly targeted. Account planning and mapping, sales and marketing coordination, offerings, and KPIs are just a few of the elements to consider here.
ABM, also referred to as key account marketing, necessitates strong collaboration between marketing and sales to discover and advertise to particular businesses that fulfil the Ideal Customer Profile, or ICP.
Below are several tried-and-true account-based marketing tactics that might give your ABM campaigns that slight edge,
Marketers typically put a priority on obtaining and developing new leads, while the ideal source for expanding sales is often your existing customers.
In ABM, determining the individual businesses to target is the first stage before anything else is done. In the case of your existing customers, since they already prefer the goods or services your business offers and you have a considerable amount of information regarding them, most of the time these high-valued prospects are the easiest to approach and upsell to.
If done right, chances are most of your sales team's targets would just come from your existing customers.
Your client base is a helpful resource for assisting you in choosing the most appropriate potential leads to work on, in addition to being some of your most valued targets in an ABM approach. Your existing clients are a treasure trove of data that you can use to target new potential clients.
Analyze your current clients to build your ICP, these characteristics and the customers themselves can be used to target customers that look like these customers via advertising platforms including Google Ads, Facebook and Linkedin. Most of these digital advertising platforms will enable you to upload a list of top clients and then effectively target people who match the demographic details of the list you uploaded.
Personalizing messages based on an account's specific goals and challenges is a fundamental element of account-based marketing. Since businesses tend to change frequently, skilled marketers keep an eye on the activities of their target accounts and use that information to trigger specific events. To comprehend what is going on at a corporate level, one option is to sign up for public information services like Google Alerts. Another strategy is to keep track of what people are saying on social media.
Unlike PR-driven articles and press releases, account-based marketing relies heavily on social data. Companies should be flexible while developing the strategy, rerouting or revising communications when new information becomes available.
Companies that employ segmented lists to boost relevancy for their subscribers have experienced a substantial surge in revenue from email campaigns. Once you identify who's getting the email, what their function in their organisation is, and where they are in the buying cycle, it's easy to customize your email content for them. In an ABM campaign, it is important that you have all of the details about your targets.
Use all of your research to make sure you're sending the proper message to each ABM connection based on their specific interests and objectives.
When you're developing fresh content, seek opportunities to highlight your key prospects positively. Consider whether one of your high-level connections at a company you'd like to collaborate with would be an excellent source for a future blog article. Use them as a fascinating reference for how to execute the strategy you're discussing in your article. Sources and references are effective strategies to strengthen a piece of content. They provide a number of additional perks when used as part of an ABM strategy:
C-level to C-level outreach is a great way to approach really high value target accounts. The outreach should be genuine and personal, and it should provide a business motive for these leaders to interact. You should back the entire campaign, including the message drafting. An inside salesman might follow up by calling the executive's administrative assistant to schedule a meeting.
You can then allocate VPs, inside salespeople, and marketing to leads at target accounts after the C-level executives have been assigned. The idea is to connect relevant personnel with relevant people at a prospective business.
The option to retarget is one of the most valuable features of PPC advertising. You may deliver advertising to individuals who have previously visited your website and interacted with your business. You may also personalise the advertising depending on how they interacted with your content, ensuring that your messaging is relevant to the user and the phase of the purchasing journey.
Most social media networks enable you to submit a list of email addresses that you'd want to target with a specific campaign. While they normally won't allow you to build advertisements that target a single person, being able to customise advertising for a specific group of people—for example, executives of technology companies with 200-300 employees—gives you a lot more flexibility in terms of creating ads that address your target audience's priorities.
Create advertising that is highly applicable to the requirements of the major target accounts and people on your ABM profile, and use the targeting tools on social networks and PPC platforms to run those customised ads. A targeted ad is one of the most effective ways to introduce your company to a new prospect with information relevant and beneficial to them.
Marketers have direct access to their target audience via social media. Once you've built a list of top ABM target accounts and identified some of the important connections, you want to identify all the connected accounts you can on major industry networks. Begin by following and connecting with your target prospects, and pay close attention to what they have to say. Before you start connecting with your prospects more actively, you need to get to know how they tend to use social media.
Content developed expressly for a single specific business is usually exceptional. It can also help you stand out from the crowd of companies competing for your customer's attention. Determine something useful you can offer based on information about the organisation you currently have, and then invest some time in developing a customized analysis that appears great and adds actual value. Working with a small group of high-value connections and coming up with something truly distinctive and beneficial for each of our customers is likely to pay off highly in the future.
Each of the tactics listed above is intended to boost interaction and accelerate prospecting for your target accounts. However, which method to use and how to use it is primarily determined by your present resources, sales strategy, and the audience you're marketing to.
