Account-based marketing (ABM) is becoming popular in the B2B niche for a good reason.
Quick Links
For one, it is a practical marketing approach as it relies on communication. Second, it allows you to target a well-defined audience.
This means that you can keep on creating audience-centric content, boosting the sales pipeline velocity. As a result, you can expand your current accounts and drive more business.
What is Account-Based Marketing?
Also known as relationship marketing, ABM is a strategic promotional approach. That’s because it allows you to identify, market to, and create relationships with a target popular or organization.
An ABM will treat a target organization as a market. Within that market, the prospective clients include decision-makers like stakeholders and executives.
ABM Strategies B2B Marketers Should Try
Now that you know what ABM is, let’s walk you through the eight account-based marketing strategies that you can try.
Build a solid target account list
Research shows that 87% of marketers deem ABM helpful for delivering higher ROIs.
Compared to other marketing activities, ABM does not need a target account list. Instead, you can focus on accounts that are perfectly tailored for the products and solutions that you are offering. You can create a B2B target account list based on the companies you’ve previously done business with or will benefit from what you’re selling.
It would help if you also tried getting help from a reliable B2B data service provider. The advantage isn’t dependent on just fleshing out critical details from your target list. However, they also provide you with look-alike lists that match the characteristics of your ideal audience.
Accuracy is key to successfully leveraging account lists. That way, you can boost your sales efforts since any inaccuracies can be expensive, especially time and money.
Use social media as a touchpoint
Social media lets marketers connect to their audience outside of inbox blasts. From there, you can make a list of ABM target accounts. The next step is to highlight their LinkedIn contacts and other associated social media accounts.
Make sure to engage with your contacts and focus on what they do. You should also be familiar with how your audience uses social media before you can directly interact with them.
Here are some tips:
- Join groups, or Twitter chats they’re involved in.
- Share their content and retweet anything useful for your customers.
- Reply to their posts, especially if you have to say something valuable.
- Send direct messages through relevant platforms.
Instead of thinking of social engagement as a separate channel, think about how you can fit your existing campaign structure. That way, you can maximize your social media marketing efforts.
Personalize your campaigns
Do you know that emails with personalized subject lines have 26% higher open rates? In addition, businesses that use segmented lists can experience as much as a 760% increase in revenue. That’s because list segmentation allows you to send relevant newsletters to your subscribers.
Here are more ways you can personalize your email marketing campaign:
- Utilize merge tags
- Use segmentation
- Match bespoke content to every segment
- Personalize both your outbound and inbound campaigns
- Paid ads with personalized and creative messaging also tend to stand out from the rest of the pack to boost performance.
LinkedIn ads let you target by company, contact attributes, or even company name. A lot of CRMs integrate with Facebook ads to transform contact list segments into customized ad audiences.
Personalized targeting messaging is also matched to dominant list attributes.
You should also look out for opportunities to improve your contact data to improve your personalization options. Let’s say one e-book asks for one’s name and email. The other can ask for email and job title.
Another one might ask for a phone number and a Facebook messenger subscription.
Implement retargeting tactics
Think about the time you looked up or bought something online, like a pair of shoes. Have you considered the number of times it took you from discovering that online store to buy from them finally?
On average, customers need 6 to 8 touchpoints with your brand before purchasing. This is where retargeting comes in handy. That’s because it allows you to remind your visitors and audience that you are still here and waiting for them to take action.
However, you should not retarget everyone. If anything, you need to know which account-based marketing metrics to measure to know whether someone is worth retargeting or not.
Create account-oriented content
Your content needs to attract your target audience. By sharing your expertise, you can help your clients solve their issues. It will also help position your business as an industry thought leader.
You should also conduct extensive research based on the recent experience of your customers. Illustrate the insights that your team has received or the solutions you’ve implemented while working on this case.
It would help if you also used it to strengthen your content by adding testimonials representing the audience you want to attract. This makes it easy for new leads to place themselves at this place and see how you can help their business.
Connect with storytelling
If you want to personalize your ABM approach, you need to focus on telling your story and your customers’ stories.
Make sure that you leverage your customer success stories on your marketing channels. This is to let prospects learn more about your brand and become more educated buyers.
By telling informative and engaging stories to your prospects, you’re making your business relevant. This encourages them to stay connected and glued to your content. From there, you can convert them into paying clients.
Just make sure that you’re relating to your target account’s specific needs.
Leverage ABM tools
Marketing and sales don’t happen without the right tools. So make sure that you leverage ABM tools.
For instance, HubSpot has an all-in-one campaign manager which integrates, gets reminders, and prospects a bit for you so that you can keep on going. Meanwhile, LinkedIn is the Instagram of ABM.
After you’re done prospecting, Slack, along with HubSpot, helps you meet smoother and better as you work on all of this. Finally, Supermetrics lets you know how you’re progressing.
Warm-up your leads with content syndication
Another thing that you need to do is to warm up your leads with content syndication before your sales team engages them. This will allow you to place your most meaningful and relevant content right before your target leads.
This can be any form- from newspapers, articles, e-books, or videos. Make sure that they solve whatever pain points that your leads might have.
Measure and analyze your progress
Just like all marketing strategies, you need to track your progress. When you identify and measure key performance indicators or KPIs, you:
- Know the gaps and weaknesses of your process.
- Know whether your strategy is working or not.
By keeping an eye on your KPIs, you’ll have a better picture of what your strategy needs to be. This ensures that you have an optimal system.
Over to You
Whatever marketing tactics you’ll be applying will depend on what you want to achieve. Your budget and resources can also influence the marketing campaigns that you can do at the moment.
Hence, you need a cost-effective marketing approach. This is where account-based marketing can come in handy. That’s because it allows you to cater to a particular and provide relevant information.
As a result, it will be easier for you to convert them into paying clients.