Account based marketing is an innovative approach to targeting specific accounts. It can help you increase conversions and ROI by shortening the sales cycle.
However, it can also be challenging to maintain relationships with high-value accounts. To ensure long-term success, you need to follow a series of tactics.
1. Create Precise Account Lists
Account-based marketing is an approach that narrows your focus on a specific group of highly valuable accounts. When executed correctly, this strategy can bring a significant increase in revenue and engagement.
One of the first steps to building a successful ABM campaign is creating precise account lists. In order to do this, you must first identify your Total Addressable Market (TAM) and Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).
Next, you must create a target list of the companies that best fit your ICP. To do this, you can use your existing customers as a reference.
Once you have your list, it is important to assess how likely each company is to purchase from you. This can be done by assessing the sales velocity of each account.
The sales velocity of your target accounts is the rate at which they move through your pipeline and generate revenue. By assessing their sales velocity, you can score each of your target accounts and prioritize those that have the highest potential to close quickly.
Developing accurate account lists is key to implementing successful ABM strategies that work in 2023. The right list can save you time and resources by reducing your outreach to accounts that don’t match your ICP or have high revenue potential.
It can also ensure that your messaging is relevant to the account’s buying cycle, helping you to convert more prospects into customers and increasing the likelihood of closing the deal. For example, a direct-dial phone number that can be reached directly by a decision-maker rather than a generic email address is invaluable.
Once you have created a precise account list, it is important to manage it regularly. This can be accomplished by monitoring your target account’s performance in real-time and adjusting your list accordingly.
2. Hyper-Target High-Value Accounts
The key to account based marketing is identifying high-value accounts that will help your company grow and generate revenue. These customers spend a lot of money with your company, and are likely to purchase from you again in the future. Therefore, it is crucial to hyper-target these accounts with personalized content and marketing strategies.
Top B2B brands like Microsoft, Salesforce, and Oracle don’t just rely on ABM, but they have developed a strategic program that prioritizes specific accounts to market to. While this strategy may not be feasible for every company, it is an effective way to identify potential clients that can drive revenue for your business.
Successful companies create an ideal customer profile (ICP) to target accounts that are likely to make a purchase. Developing an ICP involves analyzing data from sales, marketing, and customer service departments to determine the type of buyer you want to reach, what pain points they experience, and how they use your products.
Once you’ve created your ICP, it is critical to map out all the locations where your ideal customers operate in. Using this map, you can build an ABM field marketing strategy that targets the right geographical areas to maximize your chances of winning new accounts.
Another important step to a successful account-based marketing program is to develop buyer personas for the target accounts you’re targeting. These personas provide a detailed description of the buyer’s daily activities, key challenges, career goals, roles in the decision process and other buying motivations.
Defining these personas early in the program implementation process ensures that all stakeholders and functions involved in the program will be aware of these profiles and how to engage them effectively. In addition, it enables all customer-facing teams to align on messaging and tone as they market to these accounts.
3. Personalize Marketing Ads and C-Level Campaigns
Personalization is a must for any business that wants to make a lasting impression on their target audiences. This includes email, social media, and even advertising. In fact, personalized marketing can boost ROI by up to 200% by using data derived from customer behavior.
The most successful personalized campaigns are able to use machine learning to identify and deliver the right message to the right person at the right time. In addition, they should have a well-designed user experience that makes it easy for people to navigate through the different stages of their buying journey.
For example, personalized marketing emails can be triggered when someone visits your website, adds a product to their cart, or purchases a service. This is a great way to boost campaign revenue and reduce the cost of acquiring new customers.
Another important feature of a personalized marketing campaign is that it helps increase the number of people who are likely to purchase your product. This is because it makes them more likely to engage with your brand and find relevant content that they will enjoy.
A personalized marketing campaign also makes the most of the data a company has on their customers by showing them the best ads, emails, and content to match their specific needs and interests. This is called predictive personalization, and it works by analyzing your visitors’ behaviour to determine which of your content offerings will be most likely to convince them to take a desired action.
The best part of this is that it can be achieved by integrating personalization into your existing marketing and sales processes, including CRM, lead management, and even social media. This is the best way to ensure that you have the latest and greatest tools at your disposal for delivering the most successful account-based marketing campaigns possible.
4. Create Account-Based Content
Account-based content marketing is a great way to align sales and marketing with your target accounts. The strategy involves creating specific content for each account that is relevant to their needs, wants and pain points.
It also enables you to create customized web experiences, which can lead to a significant boost in engagement and conversion rates. This type of content can include blog posts, webinars, white papers and more, which can be delivered via email or direct mail.
One of the most important things to remember when putting together an account-based content strategy is that your content should speak directly to the personas within each of your target account lists. The content should address their unique pain points, be relevant to the stages they are at in their journey and be delivered in a format that they are comfortable with.
In addition to delivering relevant content that is specifically tailored to each persona, ABM content marketing can also take advantage of retargeting technologies to reach the right people over and over again. This is especially useful in the case of busy executives who may have little time to read long-form content or research new products.
For example, Tempur Sealy used an ABM strategy to target their top hotel accounts and engage with decision makers there. They were able to connect with over half of these accounts and schedule appointments with a fifth of them.
The team created a series of marketing materials including online content, direct mail, and sales playbooks, which they distributed to the accounts. This allowed them to target the exact right people and build genuine relationships with them over time.
ABM can be an effective tool for B2B businesses, but it requires a carefully thought-out approach. To get the most out of this strategy, you need to ensure that all of your marketing efforts are focused on a select group of higher-value accounts. These strategies can help you increase your leads, sales pipeline and revenue by delivering relevant content to your most valuable customers.
5. Collaborate with Sales
The key to successful account-based marketing is strong collaboration between sales and marketing teams. This aligns the teams around the same business goal, drives higher revenue, increases average deal size, and enables consistent communication between the two teams throughout the entire buying cycle.
When a company has a highly focused ABM strategy, it can target specific accounts and create personalized experiences for each one. This approach can help a company shorten its sales cycle and increase ROI, while also boosting customer loyalty.
However, it’s important to remember that account-based marketing is still a human process. While it can be automated, humans are still at the center of any B2B business. This is why it’s so critical to ensure that everyone in your organization knows exactly what you’re trying to do and understands their role within it.
This transparency and alignment will ensure that your marketing and sales teams stay focused on the same goals, stick to the agreed-upon budget, and understand the specific roles of each internal stakeholder. It will also help your team create consistent experiences for accounts and make sure that your ABM strategy is as efficient and streamlined as possible.
In addition, this type of coordination will enable your team to better understand your customers’ needs and provide them with the best possible customer service. This will allow you to build relationships with your customers that can lead to future sales.
By following the above tips, you can implement a powerful account-based marketing strategy that will work for your business in 2023. However, it’s important to note that this approach is only as effective as the strategies and tactics you put into place. If you don’t have a comprehensive ABM strategy in place, you may experience significant setbacks and poor results from your campaigns.
