Account-based marketing (ABM) is a highly tactical approach to B2B marketing where the most qualified, best-fit accounts are targeted as individual markets. It involves the use of extremely personalized, targeted marketing strategies to attract and engage specific high-value accounts to win their business. The ABM-focused accounts are mutually identified by the sales and marketing teams.
To be frank, ABM is not an easy undertaking. It requires a great deal of planning, the selection of right strategies, and proper execution. Here, you can learn some result-oriented strategies to become a smart account-based marketer to expand your customer base.
5 Ways to Increase Customers with ABM
Here are some proven strategies you can adopt to improve your ABM to get more customers.
1. Get your sales and marketing departments to work in sync
Make it a point to align your sales and marketing teams to ensure enhanced communication and cross-collaboration between them, which is crucial to the success of ABM. Use modern software that can help keep your salespeople and marketers on the same page and provide them a bird’s eye view of each target account as they progress to becoming a customer.
When you implement “smarketing,” you also allow consistency across every content, message, interaction, touchpoint, and communication for all of your ABM-focused accounts. Did you know? In comparison with sales and marketing teams that are less ABM-advanced, those taking an ABM approach together can be approximately 6% more likely to beat their revenue goals.
Be sure to establish clear service-level agreements, ensure transparency in all sales and marketing activities, and include ABM strategy discussions in your inter-departmental meetings. This will help you with better sales and marketing alignment, leading to delightful, seamless customer experiences and other successes in ABM.
2. Identify your set of high-value ABM accounts
It’s pointless to conduct ABM without knowing your best-fit accounts and key stakeholders or contacts within them. Build an ideal customer profile, study deals that closed, or pull out existing customer data from your CRM to know which accounts you need to target with ABM. Even better, leverage B2B data like intent to identify high-value accounts that are mostly likely to become your customers. Note that B2B data is also essential to build ideal customer profiles and buyer personas.
Accelerate your ABM efforts by combining intent data with contact data. The powerful combination enables you to quickly identify accounts that are highly interested in you or showing intent to buy, and also allows you to connect with them faster. Statistics show that intent data can drive a marketing ROI of up to 300% and also 4X pipeline expansion.
3. Personalize to engage contacts within best-fit accounts
One of the keys to ABM success in personalized content, 56% of marketers strongly agree. Once you identify high-value accounts to concentrate your ABM efforts on, start attracting important contacts within them to engage and build a relationship with them. Personalization is an excellent strategy to achieve this goal and turn prospects into customers with ABM.
Create hyper-relevant ads and messaging for each contact, send them personalized direct mail, and invite or get them involved in customized virtual or in-person events. Additionally, build tailored landing pages and create content to address the needs, pain points, concerns, and solutions sought by target contacts.
Don’t forget to use social media to create personalized posts for target contacts, send them direct messages, and share value-add content with them. You can also join social conversations, groups, and platforms your target contacts are mostly interested in.
4. Distribute content through the most beneficial channels
It makes no sense to invest your budget and resources in creating the best ABM content, only to find out that your target accounts are not consuming it. Content distribution is as important as content creation and personalization in ABM.
Identify the channels that your target accounts spend most of their time on to ensure high visibility and consumption rates for your ABM content. This will help you get a high ROI on your ABM campaigns as you’re better positioned to nurture prospects and convert them into customers.
Email is one of the top content distribution channels, and 93% of B2B marketers are already using it. With that said, you need to research and study your target accounts to know their most preferred channels and understand their content consumption. Besides email, you can distribute your ABM content through social media, direct mail or print media, paid ads, website, blog, online communities, and forums.
5. Measure the success of your ABM campaigns
Running an ABM campaign without measuring its results is like shooting aimlessly in the dark and hoping to reach your goals. Once your ABM campaign is up and running, make sure you regularly measure and analyze its results. This helps you know what you’re achieving, whether or not you’re hitting your targets, what changes you need to make and where, and so on.
Total revenue, average deal size, ROI, sales cycle length, number of accounts targeted, account penetration, and deal creation are key metrics to look at in ABM. Apart from these, pay close attention to relationship, engagement, and awareness metrics such as sign-ups, trials and demos, email responses, page visits, social shares and mentions, time spent on specific pages, etc.
Statistics reveal that revenue won, account engagement, and number of pipelines created are among the most common metrics tracked by marketers to measure ABM results. Having said that, it’s important to measure other metrics as well to ensure better reporting and analysis and keep track of the progress of target accounts until they become customers and even beyond.
A Final Word
ABM doesn’t have to be challenging. If you implement the strategies explained here, you’ll be better equipped to crush your ABM goals and win more customers. Before you start off your new ABM campaign, see to it that you build a high-performance in-house team, clearly define your goals and objectives, and choose the right tools to scale your efforts.
Digital marketing can be a great support to your ABM efforts. Not to mention, digital ads and remarketing could make a difference with winning customers through ABM. Considering that it’s important to provide great digital experiences to target accounts in ABM, it makes sense to focus on strategies like hyper-personalization.
At the same time, ensure that you’re only investing in digital marketing strategies that actually work. You don’t want to waste your time, budget, and resources on tactics that aren’t getting the results you want.