Have you casting a net far and wide and now want to shift to spear-fishing technique so-called account-based marketing? You are in the right place because I am ready to take you along with me as I walk-through an introduction to account-based marketing.
‘This time let’s get personal’ did you say this to your marketing team? Well, ABM could be described as the most trending and beneficial technique to personalize your content that supplements your buyer’s personas’ need. The relevant content always wins, as you must know how different it is to talk about the cures to diseases through bundles of online pages as opposed to treating a patient in person, at your desk or even better at their houses in extreme conditions. That is what ABM is and we have preconceived notion that marketers, in the long run, will have to understand this true marketing technique.
You only hit the goal you want, not the randomized targets so as to be successful at one of the 100 chances. As a true marketer, I have to come to know the importance of truly and completely utilizing your budget to the optimum level possible. If you are a women’s clothing brand that should target youth, it will false to market to any which group viz age and gender.
Have you done your homework before you start implementing ABM? This worksheet by Terminus should help you in defining your ideal customer profile. As suggested there you can list down the accounts you have been successful with until now and then analyze if these were the companies you wanted to target? Now, once you have done all the analysis, you can define your ideal customer profile viz industry/vertical, size, budget, geography, and revenue. This is what you need to do first when you are spear-fishing because although ABM uses targeted approach it won’t benefit you if you are targeting at wrong accounts as with spear-fishing using the wrong spear, it won’t be of any benefit for you.
What would you define as the spear in ABM with which you can target your ideal customers? What comes to my mind is the compelling content that fulfills their needs and helps them address their pain-points with your tips and tactics which at the later stage can guide them to your products. As simple as that!
Your spear is any content that addresses your customer’s pain points.
Although inbound marketing also uses the content-first approach, ABM is different to it because ABM does not focus on generating leads. As in ABM because you already know who your leads are, you use your content as a way to engage with them. This doesn’t mean the content you used for inbound is should be discarded. Whatever blog posts, e-books, videos, etc content you used, should be mapped to your ideal customer profile and used as an asset.
Email drip campaigns and retargeting are insufficient to reach everybody at each inbound account with the content they require. You should utilize strategies like account-based marketing, direct mail, and social media to create awareness and convey the right content at the opportune time.
ABM does not focus on quantity but on quality of the engagements you have with your leads and you should track as to how an account moves through the pipeline. ABM is data-driven and sales and marketing need to work in alignment with each other for ABM to be successful.
Though ABM is another approach to reach your target audience, you should use the marketing mix to reach your target audience. But ABM is important when need to know your potential customers. DemandBase exhibited this brilliantly in its ABM infographic, expressing that 82 percent of B2B website visitors are not potential clients, and 97 percent of website visitors overlook CTAs and stay unknown.
It is difficult and expensive to manually nurture every single lead which is your website visitor and hence, ABM was much needed in this scenario. ABM narrows down the search to only the accounts that matter the most to you, hence you implement this affordable technique. With the advent in technology, now it is possible to use one-to-many ABM approach for higher revenue gain.
Rather than hoping to reach organically through search engines or social media, ABM focuses on personalized campaigns which they target at ideal customer profiles after they have gathered insights into their accounts. Once you are done with the personalized campaigns, you can now expand your reach within the accounts so that you pitch to all the decision makers in that account. You can use social media and groups to gain insights into your accounts. After all the efforts that you put into it, ABM is sure to pay you well. Why not read 15 Things CMOs Need To Know about Account Based Marketing to know more details about ABM?
Now that you understand what ABM is we are waiting to share with you tips for planning, executing, and measuring your ABM strategy. With Account-Based Marketing (ABM) being one of the main five preferred marketing methods used by marketers, in view of ITSMA research, with 69% seeing enhancement in their yearly revenue per account, would it say it isn’t time you find out how ABM could function for you?
