Gone are the days of spray-and-pray marketing tactics. B2B audiences are now more discerning, more informed, and frankly, less tolerant of the generic wares of yesteryear. Account based marketing strategy is your tailored response—a direct and personalized approach to winning over prospects. What’s more, it's tried and tested to boost both ROI and customer lifetime value.
Account Based Marketing (ABM) isn’t necessarily a good fit for every company. If you’re selling to highly specific industries and/or have a sales cycle that’s 6 months+ long with multiple decision makers involved, then you will have a lot to gain by adopting the ABM route. It will also help greatly in improving the alignment between your sales and marketing teams, ensuring everyone is focusing on the same target accounts for success.
We’ve written up these 6 steps to building a successful and effective ABM strategy; we hope you find them useful.
ABM focuses on identifying and targeting specific high-value accounts rather than a broad (and let’s face it, often random) audience. This personalized approach focuses on building stronger relationships with key decision makers and results (if done right) in higher conversion rates and more impactful ROI.
This isn’t an either/or approach. Implementing Account Based Marketing strategies doesn’t necessarily mean ditching more conventional LeadGen, the two can and do often go hand in hand. We’ve actually written another blog about the differences between B2B ABM vs. traditional marketing.
In order to plan a well thought-out, effective, and successful ABM campaign, B2B marketers need to consider these 6 key steps:
Your initial step–which is often the most difficult one–is to align the marketing, sales, and C-level executives. The alignment goes well beyond quarterly meetings that serve to summarize the achievements (or lack thereof) and is more about collaborating throughout the process to identify high value accounts and deliver the most personalized messaging possible together through establishing thought processes and action plans. These tasks should not be owned by either marketing or sales teams individually, but achieved through cooperation.
Keep this team to a maximum of 5 people to be able to keep things agile. Promote constructive feedback and open communication, and define responsibilities to keep the alignment going.
In ABM, the right tools can be a make it or break it for the campaign. You'll be using these tools to plan, create and measure your ABM campaign throughout every step. You’ll need…
One thing that's never said enough–the better communication flow between your team, the higher chances for success, and that's applicable for all departments, not just B2B marketing. Whether you communicate through Slack, emails, project management tools like ClickUp or Asana, make sure everyone's on the same page from the start.
One tool we love? Loom. When working in different time zones or unable to jump on a quick call with everyone–we record Looms and send them across to each other.
Running ABM motions on HubSpot (we're HubSpot Diamond Partner, so we might be biased!) will help you move your leads through all stages of the funnel smoothly. As a B2B marketing agency with over 10 years of experience, we personally use HubSpot's:
For a successful ABM campaign, you want your target accounts to see content designed just for them–and you'll also want to know how and when they interacted with it. We use and recommend to other B2B marketing folks tools like Influ2 to target specific individuals (not just companies) by their IP address and see all their engagements with our content. That way, we know what to use (or not to use) to engage further.
Want to grow your database? Not a problem. Tools like ZoomInfo gather details like detailed company profiles, contact information for key decision-makers, insights from their industry, current market trends, prospecting, and sales data. Sure you can search for those details yourself, or you can have them all in one place with one click–quite an expensive click, mind you.
Finally, you’ll need a platform to interact with your target accounts on–and in most B2B cases, that’ll be LinkedIn . With its ability to target specific job titles or industries, it's a great tool for reaching your key decision makers. X and Reddit are also becoming significant channels.
The first step is identifying your target accounts. This should be a collaborative effort between marketing, sales and your management team, as you’ll need a mix of firmographic data, business intelligence and strategic outlook to help you define, discover, and prioritize your high-value accounts. There’s no point in targeting an audience that your C-level management does not count as strategically important.
To create a successful Account Based Marketing plan, define your Ideal Customer Profile. These are the accounts and the titles/people that your product has an almost perfect product market fit with. For example, companies that match current profitable customer profiles that you’d love to replicate. You’ll need to consider revenue potential, along with market influence, ease of sale or potential for higher-than-average profit margins.
It often makes sense to target ABM on companies that are already in your CRM and you have interacted with decision makers in that company before.
This step also includes mapping accounts and pinpoint key internal players in your target accounts. Gaining deep insights into your target accounts is essential for crafting personalized messages that resonate with their specific needs. Understanding their pain points, challenges, and preferences allows you to tailor your approach effectively.
Identify how your target accounts are structured, how decisions are made and who the decision makers and influencers are, and then come up with marketing plans to help you achieve specific objectives.
As always, you’ll need to test, measure and optimize – but since ABM is a long game, you’ll want to decide on what the indicators of your campaign’s success are upfront.That’s the only way to ensure that your campaigns are effective, and improve your results over time. Here are some of the important metrics to track in ABM campaigns:
Run descriptive analytics based on account level activity, and use the data this provides for a more accurate picture of your overall ABM campaign performance, but don’t forget that yor KPIs might be quite different depending on which stage of the funnel you’re currently targeting (we’ve written more about this here).
No inbound content, no ABM campaigns. It’s really that simple.
Account Based marketing campaigns rely on nurturing with tons of content in multiple formats. Once you know who your key players are within each account and what their pain points are, you can start creating high-quality compelling content that’s just for them. Think about how your messaging can address each target account’s specific needs and business challenges. Provide them with something they can gain from you; how do you solve their problem? For example, how does your product shorten their time to delivery, increase their customers satisfaction, etc.
A few more things to consider are:
Step 6: Create engagement
At this point, you’ve selected your targets and created captivating and customized content for them. It’s time to determine the best way to communicate and execute!
It’s critical to ensure your messaging is coordinated across organic and sales channels, and that the sales and marketing teams’ efforts are fully aligned to deliver a cohesive and personalized experience across multiple touchpoints. ABM encourages collaboration and alignment to maximize the impact of your campaigns.
There are many moving parts in Account Based Marketing campaigns, and automation is key to streamlining the often complex processes involved in targeting specific high-value accounts, which means you’ll want to set up your ABM campaign on HubSpot or a similar automation tool. This will allow you to easily scale as you add more accounts, set up ABM workflows from ready-made templates and easily measure the success of your campaigns as you go with powerful reports.
It’s equally important to choose the right channels for your campaigns. You may have the best content in the world, but none of it will be effective if you don’t use the right channels to promote it. Just like Jonathan Perelman had said, "Content is king, but distribution is queen”.
As generally with inbound tactics, it’s important to know where your target audience “lives” online. This will give you insight on which communication channels would be most effective in helping you reach out to them, but it doesn’t necessarily mean you should focus on just one channel.
There’s no point in producing tons of content if you’re not planning on maximizing your distribution efforts as well. If you’re not striving for a balance between content creation and content distribution when allocating your budget, it’s very likely that all the effort invested in creating will simply go to waste - even the best content won’t reach its readers on its own.
A few more things to consider are:
Now that we've covered the importance of Account Based Marketing (ABM) and the key steps to a successful ABM campaign, let's dive into some additional ABM techniques for B2B that can take your strategy to the next level:
Sounds… complicated? Tell us about it! ABM techniques for B2B can be game-changing for all businesses alike looking to make a significant impact in their B2B activities, but it might take time and resources until you master it.
We’re a B2B marketing and RevOps agency specializing in building and implementing successful B2B ABM strategies. Have any questions? Book your free consultation with a B2B expert!