In an information-saturated world, marketers are constantly fighting to attract potential customers. With so many ways to connect with people in today’s society, it’s getting harder for companies to get their information in front of their target markets.
There’s plenty of strategies you can use to try to get your message across, but while you might be getting your product or service in front of people, more times than not, they aren’t the right people. That’s why account-based marketing is the most effective and efficient way to generate high-quality leads. When using an ABM strategy, you can streamline your sales cycle, connecting directly with decision-makers.
Intrigued? Keep reading to learn about how an ABM strategy can help you generate the RIGHT leads for your business!
What is Account-Based Marketing?
So what exactly ABM? Account-based marketing (ABM) is a focused approach to a B2B Strategy that concentrates its efforts and resources to target best-fit accounts within a market. ABM allows you to sell directly to your highest quality, potential customers without wasting time on unqualified leads that might never convert to paying customers.
To execute an ABM strategy effectively, your marketing and sales departments must collaborate to create personalized buying experiences for a mutually identified set of high-value accounts. This helps to weed out low-quality accounts so you and your sales team can skip straight to the process of engaging your most sought-after accounts faster! Effective right? But how do you implement an ABM strategy for your business?
How to Implement an ABM Strategy
The implementation of an account-based strategy can help align your sales with marketing, improve ROI, generate revenue and conversions, and attract valuable customers.
ABM is not a new concept, although it has become more popular over the years due to the increase of a technological society where everyone and everything is connected. With the rapid increase of new technologies, marketers can connect with their customers like never before.
The foundation to building a successful and effective ABM strategy starts with identifying high-value accounts. Once you’ve established a list of valuable customers that you want to target, your sales and marketing team can come together to create personalized campaigns for those specific accounts.
Here is a step-by-step guide to how you can start implementing an ABM strategy:
- Define and Find your High-Value Accounts
First things first, you need to define your strategic accounts. To do this, determine the commonalities between the accounts that currently bring in the most recurring monthly revenue for your business. Look at factors such as location, company size, industry, revenue, profit margin, etc.
- Find Accounts
Once you’ve identified the makeup of organizations that bring the most value to your business, you need to find accounts that match. A key component of this step is researching who the decision-makers are for these accounts and how decisions are made within their businesses. You can take advantage of your own CRM or social platforms such as LinkedIn and Facebook to help with this step. We’ll go more into detail on the types of content you can utilize to successfully execute this step.
- Create Personalized Campaigns For Those Accounts
Now that you have identified the specific accounts you want to target, you need to start building campaigns around those accounts. Create content that speaks directly to the stakeholders and decision-makers of those organizations. In the previous step, when researching the decision-makers of the company, you should identify their pain points as well. Once you understand their pain points, create your messaging around them and how your company can help solve their problems. This is where you will emphasize how your company can make their lives easier.
- Find The Right Platforms
So you have identified the accounts you want to target, who the decision-makers are, and their pain points, now it’s time to find them. All of the research and content that you have created surrounding your accounts will be useless if you’re not targeting them on the right platforms. Find out where they spend their time and what their state of mind is when using certain platforms. Facebook and LinkedIn can be extremely valuable tools for targeting stakeholders and decision-makers.
- Implement Your Campaigns
The hard part is over, now it’s time to start executing your campaigns! But just because your campaigns are launched, doesn’t mean you’re completely done. Be sure to test, measure, and optimize your campaigns to ensure effectiveness and to actively increase your results.
Benefits of an ABM Strategy
From increasing your ROI to expanding your business relationships, if done correctly, there are many benefits to using an account-based marketing strategy.
- Cost Efficiency
When using a lead-based strategy, companies try to acquire as many leads as possible and then determine their quality after the acquisition. This ultimately leads to companies throwing away money on poor quality leads that will never benefit the growth and profitability of their business. As you know by now, unlike a lead-based strategy, ABM helps you skip the fluff and puts you directly in front of decision-makers.
- Aligning Marketing And Sales Team
Account-based marketing helps align your marketing and sales team, ensuring that they are focusing on the same goals. This alignment between the two departments helps ensure all communications and content are consistent for each account you work with. An ABM strategy promotes cross-team collaboration, creating a seamless customer experience due to both departments understanding the full scope of each account.
- Consistent Customer Experience
As mentioned above, when your sales and marketing teams are aligned, the process of delivering a consistent customer experience is much easier. Because your sales team is aligned on the goals and objectives for each account and campaign, they can deliver across the entire buyer’s journey and customer lifecycle seamlessly.
Also, when using an ABM strategy, nurturing your target accounts overall creates a better customer experience because as business professionals, we know that our target customers don’t want to be sold to. They need to be nurtured with information that can help them choose which company is the right fit for them.
- Shorter Sales Cycle
The sales cycle can be a long and daunting process since there are usually multiple stakeholders involved in making final decisions. With an ABM strategy, you can surpass the speed bumps associated with the sales cycle, getting your key message directly in front of the key decision-makers for your target accounts. ABM streamlines your sales cycle by helping you stay efficient. Rather than experimenting with different ways to prospect and qualify a large number of potential accounts, ABM ensures you are only targeting accounts that are ideal for your business’s growth and profitability.
- Stronger Business Relationships
An ABM strategy is built around your customers’ needs. When you’re targeting 1-2 specific accounts, you’re able to dive deep into their needs and pain points, creating content that is highly relevant to their needs. Speaking directly to what your potential accounts are looking for makes them feel heard. Unlike other strategies that develop a generic marketing campaign that speaks to a larger audience.
So, we’ve gone over what an ABM strategy is, how you can implement it, and the benefits of executing one. Now let’s talk about the certain types of content that you can utilize to make your campaign successful.
Examples of content in ABM strategies
We are all aware that in B2B Marketing, your target audience needs more time to make a decision, making it necessary to nurture them and provide them with enough information to feel confident with their decisions. Here are a few ways you can provide the key decision-makers of your highest-quality accounts with the right information they need.
- Case Studies
Case Studies are a great way to show your expertise in your industry. They provide real proof that you can do what you say you can. Although customers want to hear about all the ways you can help them, It means nothing if they don’t SEE it. Visit our website to view more of our case studies. https://ajaxunion.com
- Blogs
Blogging is an important part of any business. Creating a blog helps put a voice behind your company, connect deeper with your audience, and position you as an authority in your industry.
Check out our blog: https://ajaxunion.com/blog/
- Resources
Every B2B company should have some form of an asset library. Creating helpful infographics or content that speaks directly to your audience’s pain points is an extremely valuable tool in an ABM strategy. Also, when you gate your content, you can collect emails to identify leads and nurture them, turning them into prospects and ultimately paying customers.
Check out our resource center for helpful B2B marketing tips! ajaxunion.com/resource-library/
A one-size-fits-all marketing approach is no longer working for most businesses. With the amount of information at our fingertips, our consumers can research and discover what they want and what works best for them. We must cater to our target audiences’ needs, make them feel heard, and provide them with VALUABLE information. That’s why an ABM strategy is an extremely effective way to turn your prospects into clients.
Are you interested in implementing an ABM strategy? We can help! As experts in ABM, we can help you streamline your sales cycle and generate high-quality leads for your business. Contact us today! ajaxunion.com/contact/ Or visit go.ajaxunion.com/strategysession to schedule a free strategy session with one of our B2B marketing strategists.
