If you are an enterprise looking to target your best-fit prospects, account based marketing (ABM) is the right choice for you. It fosters a close alignment between your sales and marketing teams, and helps you convert your target accounts into customers. A look at how the ABM process works:
Step 1: IDENTIFY your best-fit accounts.
Step 2: EXPAND the targeted accounts by adding more contacts within each account.
Step 3: ENGAGE your prospects through different forms of targeted content like email, ads, videos, events etc. This step continues till the prospects become your customers.
Step 4: ADVOCATE and turn your customers into a raving fan of your business.
So unlike the traditional B2B marketing, where you target a large number of accounts, ABM focuses on marketing only to a selected few. It lays emphasis on creating smooth user experiences, inducing engagement and building relationships along the way. The ultimate aim being to convert them into your customers, and then advocates.
Niswey has been involved in formulating ABM strategies for several of its clients. Its Account Based Marketing Services enables its clients’ sales team to market to the kind of accounts they desire, through personalized content, email marketing and targeted advertising. Take a look at how the ABM process works at Niswey.
Niswey’s ABM strategy for its clients involves the following steps:
Our team sits with the client’s sales, marketing and customer success team to identify and understand their sales goals. We ask questions like:
On the basis of this, we identify the characteristics that would make a business a good fit for our clients. For example, details like which industry they should target, company size, location, revenue, technology used, and so on. In other words, we help them define their ideal customer profile.
Then we also speak to our client’s customers. Ask them things like why did they sign up with our client, what do they like about the relationship, their content consumption habits, what could be improved, and so on.
Having done that, we take the next step, i.e., build a list of companies that fit the ideal customer profile criteria for our clients.
Next, we identify the buyer personas: the people your sales and marketing teams will directly engage with during the ABM process. We help you figure out the personas your business needs to cater to, their job description, roles, responsibilities, as well as the challenges they face, and how your product or service will help solve those challenges.
Then for each company in the list, we will help you identify the contacts or stakeholders who you need to target.
Once the target personas are identified, the next step is to engage them. Ad campaigns, email marketing, sales calls, webinars and in-person events are some of the possible ways to do so. And the channels we use depends entirely on what you are selling, who your target persona is, and which stage of the sales cycle they are on.
In general for a new prospect, we create a workflow containing:
A look at the 3-Ad campaign strategies, and what they entail:
Our team at Niswey frames the complete strategy of the workflow, i.e., who is sent what content and through what medium, and which direction the engagement will proceed if the prospect downloads the e-book, and what if he doesn’t.
As of now, we run Ads on several social platforms for our clients, and leverage Terminus to push them out to select contacts and accounts, especially in the US. Terminus allows our clients to hypertarget ads to a set of people, and even personalize the ads for different accounts being targeted.
Broadly speaking, the marketing plan we frame for our client is in tandem with their business goals and sales team requirements. And while the ABM process takes a minimum of 6 months to convert a prospect into a customer, we ensure that the efforts, time and money spent are worth the deal.
The plan has been framed, but there needs to be a control mechanism so that it succeeds in achieving the business goals. Therefore, while framing the campaign strategy for the target personas, we also lay account of the key metrics to be used for monitoring their performance.
These 5 key parameters – Coverage, awareness, engagement, program impact and influence – ensure whether the plan is on track. And if not, it enables us to identify and take corrective measures.
Besides aiding you with solid marketing strategies to turn your prospects into customers, we also continue doing the same for your customers. We help you build relationships with your target accounts, and ensure that they have a smooth user experience before and after becoming your customers. Once this happens, they become your raving fans, and ultimately end up getting you more best-fit customers!
Our ABM strategy for Srijan not only helped them convert a high value account, but also helped them build a sustainable accounts pipeline, with highly engaged decision makers across accounts. And got them nominated for a couple of ABMies too!
Niswey’s team can help your business achieve the same. Book a consultation with us, and we will help you formulate the right ABM strategy for your business.