Here we are going to discuss Account Based Marketing best practices and take a look at what you need, to run a successful account based marketing strategy.
But before we get to that, let’s take a look at some numbers to understand why exactly we need AB
- For B2B Marketers, generation of high quality leads is the biggest challenge and only 0.75% of the total leads generated become closed revenue
- Given the low levels of conversion, a lot of businesses are turning to pursuing targeted accounts and converting them, rather than waiting for a broad array of leads to turn to customers. 86% of marketing and sales professionals in the B2B segment have started using account based targeted strategies
- And 85% of the marketers already using Account Based Marketing believe it has a greater ROI.
Since ABM is bringing in great results, account based marketing tactics are here to stay. But if businesses are to truly benefit from it, they have to do this the right way.
So let’s get down to understanding some Account Based Marketing best practices:
Keeping sales and marketing closely aligned
According to a 2016 survey by Bizible, ‘marketers doing ABM are about 40% more likely to report alignment with their sales compared to marketers not doing ABM.’
When you have specific accounts to pursue, the sales and marketing teams have to work in a close-knit environment all throughout the marketing funnel. To create a good Account Based Marketing strategy, the sales and marketing teams must work to identify target accounts, develop a communication strategy with outreach tactics, and monitor the progress of the campaign.
Know what your account needs
Focus on understanding the key concerns, challenges, and requirements of your accounts.
While accounts belonging to the same industry will have the same problems, it will manifest in different ways. And the content you create for each of these accounts will have to be tweaked to address each accounts’ specific concerns.
That makes your content immensely more valuable than the generic industry-based content, and generates greater engagement and trust.
Create a ideal customer persona checklist
One of the many advantages of Account Based Marketing is that it brings down the number of irrelevant accounts/leads that you go after, and you can instead focus all your efforts on select targets. But you need to have some sort of metrics or checklist in place to help decide if a particular account is indeed worth pursuing. This checklist should give you a clear picture of your ideal customer persona, and your sales and marketing teams should stick to it while identifying target accounts.
For example: If you are a company building enterprise technology solutions, your checklist can include metrics like industry, annual turnover, current technology stack, countries of operation, etc. This can help select companies that your team can ideally approach and do business with.
Use resources optimally
A client specific marketing strategy has been proven to be more engaging to prospects and customers. Account Based Marketing creates content that the key decision makers would want and/or need throughout the buyer’s journey, taking personalized marketing to the next level. Creating this content requires a ton of research.
But more often than not, you already have a lot of information and raw material available to create this content. For example: if sales is currently in touch with a decision maker at the account, and knows that they are struggling with a specific challenge, it must be conveyed to marketing so they can create appropriate content.
Or you might have a few blog posts that you can combine into a great e-book.
So you have to take a look at everything that you have and plan how best to use it, to serve accounts at each stage of the buyer’s journey.
Track everything
An ABM Adoption Report states that, ‘ABM’s ability to drive revenue creates benefits for the marketing organization. The ultimate goal for a marketing organization is to not just influence revenue, but to attribute a measurable contribution to revenue.’
Businesses will be unable to measure ABM’s contribution to revenue without effective tracking. Each content piece, ad campaign, or email campaign should have defined goals, and their performance should be measured against those goals.
How many leads did the email campaign bring in? How many accounts are actively engaging with your content? These and more questions should be asked to evaluate your efforts. The effectiveness of each of these components will determine the strength of your ABM strategy, and ensure that it’s contribution is measurable.
Tracking also helps you identify where your strategy might be faltering, and make corrections in time.
So, those were some of the account based marketing best practices.
If you are looking to start an ABM strategy for your business, Niswey is an Account-Based Marketing company that can help.
How about we get that conversation started?
