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What if your sales team could identify the best fit or high-value leads from potential leads, target them with personalized messaging, and convert those leads into customers? It could give you an edge over competitors and help you convert better.
Does the above sound too good to be true? Well, it’s all possible with account-based marketing. With account-based marketing, your sales team can get access to high-value leads and target them in a hyper-personalized manner ensuring higher conversions.
This blog talks about everything from what account-based marketing is to the benefits it offers and how you can create an account-based marketing strategy for your business. So, read in full.
Account-based marketing is about hyper-segmenting your key accounts and creating a marketing strategy around those accounts.
In account-based marketing, sales and marketing teams come together, identify high-value accounts (businesses) based on ideal customer profiles, understand them (their needs and pain points), and launch highly targeted campaigns to convert them into customers.
Unlike traditional marketing, account-based marketing focuses on creating content and launching campaigns keeping the target segment in mind, making it more impactful.
Unlike traditional marketing’s one-to-many approach, account-based marketing focuses on one-to-one engagement.
With ABM, your sales team can target high-value accounts (prime decision markers or stakeholders) and present solutions specific to their pain points that help with better conversions. And as your sales team is targeting a few chosen accounts, your marketing spend reduces, improving your ROI.
In addition, high-value accounts tend to stay longer and spend more than regular prospects, which improves the customer lifetime value and, thus, ROI.
ABM marketing requires you to study your accounts closely.
Using firmographic and technographic data, you can understand the profile of your target accounts, what technology they use and gaps in there, where your solution may fit-in etc.
This kind of data can help you understand your prospects like no other, which gives you a chance to personalize your messaging. And personalizing is really rewarding.
For instance, personalization helps reduce customer acquisition costs by around 50% and boost your revenue by about 15%, according to McKinsey & Company.
In a nutshell, if you use ABM, you can understand your customers better and offer them personalized experience throughout the customer acquisition process, which is better for your business’s bottom line.
Account-based marketing requires you to target high-value accounts in a personalized way. Everything from your content to the way you position your product is tailored specifically for individual accounts, which increases the relevance of your business among high-value accounts. It makes them understand exactly how your product/service solves their problems.
In addition, using different yet relevant channels (emails, ads) to target high-value accounts will help you brand visibility. And this, again, adds to the relevance.
The saying “quality over quantity” fits quite right in the account-based marketing scenario. Because in ABM marketing, your sales reps engage and delight a handful of high-quality accounts instead of trying to close thousands of poorly qualified leads.
When your sales reps patiently engage with your prospects, it creates a kind of relationship which helps with easy conversions and also helps retain customers for longer. And when customers stay for longer, they spend more which is good for your business’s bottom line. Also, retention is always affordable and more beneficial than acquiring new customers.
In addition, loyal customers will automatically refer your business to other businesses and act as your brand advocates bringing you more leads and reducing eventual customer acquisition costs.
Here’s how you can create an ABM strategy:
The first step towards creating your account-based marketing strategy is bringing your sales and teams together. If you’re wondering why it is important, here’s why:
Remember what’s ABM all about: targeting high-value accounts, engaging with them, offering them a personalized experience, and eventually converting them into customers. And this isn’t possible unless your sales and marketing teams are on the same page and aligned.
For instance, if your marketing doesn’t follow a hyper-targeted approach, it may not be able to generate high-value or high-quality leads for your sales team to act on. And if your sales team doesn’t understand the potential of high-quality leads, your marketing team’s efforts will be in vain.
So, ensure that your sales and marketing teams are aligned and on the same page.
Account-based marketing is a complete strategy and not a way to execute campaigns. So, you’ll need dedicated resources to create, execute and track your ABM campaigns successfully.
For instance, you need a marketing manager to generate quality leads, a sales manager to ensure that the sales team communicates perfectly, a content team to create personalized content, and an account executive to execute the ABM strategy.
To identify your target accounts, you need to first create an ideal customer profile depicting what your ideal customer looks like. Once you have an ICP, you can find the best match, i.e., high-value accounts.
After you’ve found the right accounts, learn about them and their pain points & needs. Use technographic data (technology stack, tools they’re using, gaps), firmographic data (client base, key decision makers, industry, company size), and buyer intent (intention to make a purchase) to deeply understand your accounts. Prioritize them using lead scoring and help your sales team target the ones who top the priority list.
Pro Tip: To understand more about the target accounts, you need technographic, intent, and firmographic data, which is fairly complex to get. You might end up investing way too many resources and still not get the data you actually need. So, connect with reliable data enrichment and lead generation company such as DAT-A-CCURATE.
DAT-A-CCURATE can help you enrich your target accounts with accurate intent and firmographic and technographic data. This way, you can prioritize the accounts and launch better campaigns.
Once you know who your target accounts are, create content that’s relevant to them. When you studied your target accounts (in the previous step), you must’ve come across their pain points. So create content that addresses those pain points and ensure it resonates with your prospects perfectly.
Also, choose whatever channels you find relevant to reach out to your audience. Common examples are paid ads, guest posts, cold emailing, etc.
Launch your ABM campaign by distributing your content across relevant channels. Once the content is out there for long enough, you can opt for outbound methods such as cold emails or calls. As your sales reps will have more context and a better understanding of the prospect, you can expect these outbound efforts to perform really well.
It’s time to check how your ABM campaign performed and if your account-based marketing tactics bore fruits. For this, you can choose and keep an eye on some KPIs such as conversion rate, customer acquisition churn, etc. (refer to the complete list of KPIs here). And compare them each time you launch a campaign. This way, you’d know what’s working and what needs more effort.
ABM marketing is undoubtedly one of the best ways to get a competitive advantage by identifying, targeting, and converting high-value accounts using the power of personalization.
However, to take advantage of ABM, you must carefully craft, execute, monitor, and tweak your ABM strategy. If you’re too occupied and think you need professional assistance, which is a smart move, you can contact an account-based marketing expert such as DAT-A-CCURATE.
Experts at DAT-A-CCURATE will help you integrate customer profiles, buyer intent, and technographic and firmographic data and craft sales and marketing strategies accordingly. This way, you can focus on your existing operations and experience the benefits of ABM at the same time.
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