Most marketing strategies use broad strokes to cast a wide net. But, sometimes, personalization is key to getting your audience’s attention. An account-based marketing (ABM) approach focuses on delivering tailor-made campaigns that serve a very specific target audience — often just a single potential customer. 

While ABM campaigns vary, all require your sales and marketing teams to collaborate and share insights to construct and implement your strategy. Here’s a guide for setting your ABM campaign up for success. 

What’s account-based marketing?

ABM tactics aim to deliver a curated experience that resonates with a specific, high-priority prospect. Unlike broader campaigns meant to draw in a wide audience, these campaigns use targeted tactics, like one-to-one email campaigns or prospect-specific landing pages that address their unique pain points.

Here are a few benefits of using this focused approach: 

• Sales and marketing alignment: When your sales and marketing teams focus on a single prospect, they can share detailed knowledge and research to craft a stronger, more tailor-made marketing strategy.
• High return on investment (ROI): ABM strategies require less investment since the required research and development processes are so narrowly focused. This enables your marketing team to shoot for significant gains with a smaller budget.
• Increased brand loyalty: A successful ABM campaign nurtures a strong bond between your brand and the target account. Receiving content that speaks directly to their pain points and how you can solve them can make the target audience feel seen and understood. This is a first step to building customer loyalty. And, as you bring the account onboard and develop a strong relationship, this can result in word-of-mouth advertising as your happy customer shares their experience with others, leading to more opportunities for more ABM campaigns.

The role of sales in account-based marketing

Your sales team is integral to an ABM campaign. It’ll be up to them to deliver on the promises your marketing materials make. Here are a few ways sales teams shine during the ABM process. 

Account selection

Sales teams make it their business to know the ins and outs of their industry. They’re your go-to people when deciding which accounts to target. For example, when sales team members attend conferences, they’ll hear about up-and-coming prospects before anyone else, and they can report that to your marketing team.

One-on-one interaction

Typically, your sales team will own face-to-face customer interactions. They’ll attend the same events the customer attends and, if possible, visit their office or arrange a virtual call to spend time talking up your brand. They might also speak at seminars, post or hand out materials, and engage with the company’s employees to keep your brand top of mind.

Collaboration

Your marketing and sales teams will work closely to develop and deliver ABM campaigns. This collaboration leverages each team’s unique, but ever-crucial expertise, to craft a highly specific campaign that resonates with the target prospect. For instance, drawing from their respective areas of expertise, sales and marketing teams can work collaboratively on landing page copy to ensure it speaks to the potential customer’s concerns and preferences. 

What are the 3 pillars of account-based marketing?

Rather than broad appeal and generic messaging, ABM prioritizes the following three pillars to deliver highly effective outreach.

1. Targeting

Marketing and sales teams must develop an ideal customer profile (ICP) — a detailed description of their dream client. With this ICP in mind, sales teams scour the industry landscape for a list of candidates. Then, both teams come together to decide on a prospect to target.

2. Content

With your target customer selected, it’s time to craft personalized campaigns that’ll resonate. Typically, this involves showcasing how your brand can address the target audience’s needs. Say you’re promoting a collaborative task management tool to a solar company. You might highlight how your software uses a calendar to organize solar panel installation timetables and integrates with a map service to optimize service routes.

3. Continuity

ABM requires consistency and repetition. You must share engaging and relevant content across various platforms, such as email, social media, and in-person events, to gain your ideal client’s attention. This might also involve regular face-to-face check-ins with C-suite executives at the company you have your sights on to keep the conversation going as they get closer to making a purchase. 

Types of account-based marketing strategies

Typical ABM campaigns serve a single prospective customer (also known as one-to-one marketing). But the core principles can apply to slightly wider audiences as well. Here are the most common ABM tactics, including a couple with larger target audiences.

One-to-one marketing

This is pure ABM: one marketing strategy to serve a single customer. With this approach (also known as strategic ABM), you outline a specific ICP, search for companies that fit it, and deliver them a tailor-made experience. It’s a narrow tactic that, when done well, increases your win rate.

One-to-few marketing

You can adapt ABM to market to a small group of accounts with similar needs, a tactic that’s called lite ABM. You’ll still use personalized messaging and one-on-one interaction, but scale back both to cast a wider net.

For example, you might market your CRM software to a rideshare app, a marketing agency, and an accounting firm because they all need to manage customer profiles, establish loyal relationships, and schedule services.

One-to-many

Though not a true ABM approach, one-to-many strategies target a large group of potential accounts who share something in common, such as a similar pain point or goal. Based on this common thread, you’ll craft generic advertising campaigns with a hint of personalization to draw in these potential customers. That personalization usually involves using variables in email campaigns that are replaced with customer names, business names, or purchase history details. Hence, this technique is also called “programmatic ABM.”

Say you’re targeting UX designers. You might put up a booth at a software conference to advertise your new design app. As you network with designers, you’ll gain their contact information and learn a bit about them. Then, you can use this information to send them programmatically personalized email campaigns.

How to create an account-based marketing strategy in 8 steps

With this guide, learn how to bring the three pillars of ABM — targeting, content, and continuity — together to craft an end-to-end ABM strategy. 

1. Define key performance indicators 

Start by outlining the key performance indicators (KPIs) you’ll use to track progress and determine success. These KPIs guide your ABM strategy, offering sales and marketing teams direction and making it easier to pinpoint when to make adjustments or pivot entirely. 

Typical KPIs include increased:

• Brand awareness
• Revenue
• Market share
• Conversion rate
• Retention rate

Select a specific set of KPIs, then decide how to measure them.

2. Determine your ideal customer profile 

Marketing and sales teams can work together to develop an ICP — one that directly correlates with your KPIs. If a crucial metric is increased revenue, for instance, you might define your ideal customer as a client with the resources and make it your goal to persuade them to sign up for a long-term, top tier contract with your company. 

3. Research the target account

ABM strategies are most effective when they’re data-driven – you should know the ideal customer that you are going after. With specific insights, you can more effectively engage with your ideal customer. 

With your ideal customer profile in hand, create a list of potential accounts. Then, research each business’s pain points, competitors who are also vying for their attention, and characteristics that might affect their decisions and preferences (like their industry, company size, and business maturity). You can also use information from previous deals to find other good-fit customers.

4. Create a list of accounts

Next, select the list of types of customers that you’ll focus your strategy on. With this focus in mind, conduct more research to better understand key stakeholders within the target company’s organization, the budget they might have available for your product or service, and how you can effectively reach them (like using LinkedIn or Instagram, for instance).

5. Craft a campaign

The marketing team typically takes over here. The team might craft a strategic marketing plan detailing the content marketing materials required to pique the target company’s interest, timelines for producing and sharing these materials, and methods for tracking each tactic’s efficacy (like metrics to gauge how emails versus social posts perform). 

It helps to use platforms like HubSpot or Triblio to orchestrate your strategy. They can maintain the documents, spreadsheets, and databases you need and track your success with AI-assisted insights and detailed analytics.

Here’s how marketing teams using each ABM type might approach their campaigns:

• One-to-one:some text
  • In person events at a company’s office
  • Establishing business partnerships
  • Discount programs for employees
• One-to-few:some text
  • Seminars at a conference
  • Ads posted near the offices of certain companies
  • Landing pages personalized for specific audiences
• One-to-many:some text
  • Programmatically personalized emails
  • Web ads placed on websites frequented by target customers
  • Referral programs with unique incentives for different audiences

6. Adapt your approach

Use marketing analytics tools like HubSpot and Semrush to monitor the efficacy of your efforts and make strategy adjustments when necessary. You might compare how effective it was to include landing page links in a LinkedIn DM versus an email by monitoring click-through rates, for example. 

7. Pass the lead over to the sales team

Once someone at the company you’re targeting has engaged with your marketing materials, like clicking on an ad or subscribing to a newsletter, you’ve generated a lead, known as marketing qualified lead (MQL). When the marketing team feels this target client is ready to purchase, they can hand the lead over to the sales team who’ll close the deal. 

At this point, the sales team can reach out to meet with a decision-maker from the target company. Some account-based sales tactics involve asking the company to market your product to their employees. For example, if you’re marketing time-tracking software, you might host a demo at a design studio that hires contractors and freelancers who need to bill their work accurately. If going in that direction, get in-writing/digital agreements highlighting what you intend to advertise, how, and when.

8. Continue improving the customer relationship

If your target client signs up for a year-long contract, you might kick off a campaign where sales teams check in monthly toward the contract’s end to showcase new features and the positive results of the contract thus far. Plus, you can apply ABM strategies to the ways you nurture your connection with current clients by finding ways to extend contracts and increase the value you offer. 

Level up your account-based marketing strategies

Great ABM strategies are adaptable and dynamic with room to pivot when necessary. This includes collecting valuable data about your customers and having the flexibility to personalize content to meet their needs.

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