How to launch an Account based marketing campaign?
Understanding the significance of ABM begins with why B2B companies are increasingly turning to this approach.
Before diving into the ABM process, tools, and strategies, it's crucial to comprehend the driving force behind ABM campaigns and their impact on addressing business challenges.
At its core, ABM is about care for potential clients - Rather than bombarding them with generic emails or marketing campaigns, ABM focuses on personalized engagement to meet their needs, interests, and pain points.
This approach ensures that your message resonates with the right audience at the right time, delivering relevant content that fosters meaningful connections. By applying ABM, businesses can optimize their budget, refine targeting efforts, and ultimately enhance the flow of valuable leads.
What is ABM?
ABM, or Account-Based Marketing, is a strategic approach adopted by companies to prioritize targeted marketing efforts over broad campaigns. ABM campaigns come in various types, tailored to fit specific business needs and marketing strategies. Acting as a bridge between sales and marketing teams, ABM plays a crucial role in providing support to sales efforts. Often, ABM campaigns serve as air cover for sales teams, assisting them in swiftly closing deals. This alignment between sales and marketing ensures a more focused and effective approach to acquiring and nurturing valuable client relationships.
Types of ABM
This approach involves crafting customized marketing campaigns and strategies tailored to address the unique needs of individual accounts or clients. It is particularly effective for high-value accounts, navigating complex sales cycles, and strategically important accounts.
One-Few ABM usually works well for accounts that need a personalized approach instead of mass targeting. This method is especially helpful for businesses handling a few important accounts, dealing with somewhat complex sales processes, or building relationships with important clients in important industries.
One-to-Many ABM is customized marketing strategy to target multiple accounts with similar characteristics or needs using personalized marketing campaigns. Unlike One-to-One ABM, where each account receives individualized attention, One-to-Many ABM involves grouping accounts based on commonalities and delivering tailored content and messaging to each group.
Advantages of Account Based Marketing
Focused Targeting: ABM helps you concentrate your marketing efforts. You can narrow down your marketing to top accounts and high-value clients. This way, you'll spend your marketing budget more precisely, making your campaigns more ROI-driven.
Personalized Approach: It's true that one size doesn't fit all. It's important to understand what your audience is looking for and tailor your offerings and content to address their pain points. With ABM, you can customize your messaging and content to meet the specific needs of individual accounts, leading to deeper engagement and relationships.
Alignment with Sales: Businesses have realized that sales and marketing can't work in silos. Effective ABM campaigns require collaboration between marketing and sales teams. By combining insights from the sales team with real-time intelligence from marketing, ABM can drive great business results.
Enhanced ROI: ABM campaigns are mostly focused on ROI. They target accounts that will drive real business results. Hence, B2B companies often prefer ABM over other marketing tactics.
Improved Customer Experience: Marketing is about caring. By creating a content journey that addresses customers' pain points, ABM campaigns can enhance the customer experience and make the buying decision easier.
Increased Customer Retention: It's true that 70% of revenue comes from 20% of existing clients. ABM makes it seamless to communicate with your existing accounts, thus improving customer retention.
Measurable Results: With ABM, you can measure the impact you're making on each account. You can track engagement with your content, form fills, and conversations with the sales team, providing clear and measurable results.
Steps to Follow Before You Launch Your ABM Campaign
Identifying Ideal Accounts: The first step is to identify the top accounts you want to target. Target accounts can be finalized with input from both the sales and marketing teams.
Developing Buyer Personas: Understanding your buyers' journey is crucial. Creating detailed buyer personas for each target account is essential. Consider key decision-makers and influencers to better understand their needs and preferences.
Tailored Content Creation: Content is crucial. Focus on addressing your clients' pain points, organizational needs, and business challenges they are facing.
Marketing Tactics: Decide which marketing tactics you want to align with to reach your target audience. For example, will it be LinkedIn, webinars, email, programmatic advertising, etc.?
Sales and Marketing Alignment: Sales plays a key role in launching a leak-proof ABM campaign. The sales team can help align target accounts and their pain points.
Leveraging Technology: It's impossible to launch an ABM campaign without the help of marketing automation tools. These tools help you launch, track, and nurture your target audience. Platforms like HubSpot and Pardot are key for your ABM campaigns.
Measurement and Optimization: Have KPIs and tracking platforms in place to measure the effectiveness of the ABM campaign. Ensure proper tracking and tagging before you launch your campaign.
Looking to implement a strong ABM campaign for your organization? Talk to us today, and one of our ABM experts will give you a call.
