Marketers are often tempted to cast their net wide when seeking to snare new leads – after all, it seems efficient to produce one piece of marketing collateral and send it out everywhere. Something is bound to bite, surely?
Some do, but perhaps not nearly as many as we’d like. What if there was a more powerful way to find quality leads that are much more likely to be receptive to your message?
That method is Account Based Marketing, or ABM. This concentrates marketing efforts on a small number of targeted accounts, delivering highly personalized messages that appeal to particular people or groups of people in the organization.
But how do you make effective use of this powerful tool?
Read our top six tips to successful Account Based Marketing.
Targets in sight
Despite what you may have heard, successful ABM is not about targeting individuals – instead it is about aiming at the right organizations.
So, you need to find the right organizations, the ones that bring in the highest monthly recurring revenue. Look at what they have in common – industry, location, company size, revenue. You’ll need data from both marketing and sales, but don’t forget intuition and your gut feeling about what looks like a good prospect.
Who’s the Daddy?
Once you have a good list of prospect organizations, it’s time to dig deeper and find the people that will really matter to your campaign – basically, who makes the decisions? And how are those decisions made?
Find out how the organization runs, who reports to whom and how you influence the key stakeholders. Make use of your Customer Relationship Management system, people in your sales department who see these people regularly and tools such as LinkedIn and Facebook.
Get personal
With a list of real people, it’s time to put together compelling content that will grab the attention of those individuals. Understand their pain points and how your content can offer them the solutions.
Your design and sales team are your main colleagues here – work with them to make your content jump out from the crowd but also contain the right messages for these key people. Remember that the content should be personalized to the organization’s needs – it needs to speak to them, not to everyone.
Right place, right time…
So you have great content – but how is it going to reach your target audience? You need to make sure you are promoting it in the right places.
Get to know where your chosen stakeholders spend time online and ensure they can access that content from that website or platform. Again, Facebook and LinkedIn are your friends because you can use them to run specific campaigns that reach your target organizations.
For example, write a blog on a forum that you know one of your prospects looks at regularly and quote one of their articles or presentations that is connected with your product or service. It’s all about making that connection that says something to them personally.
…but don’t overdo it
It’s time to launch, but don’t go overboard with your content. By bombarding your prospects with the same messages from different sources, you run the risk of turning them off.
Also, make sure you haven’t set up your channels to speak to only one or two people – you are aiming to reach an organization and the important, influential people within it, not a single person.
Did it measure up?
Run the campaign for between one and two months to give it the chance to make an impact, then see how it went.
Questions to ask include: Did the content engage with people and if it did, how did it do it? Are the accounts engaging with your brand? Did the leads get closer to doing what you want them to do? Did the campaign have any effect on revenue? What could you do better in the future?
The campaign may not have met all your hopes, but the important thing is getting measurable results, good or bad. You can then tweak your approach and techniques to get those numbers moving in the right direction. Done well, ABM can be powerful – follow these tips and you could be well on your way to making it a standard part of your marketing toolbox.