How to Create a Winning ABM Strategy for Your Business?
Is ABM the Right Approach for Your Business?
Some surefire ways to determine whether account-based marketing is the right choice for you is to determine whether:
- The sales cycle involves a research/evaluation phase and it often involves multiple stakeholders.
- Your sales and marketing teams are looking to make a bigger impact with a more strategic focus.
- You’ve noticed that existing buyers who generate the most revenue have distinct characteristics, or you have identified accounts with distinct characteristics that can generate more revenue.
- There are organizations with needs that your solution clearly addresses.
- Your organization is looking to break into a new segment, territory, or vertical, or going after your competitor’s customers.
- Your organization offers several products or services and has set goals to grow buyer lifetime value through up-selling and cross-selling.
How to Create a Winning ABM Strategy for Your Business?
Choosing target accounts will vary for every company as each organization has unique business goals and a personalized strategy that’ll determine its criteria. Before you start putting together an ABM plan, there are three key foundations to look into:
- Purpose of your ABM program
- Accounts you are targeting
- Prospects within those accounts that you’re targeting
Identify and Pick Your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)
Before you get started with your ABM efforts, your marketing and sales operations need to do some heavy research to help you make an informed decision about the accounts you select. Determine which industry, company size, location, annual revenue, up-sell opportunity, profit margin, etc. are right for yielding your business the highest long-term profits. This research needs to be both qualitative and quantitative.
If you don’t know which accounts to target or have exhausted your initial list, collaborate with the marketing team to build a predictive model. Predictive analysis takes into account millions of data attributes from both internal and external sources (company’s tech stack, hiring trends, social media activities, funding level, marketing solution, CRM, blog posts, third-party websites, social media channels, etc.), then applies machine learning to understand who is showing the highest propensity to purchase.
Next, prioritize your accounts and decide which ones to go after first. It’s crucial to prioritize the lists in order to demonstrate early success and maximize your ABM ROI.
“Give priority to the account types that are most relevant to you—the accounts where you have a good understanding of the potential buying journey and those that you already have content to support.” – Marketo
Map Your Accounts
After you’ve prioritized your target accounts, start mapping personas inside each key account. This will give you a closer look at which buying groups are best to target. You must understand your audiences well – what challenges each persona faces, what impacts their decision, and who makes those decisions.
- Have a plan that focuses on the key part of the organization. Consider the
- Financial health
- Business initiatives
- Personnel developments
- Technologies
- Organizational structure
- SWOT analysis
- Industry analysis
Successful and effective marketing should start by understanding your audience. This is especially important when the audience makes up an entire buying group, or a specific set of key individuals who decide when, what, and where to make the purchase.
Create the Right Content
You must have relevant content to communicate the value of your solutions to your ABM audiences. To offer custom-tailored brand experience across all channels, consider personalizing content for the contacts at your accounts.
Creating scalable content to support your ABM model across the entire buying cycle might sound a bit overwhelming at first but not impossible. Before you start to make original content from scratch, look at what you already have in your library. You may have a comprehensive list of content with details about its date, audience, and so on that can be put to use or help you find potential gaps.
This way you know which content to update, repurpose, or discard from your repository. Start by building an effective content strategy for your target accounts once you’ve got a clear idea of what content you have, the gaps that exist in the content repository, and who you’re creating the content for. You can use a content/message matrix to map what content you’re going to use to reach your target across the buying journey.
Distribute your content across social, email, websites, etc. and make sure the process is organized so that no target account receives the same content twice, or any irrelevant content for the stage they’re in.
To engage your ABM audiences, your content has to be personal, relevant, and timely.
Measure and Optimize Your Account Based Marketing Results
You can’t gauge the success of any of the strategies without understanding its revenue impact. So, you must make your ABM results actionable, tangible, and available in real time. It is reported that about 60% of CMOs have trouble proving their ROI – one of the main reasons for that is not asking the right questions.
Once your campaign has been running for 30 to 60 days, check to see:
- Whether your personalized content proved to be engaging? If so, how?
- If the accounts are becoming more engaged with your brand?
- Whether you are expanding the number of known stakeholders within these organizations?
- Did you move any of these targeted leads down the funnel?
- Whether you’ve generated any revenue from these campaigns?
- What could you do better going forward?
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