Hello! I welcome you to check out this guide that I’ve written on Account-Based Marketing. This guide consists of the key strategies & tools you can use to get high-value clients for your business.
Let’s quickly go through what exactly account-based marketing(ABM) is.
The strategic approach of identifying high-value leads & targeting them with a specific strategy to convert them into high-value clients/ accounts is called account-based marketing. There are various approaches by which you could successfully get business from these accounts. This marketing strategy is typically used on an enterprise level & not for small-scale purposes.
Just imagine how great it would be to sell your business/services directly to the highest-valued accounts instead of wasting time on smaller accounts. Personalizing the buyer’s experience & tailoring the content, communication & campaign towards only the high-value accounts can get you the most ROI.
Let’s understand account-based marketing a bit more, shall we?
Implementing an Account-Based Marketing Strategy
Executing an account-based marketing strategy is not an easy task. However, it can get you immense value out of it when done right. Ideally, you should approach big businesses & their founders to generate the most ROI. This strategy is of very less use if you target smaller businesses as you’ll be putting your time & efforts towards getting lower returns.
I will show you some essential steps you need to take for your account-based marketing strategy to work.
How to Identify the Right Targets?
First and foremost, you need to identify the right accounts to make this strategy work. Without the right target or set of targets, you won’t be able to convert those leads into clients/accounts successfully. So how will you determine who are the right targets & who aren’t?
Well, targeting the right accounts for your business depends on the type of business/ service you provide. When identifying an account, you must analyze how much revenue you could generate from that account. Also, carefully studying if their company is growing or not is essential for you to sustain the account.
You can start by looking at your own database for the accounts that meet these criteria:
- Big spenders
- Accounts who renew your plans
- Accounts who don’t complain too much
- Accounts who are successful with your platform
These are essentially your best customers. You should make a list of these accounts to understand what type of customers they are & which market segment they belong to for better targeting. What you should be doing is instead of trying to get people who may or may not become your clients, you should focus on people who are already spending money on your platform.
I suggest you consider analyzing your competitors as well. Who are they selling to? Could you tap into their accounts? How will you make your competitor’s accounts switch to yours? All these questions should be asked while target identification & acquisition. Don’t worry; I’ll explain how will you do these things & get accounts even from your competitors. Most of these steps are applicable for fresher accounts & the accounts your competitors currently handle.
Tools for Identifying the Right Targets
There are some tools out there in the market to identify these right accounts. For example, the Find Emails & Search Emails by Domain are tools that help you get emails of the people(high-value accounts/ potential targets). Use these emails to send them a personalized invitation & connect with them. To penetrate into the people’s minds, you need to come up with an exciting ice-breaker relevant to your target audience’s niche or liking.
For the Find Emails tool, you just need to enter the full name of the account you want to target along with their company domain name. To use the Search Emails by Domain tool, you need to enter the company name in the tool & start finding a list of emails associated with that company. Both these tools come with a very easy-to-use interface to avoid confusion.
To understand what those founders of the big companies like, you need to research in-depth about them & their company. This brings us to the next step, which is Conducting Research.
Conducting Research
Now, I will explain how to conduct research, which tools to use for conducting research & how will it benefit you.
Research is a crucial & one of the most important aspects of any marketing strategy & ABM is no exception to it. You must carefully research your potential accounts based on their business growth, financial conditions, how they spend money, where they invest, their goals & future plans to develop the most effective account-based marketing strategy.
I suggest you also make a list of your ideal 100 accounts that will be successful if they know about your platform. You will be determining these 100 accounts based on the data you gather.
Tools for Conducting Research
You can use Crunchbase, which is a platform where you find company details. Use this tool to find key details such as the size of the company, number of employees, funding type, IPO status, total funding amount, details on the investors, partners and much more. To use this tool, simply go to their website & search for the company name or the name of the person that you want to target. You will get results segregated by organizations, people, hubs & events categories to understand the targeted accounts better.
You can also use the B2B Lead Search tool, which provides you with similar key information for targeting accounts. To use this tool, simply enter the name of the type of business & the city you want to target accounts from.
These tools are probably the best account-based marketing tools for conducting research.
Customize Marketing Campaigns
After thoroughly researching the target accounts, you need to customize your account-based marketing campaign suitable for getting the accounts on board. Every account requires a different approach to fulfilling its goals & get business effectively. The sales & marketing teams must work closely & coordinate with each other when customizing the marketing campaign for an account.
You need to look at the accounts as not only accounts but also identify the core people. Core people of a business include the Founders, CEOs, CIOs or Sales Heads whoever you want to sell your service to. These are your customers whom you want to tailor your all marketing strategy & efforts to.
When you’ve researched an account, you will know their online behavior, interests, attitude & perceptions, among many other things. You then need to build a persuasive & effective manifesto. Make a pdf or a PowerPoint file containing your go-to marketing strategy to attract these accounts. The key thing to understand is that you need something that uniquely speaks to the core accounts. Get their attention & communicate the value that you provide. You can also use the key data points to build a custom-based marketing campaign through various data-driven online tools, personalized emails or even cold calls.
Tools for Customizing Marketing Campaigns
You can use Hubspot’s Marketing Plan Generator, which is used to identify important marketing initiatives & track the metrics for improving your marketing campaign. You also can reach out to an account via personalizing email. I would suggest you start your email with a catchy phrase (ice-breaker) that might interest the account. Of course, when you research an account thoroughly, you will know their topic of interest & even their personality, which might be advantageous. What matters is how you execute the strategy after the research process.
Launching the Campaign for the Target Accounts
Once, you’ve got the messaging right, all that’s left is for you to launch the campaign for the targeted accounts. Launching the campaign include all the sales & marketing actions that you carry out on a weekly basis. You need to run a concrete marketing campaign based on your manifesto daily or weekly to effectively penetrate the accounts’ minds. When they see value & benefits from your service, they will buy it.
There are a few ways to reach out to the accounts. You can use social media or share blog posts that are specifically valuable to the accounts to generate interest. You can also retarget those accounts that are interacting with your website. Retargeting makes people see your content everywhere which might help you get business from such accounts.
What makes the ABM such a great marketing strategy is that you are not limited to digital platforms. You can use courier services such as FedEx or Blue Dart to send them personalized envelopes, which might be very effective. You can send a copy of your manifesto in these envelopes to drive sales. Also, try inviting these high-value accounts on a webinar or for dinner to have a one-on-one meeting online or in person.
Measuring the Custom Marketing Campaigns
Once you’ve launched an account-based marketing campaign, you need to constantly evaluate how it is running. If you feel anything is lacking, you can add a few things to make it better. Modify your daily or weekly marketing strategies based on how the results you get. Higher engagement means you are doing the right things & it may not require much modifications. However, if your campaign is not turning out fruitful, then you might need to make some tweaks for better results.
These are a few Key Point Indicators to analyze & measure your marketing campaign:
- Return on Investment(ROI)
- Cost per Lead
- Customer Lifetime Value
- Conversion Rate
- Website Traffic
- Client Retention Rate
Still not convinced if ABM is one of the best types of marketing strategies? Let me tell you a few benefits of account-based marketing.
- Personalized marketing approach
- Linkage of sales and marketing
- Shorter sales cycle
- Saves time & resources
- Excellent ROI
- Can be used with other marketing strategies
- Cost efficient
- Build trust & long-term relationship
Account-Based Marketing via Social Media
There are various social media tool that you can use to run campaigns. I’ll even list down a few tools that you can use on popular social media sites.
LinkedIn:
The Company Targeting feature of LinkedIn is very useful if you want to connect & drive sales from LinkedIn. Use can also use the LinkedIn Email Finder & LinkedIn Group Scraper tools to find emails & important details of potential accounts.
Twitter:
Twitter is a very powerful social media platform where you will find almost all the big businesses. Use Twitter Email Finder & Twitter Follower Email Finder tools to find the emails of the accounts that you want for outreach.
Using Social Media along with other methods is an effective Account-Based Marketing strategy.
Final Words
So, I hope by now you’ve understood what an Account-Based Marketing Strategy is & how will you successfully carry out the campaign for it. Please take a good amount of time to identify & research your accounts before you dive into customizing your marketing campaign. I really hope that this article benefits you & I’m looking forward to reading your comments. Feel free to check out the blog page for more such exciting Growth Hacks.
