Account-based marketing (ABM) is one of the many marketing approaches businesses are applying today that you might also benefit from. In this article, we’ll cover a few ways ABM can help you potentially close bigger deals for your business. Let’s begin.
Identify your target accounts
You can’t launch successful ABM marketing campaigns without taking the time for your setup to include research on who your target accounts are going to be.
The difference between ABM and other marketing strategies is that they focus more on hyper-specific accounts. Most of the time, other campaigns are catering to specific demographics. However, ABM gets deeper into its target accounts. Hence, the name.
By focusing on specific accounts that align with your ideal customer profile, you can tailor your marketing efforts to address their unique needs and pain points.
Once you know your target accounts, you have a direction for gathering information about their industry, challenges, and goals. Use that information to create highly personalized and relevant content that resonates with them on a deeper level. By delivering messages that speak directly to their pain points, you demonstrate an understanding of their business and establish credibility.
By concentrating your resources on a select group of high-value accounts, you allocate more time and effort to building strong relationships with those organizations.
Since they’re more familiar with you, it increases your chances of closing bigger deals.
Marketing teams often don’t interact as often between accounts and themselves, especially compared to sales teams. However, with ABM, both teams can align their efforts toward engaging with the right stakeholders at the right time.
This coordinated approach helps streamline the sales process and ensures that all interactions address the specific needs of each account.
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Create targeted content
A significant aspect of your ABM approach that will change, given your now more profound understanding of target accounts, would be your content marketing. Since you know your audience well, you can create deeper and more targeted content.
To create targeted content, start by utilizing your understanding of target accounts’ unique pain points and challenges. This knowledge will help you make more engaging content since it helps solve these pain points.
Part of creating targeted content is a content strategy that aligns with your ABM goals. It makes sure that your content production efforts are organized too. Your content strategy should help you decide on the best content formats and channels for you to be in.
Don’t forget personalization in your content too.
It would help if you used language and messaging that directly addresses their pain points and offers solutions that align with their objectives.
If you want better ways to create your content, you should also look into data or team up with any of the popular enterprise partners to help you do it.
Analyze past campaign performance and customer behavior data to make content that targets your accounts truly. If you want impactful content, data-driven insights are an excellent foundation for them.
Don’t forget to ensure your messaging remains consistent across different touchpoints with the target accounts. Otherwise, the lack of consistency across other channels unintentionally confuses your target audience.
Define your target audience with ICPs
One way to better define your target audience for your content and marketing efforts would be through creating your ICPs.
Your ideal customer profile or ICP will help you create more targeted marketing efforts, but they’ll also help you build up an effective sales prospects list.
Defining your target audience through a comprehensive ICP involves analyzing data, conducting market research, and understanding the characteristics of your most successful customers. Consider factors such as industry, company size, job titles, pain points, challenges, and buying behaviors.
Once you clearly understand who your ideal customers are, you can tailor your ABM campaigns accordingly.
Defining your ideal customer profile’s demographic, psychographics, and other details will take much more work than assumptions. It is in your best interest to contact your ideal customers directly. Otherwise, all your ideas around your ICP will be pure guesswork.
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Reach out at the right time
Since ABM needs your sales and marketing teams to work together, it’s a good idea to figure out when to directly reach out to your clients and be part of your ABM efforts.
The sweet spot would be that your prospect has interacted with enough of your marketing materials that when your sales team approaches them, they’ll be more open to doing business with you.
There are many ways to better your outreach approach. One aspect that’s worth bettering would be your email outreach approach.
Researching appropriate email marketing strategies for client outreach can help you have a better response rate for your email campaigns. Newsletters are also a viable way to warm up your leads until they’re more open to your sales team.
Reach out with the proper messaging
Part of improving your outreach is by using proper messaging.
Sure, you might’ve reached out to them at the right time, but if the content of your messages isn’t compelling enough, you might end up souring the interaction.
You should modify your copy based on your messaging or outreach vehicle choice. For example, emails should have compelling subject lines. Your messages on social media platforms should have great opening lines.
Even your ads should have the proper messaging if you want to increase your sales conversions through them.
Proper messaging coupled with excellent timing can make for a killer outreach approach and is a perfect marriage for your sales and marketing teams in your ABM campaign.
Target critical accounts with digital ads
If you want to reach more people, digital ads are a powerful tool to help you achieve that.
When you serve ads to the right people, your email outreach open rates might increase because you are more familiar with them.
It helps that a digital ad campaign is also quite measurable. Therefore, you can optimize your future digital ad campaigns and tweak them to their most efficient form with messaging that hits hard for your target accounts.
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Be diligent about follow-ups
Finished messaging a prospect and didn’t get a reply? Don’t beat yourself up about it, and don’t move on just yet.
For many people, they need several touchpoints first before they finally convert. The more convoluted the product or service you provide, the longer the process may be for your prospect. Therefore, following up a few times should be part of your outreach.
How often to follow up depends on the company, per prospect, and even per product/service offering. However, a good rule would be the Rule of Seven in following up.
Key takeaways
ABM campaigns that follow these approaches have a higher chance of closing bigger deals simply because of the union between target account understanding, sales, marketing coordination, and great content in the campaign. Pay attention to these tips if you run an ABM campaign.
