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In today's hyper-competitive business landscape, Account-Based Marketing (ABM) has emerged as a powerful strategy to target high-value accounts and drive increased engagement. Yet there’s a lot of misconception around ABM. Some believe ABM is only about running programmatic ads or intent data and building ads around that.
The truth is that ABM is a bit more nuanced than that. While intent data does play an important role (as do programmatic ads!), these are just two pieces of a much larger puzzle.
Indeed, to succeed in your ABM endeavors, you must follow a comprehensive approach that includes creating a good audience, delivering personalized content, building an omnichannel strategy, and optimizing lead distribution. The goal is to warm up your leads and build your brand recognition so that you never have to make a cold call again! This leads to more engagement and higher close rates.
If you are new to ABM and want to understand the fundamentals that create the building blocks for successful ABM campaigns, you've come to the right place! Today, we'll walk you through each of these critical elements to help you unlock the secrets to launching an effective ABM campaign and set you up for success as you work towards building your own ABM approach.
One of the foundational steps in ABM is to create a well-defined and highly targeted audience. If you go too broad, you'll be wasting your time targeting accounts that aren't in-market. To target appropriately, you need to drill down by first considering several factors:
Firmographic data helps you categorize organizations based on various factors, enabling more precise segmentation. Start by identifying key firmographic details of your ideal accounts, such as company revenue ranges, industries you want to target, and the locations of your prospective customers.
While first-party data is crucial, consider adding a layer of third-party intent data to gain enhanced insights! B2B intent data tracks the digital footprints of potential buyers, helping you identify who is actively researching online and what products or services they are interested in. This data can uncover new in-market prospects. It can even help you retain existing customers by seeing which of your existing customers is researching your competition.
Incorporate relevant keywords and phrases that align with your audience's attributes. This is similar to setting up a search ad campaign but with a focus on the most pertinent and accurate terms. Select high-quality keywords that best describe your target businesses to ensure maximum accuracy.
ABM hinges on delivering valuable and personalized content that resonates with your target accounts. Various content types can be used at different stages of the ABM process. The secret is to craft content that speaks directly to your target accounts' needs and pain points. Use these various types of content to deliver personalized, thoughtful messaging:
Going omnichannel in your ABM strategy means reaching your target accounts through multiple touchpoints and channels. This includes:
The goal is to create a consistent experience across all these channels and build prospects' trust, which ultimately translates to deals (once you've demonstrated your unique value proposition!).
By providing an omnichannel experience, your leads get exposed to your brand across the different channels they frequent, which helps cultivate more brand visibility and awareness. Once prospects become more comfortable with your brand, they begin to trust it - and this level of comfort ultimately leads to engagement in the form of clicks and downloads before becoming even more direct in the form of meetings, demos, and deals.
To make the most out of an omnichannel approach, get personal by tailoring your messaging to the specific channel and the individual preferences of your target accounts.
Don't forget to analyze your work! Integrating data from different channels is essential to gain transparency of your target accounts buyers' journey and enhance your strategy's effectiveness. You´ll need an Analytics Dashboard to help you better understand your outreach across channels and see how accounts progress through the ABM lifecycle by channel. That includes being able to pinpoint if a prospect is brand-aware, marketing-qualified, or marked for sales engagement.
Here's what you can do to maximize your ABM campaigns and the alignment of sales and marketing:
Streamline your sales workflow. Develop a straightforward and efficient sales workflow that outlines how sales teams should engage with leads, nurturing them through the sales funnel. Customizable Playbooks can help your team map out the entire process and take the guesswork out of the next steps. By having clear processes laid out, your team will know which marketing channels to use, which content to leverage, and the cadence of sales touches (across Linkedin, emails, and sales calls).
Automate your lead handoff process. Set up automated processes that transfer qualified leads from marketing to sales, ensuring sales have the information they need for a timely, individualized follow-up. You´ll need a lead management tool that centralizes engagement and identifies the key contacts you need to reach out to and their contact information. That way, sales can personalize their connections during outreach, find commonality, and humanize the sales process.
Lead scoring. Prioritize high-value accounts and enable sales teams to focus on the most promising prospects based on their level of engagement. Differentiate between cold and warm contacts, based on their familiarity with your brand and level of engagement. Ensure outreach is focused on hot contacts who have already actively engaged with your brand and are the most likely to convert.
Integrate your CRM. Seamlessly integrate your CRM system with ABM to enable real-time data sharing and make it easy to supercharge your outreach.
Your ABM strategy relies heavily on multiple touchpoints for success. ABM campaigns reach highly targeted audiences and social media outreach can help develop trust and build relationships, by delivering messaging that resonates with your target audience.
Social media provides transparency into your prospects' passions, ideas, and even sentiments about your own products and services. When we’re able to validate those passions and become an advocate for our prospects, social media allows you to form long-term business associations that eventually lead to long-term engagement with your target audience.
A successful ABM campaign hinges on creating a well-defined audience, delivering personalized and valuable content, going omnichannel, optimizing lead distribution, and leveraging the right tools and technologies.
Remember that ABM isn’t just about creating programmatic ads or using intent data for targeting. Rather, it’s about integrating everything together to target the right people, create meaningful outreach, and drive higher levels of engagement.
To get a full sense of the full potential of ABM, Download Your ABM Campaign Guide or try Propensity for free today! to learn more about how to achieve ABM success.
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