3 Ways Social Media Can Steer Account-Based Marketing Campaigns toward Success

These days, importance of account-based marketing is hard to ignore in the B2B marketing field in achieving revenue growth. But, marketers who are solely relying on ABM strategies with no attention paid to other marketing strategies could be making a serious mistake. Especially if they have not tapped the potential of targeting, educating and personalizing communication of social media, they could be retracting possibilities of better account selection, more effective nurturing, more personalized offers, direct meetings, more accurate retargeting, better messaging and many other perks of social media integration. Why? Simply because social media, similar to account-based marketing, aids in building personalized relations with prospects and customers, customized communications, finding and focusing on the right accounts, and targeting and communicating with influencers and audiences. No wonder many ABM marketers are adopting social media integration to their account-based marketing campaigns.

Here we have explained 3 major ways marketers are leveraging social media in their account-based marketing campaigns and how they do it.

1. Listening to the accounts

Listening to the target accounts is one essential tasks of ABM marketers to be able to decode what they are most frequently talking about, the type of product and services they are discussing, features and functions most valuable to them and what they are complaining about. Thus, marketers can gain insights and ideas on how to create personalized messages for their target accounts and key decision makers. Since account-based marketing brings marketing and social teams together to coordinate, both teams can utilize social media for individual listening purposes and for targeting their audience.

• Marketing teams can leverage the ‘List’ option on Twitter and add all accounts of companies and key decision makers to keep a tab on their posts and discussions. You can follow them and get more interactive with them by dropping comments to their posts. You can also follow their mostly used hashtags to know what interests and engages them the most.
• Sales teams can use social media to spot the major decision makers to contact while dealing with a specific account. For this, they can use special tools such as, LinkedIn Sales Navigator that enables finding extremely relevant information and major highlights which will factor in creating sales pitches while following the account.

2. How social listening improves understanding target accounts’ goals and challenges:

Earlier we learned how to use social media for listening to the target accounts and key people in those companies. Here we will guide you on how you can use regular social media listening practices to improve your understanding of your target accounts:

• Social media listening will reveal a lot about exactly which third-party sites and content sources target accounts are mostly using to dig up information and which they mostly rely on.
• Knowing the format of content they most search, read and download, whether it is blogs, infographics, research findings, whitepapers, e-books, or videos will help you figure out what kind of content you need to create the most to engage your prospects.
• The kind of solutions and problems they are mostly searching over Google and social media channels will help you define their needs, expectations, and kind of solutions they seek in your product.  At the same time you can also understand the features and functionalities they seek to improve their customer servicing and satisfaction so that you can understand their challenges and goals to help them replace the previous vendor with your product and services.

3. To compose and optimize content to target accounts and decision makers

Now that you have started listening to your target accounts and key people in those accounts via social media, you can use the insights and information in developing the right content strategy for engaging the audience. This is another great way to leverage social media platforms to promote the content optimized to the audience and grab their attention at the right time. Thus, you can spread awareness, educate, and highlight best features and functionalities of your products by publishing informative and engaging content on social media.

Especially if you have launched your account-based marketing program, then social media content promotion will come in exceptionally handy for you – here are some tips on how to maximize the impact of social media content publication:

• You have already learned what kind of content they mostly consume and it is time to put the insights in good use. So, what format of content and events are they reading, downloading and engaging the most? In addition to promoting gated content via email marketing campaigns, you can expand the reach by promoting those gated content via promoting the content and events on social media platforms.

• In addition to promoting gated and blog content, another format of content that works a great deal in engaging audiences and establishing credibility is case studies which are relatable to the industry of the target accounts. While promoting case studies on social media, you can tag or mention the stakeholders’ profile to attract, reach and engage – if you notice that the stakeholders are not responding then stop tagging them.

• Apart from promoting the content from your official social media pages, you can post those links in the comments section below the posts of your target accounts to key people involved in closing deals. You can also post helpful and informative comments to engage your target audience with your replies. However, see that you do not overdo embedding links to your content on their posts or the content will appear too promotional and spammy.

On the other hand, your genuinely thoughtful and useful comments and replies to their posts will draw more attention of your customers and will help you establish your thought leadership in the industry.

Do you find this information helpful for your account-based marketing projects? In case you need more tips and guidelines or professional assistance for your account-based marketing campaigns, just give us a call at (408) 502 6765. Join us on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn pages to keep a tab on latest news, trends, technologies and updates on account-based marketing. Don’t forget to leave your mark or comments – we love to hear from you.