The Ultimate Guide to Become an Account-based Marketing Expert for Your Business [Part – I]

Marketers are now identifying the significance of narrowing down to a limited number of high-value accounts instead of too many accounts. As per recent survey findings on ‘ABM Command Center’ by SiriusDecisions, around 91% of marketers heavily rely on account-based marketing – hence, the competition in vying for the highest-value accounts and the revenue pie is just getting stiffer. 

Several businesses that are investing about 30% of their marketing budgets into their account-based marketing program have accelerated from 17% in the last year to 54% this year. If your organization is serious about implementing ABM strategies, but are apprehensive about pitfalls and loss of profit. That’s why we present this all-encompassing guide to help you become an ABM rockstar beforehand and master the capabilities of strategizing like a pro. 

Major areas of ABM are covered in this guide spanning from careful campaign planning, campaign development, best channels to choose for ABM campaigns, building and maintaining the ABM databases and personalizing ABM strategies to each account and buying journey. 

So, let’s begin…  

Campaign planning for account-based marketing 

With plenty of targeting, personalization, multi-channel marketing and content development tasks at hand, marketers get into the dilemma of where and how to start.  Instead of feeling daunted, start setting your marketing and business goals with your teams. 

How to set the ABM ‘Goal’? 

Account-based marketing aligns your sales and marketing teams by bridging the gap and diminishing conflicts and communication gaps. ABM approaches will require your marketing teams to conduct offline events and campaigns including corporate dinners, executive events, sporting events, managing and delivering direct mails, ensuring web personalization and performing re-targeting. That’s why you need to set specific measurement metrics to gauge these marketing activities which may include metrics to trace several additional contacts, opportunities generated through these marketing efforts, events for targeted accounts as well as a number of closed hard revenues.

Planning the right campaign development process 

Account-based marketing is considered to be a marketing strategy that takes in conveying the right messages to the right accounts and stakeholders, at the right time, through the right channels which connect with a targeted audience. Thus, marketers need to invest a significant amount of time in social listening to select the right social channels for ABM campaigns, just as surfing through video channels and types of mobile content, which your targeted audience is engaging and interacting with the most. Thus, your organization needs to develop, distribute and run various types of campaigns that will perfectly tailor to targeted accounts and personas.

Planning your ABM offers

You need to create product and service offers that match with the type of offer your targeted audiences are mostly searching for, engaging with and have spent with.  Campaign offers are of different types and should be optimized to marketing and sales activities conducted in varying phases of the buying journey. 

A planning framework for ABM campaigns 

Execution of ABM campaigns must be well thought out, planned and following a coordinated framework. ABM approaches mandate implementing one-to-one, personalized and scalable communication that will increase engagement with the targeted account profiles. Once the account stakeholders sign off and close the account strategies, the marketing team will start working on mapping the campaign plans by aligning specific goals, targeted deliverables and deadlines. Once the planned campaign is ready, it will be assigned to the marketing calendar and set in motion for deployment. 

Results to expect

With this campaign goal setting and planning exercise, marketers will get clear conceptions on types of campaigns to conduct as well as accounts and stakeholders to be targeted with each type of account-based marketing campaign. With ABM, sales, sales development reps, and marketing teams work in unison as a whole team to create customer relationships and always-on touch-points for those targeted accounts.

The top 3 most effective ABM campaign strategies 

In addition to email marketing, social media campaigns and a combination of online and offline corporate events, marketers should consider deploying the following 3 most engagement-driven campaign approaches:    

Direct mail

Turns out direct mail has not died, but has returned with the glory to take the spot of one of the top trending marketing strategies for ABM campaigns. Direct mail is emerging in popularity for it’s tangible nature and ability to enable marketers to add personal touches to the messages. Leading organizations are working at great lengths to design personalized designs, shapes and patterns that will instantly connect with and engage targeted recipients despite their ease of communication with the brand through digital mail. One of the main reasons why direct mail is riding high with success has to do with its effectiveness to connect top-level executives. These top-tier executives are unwilling to register for white papers, blogs, webinars or similar online events and they hardly interact with email newsletters. However, with these personalized pieces of direct mail communications including personalized envelopes, mentions, gifts, messages or offers, they feel valued and respond well to direct mail instead of unsolicited emails. 

Personalized content

Personalized content is a highly critical (or a must) account-based marketing strategy to cut the clutter and connect more efficiently with the targeted accounts and stakeholders with optimized deals, information and messages. Thus, personalized content helps to increase sales conversion rates. Amongst all types, optimized landing pages work a great deal in shortening the sales cycle with the most accurate and appropriate information, design and links to product pages that buyers are interested in. To improve the personalization of landing pages, marketers should make use of Marketo RTP that helps create custom experiences for targeted accounts. 

Along with above-mentioned two ABM campaign strategies, marketers should also deploy targeted outreach approaches which designate sale and marketing reps to improve cultivating customer relations with ideal buyer personas (IBP) of the accounts your business is targeting. You can employ level to level outreach practicing activities so that targeted buyers of different levels will start connecting with employees of your organizations thus, creating numerous touch-points with the relevant level of employees of targeted account company.

Do you need more interesting and winning takeaways on account-based marketing campaign planning and strategies? Get in touch with our Marketo specialists at (408) 502 6765 or share your ABM concerns or inquiries to services@ShowMeLeads.com. Additionally, you can always DM or write us via Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.