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

After you have mastered the techniques of campaign planning and executing tactics, it is time to shift your focus on to the next phase which covers how to create relevant and competitive offers, excel in managing ABM databases and add your signature touches to all your ABM campaigns.  

How to craft tempting ABM offers your prospects cannot refuse:

Personalized, data-backed offers 

In Part I, we discussed how to conceive a plan for offers and personalize according to the targeted audience. It is time to place this offer plan into action. Companies practicing account-based marketing approaches narrow down on the limited number of target accounts  to achieve better conversion rates from high-value accounts. At that, companies need to develop offers that are tailored to meet the specifications of targeted accounts based on insights collected on the account and its stakeholders.

Conduct events and in-person meetings for heightened exposure

In-person and real-life meetings have huge impacts on improving customer relations and trust. That’s why we recommend companies to plan, schedule/conduct tradeshows, VIP corporate meetings/dinners, focus groups, discussion boards/executive forums, exclusive demo events and other events to engage key account stakeholders with your brand. In your event planning sessions, make sure your sales and marketing teams work in unison to create and present high-value offers during those shows and events which will impress the key stakeholders.   

Companies that make their offers based on data, insights and present through in-person events get to heighten returns on their ABM efforts and investments. Several organizations have reported having amplified their ROI as much as 200%, 300% or 400%. 

Orchestrate and maintain healthy ABM database

In the B2B industry, marketers need to build and maintain their ABM database to target accounts and contacts their businesses are focusing on to run campaigns.

Below we have elucidated step by step tips to help you maintain best practices on the creation and management of the ABM database.

Step 1: Begin with preloading data

Marketers should create and maintain a database of qualifying accounts and contacts that they target after they have identified the most profitable accounts as per the criteria. They can start pre-loading the data of highly valuable people from the CRM. At the same time, they should have a periodic data health check process in place to avoid invalid, inaccurate, duplicate data and ensure a clean database to prevent loss of marketing budget caused by bad data.

Step 2: Determine key data fields to incorporate in the database in advance

Marketers need to spend a considerable amount of time and effort in a careful selection of key fields and indicators of their targeted accounts. Organizations need to align their marketing and sales teams to collect insights on accounts and contacts which help identify target accounts based on total indicators such as, total available market (TAM) and ideal customer profile (ICP). Companies that skip this continual process of standardizing and cleaning data suffer from different types of data issues such as, loss of opportunities, big data chaos and running campaigns on inaccurate or invalid data. Prime areas that marketers need to emphasize upon in building a database include specific data ranges such as, count of personnel and annual revenue ranges then, job profiles, titles, functions etc. 

Step 3: Work on data appending

After you have uploaded the CRM data and painstakingly chosen the key fields, this next step is about appending data to the ABM database. This step could be a bit more critical and can be completed without zero risks of errors in two ways. First of all, collect information by following digital footprints of target account companies and key stakeholders via social media channels (the most reliable social media source of data is LinkedIn) and third-party customer intelligence vendors (Discover.org, Zoominfo). Next, marketers can specify unique attributes of targeted account companies and prime employees to identify their most valuable prospects. They can use predictive analytics to analyze future behavior of customers and their purchase trends. Thus, marketers can define their customer profiles that will boost ROI and growth opportunities.

And then, this process of identifying TAM, ICP and appending and removal of data based on the criteria must be continued in repeat mode to ensure the collection of quality customer intelligence data.

Make your ABM campaign more personal and relevant

Personalization is one area where organizations must invest a major part of their marketing budgets. Around 39% of marketers reportedly are allocating a bigger share of their budget in web personalization this year as part of their planning for ABM efforts.

Major areas of web personalization to pay heed to include:

• While personalizing messages for your client account, you need to be able to compose a story and collect information by asking questions such as, what features and functionalities your target accounts want, what they need to beat the competition and what challenges and confusions they face in their buying process.
• Marketers should remember that the personalization is heavily dependent upon the type of account-based marketing campaigns they are planning to run. There are one-to-one ABM which presents maximum opportunities for personalization, however, with one too many ABM, personalization can be implemented on a specific level based on a limited set of similar characteristics of all targeted accounts to prevent that marketers are not excluding any prospects.        
• Marketers need to understand their targeted accounts very well by investing a considerable amount of time in analyzing accounts to connect them with the right messages at the right time. Based on their analysis, they need to segment all the accounts they are targeting and prioritize as per common criteria, market or demographic.
• Marketers can choose to begin web personalization with one too many account-based marketing accounts by segmenting as per the industry type. They can compose industry-based messages well ahead of time and then, customize those messages by tweaking as per some industry-centric information. They can create as many as 60 messages for a specific type of industry and then personalize those messages with specific information that accounts and prospects will find most relevant to their criteria.
• It is extremely important to figure out and determine the personas of accounts and key stakeholders – the more efficiently they can analyze personas, the better marketers will be able to speak as per the specific personas and deliver personalized messages more effectively. Also, keep a content plan ready as per all the diverse types of buyer personas and different buying stages you want to engage your prospects in. Thus, marketers can identify and plan specific types of information, content and messages that will improve engagement by helping prospects in various stages.
• In different buying cycles, companies need to utilize a different set of people to communicate and engage their targeted buyers. That’s why you need a tightly aligned team of marketers, sales team and sales development representatives and employ the right teams with accounts and contacts for more personalized and human contacts. It is effective to deploy your marketing team for top tier targeted accounts, however, for tier-two accounts, sales development reps. This is necessary because there are real people who make the final purchase decision for every account you deal with and that’s why it is important to employ the right people to understand those people and understand their pain points and real challenges. The more engaging the communication will be with these people and catchy (a slight touch of humor always works in breaking the ice), the more those people will develop faith in your organization, your product and solution.     

There are many more ways you can achieve personalization and build up customer relations and engagement – do you need tips and assistance in account-based marketing database management, content planning and messages? It’s easy – pick your phone up and call our ABM specialists at (408) 502 6765 or send ABM inquiries to services@ShowMeLeads.com. Alternatively, you can connect with us by DM via Twitter and LinkedIn.