What Type of Account-Based Marketing is Right for Your Business?
The term account-based marketing (ABM) is one of the most popular buzzwords in marketing world. ABM allows marketers to coordinate with the sales team and other functional teams that interact with client accounts. ABM strategies are a paradigm shift from the mass marketing techniques to make marketing approaches more personalized and tailored to the clients’ requisitions, current challenges and business objectives.
With ABM, marketers are able to deliver personalized messages to each account or group of similar accounts. ABM enables sales and marketing teams to work in concert in finding new opportunities and contacts and working with them in tandem.
But not all ABM strategies are alike. There are different types of account-based marketing strategies and approaches – the following are the most effective types to handle ABM campaigns based on types of varied accounts.
Enterprise Accounts:
Enterprise accounts, as the name implies, are relatively the largest accounts marketers are deal with – usually, these are client companies exceeding 1,000 employees and they are grossing $500 million or more in revenues. For such accounts, marketers need to assign a dedicated marketing and sales people who will work exclusively with these enterprise accounts, which often exist in smaller numbers. These accounts also feature numerous decision makers to contact and many types of perplexities that aren’t found in smaller accounts.
Marketing companies serving to these large enterprise accounts also yield bigger amount of revenues from limited number of such accounts. That’s why they offer narrowed down upon these accounts with persistent attention to help them with various types of solutions based on needs and inputs of key decision makers including CEO, CFO, CMO or other leadership executives of the company.
Industry-Specific Accounts:
An industry-based account-based marketing strategy is a great an excellent approach to cater to both existing client accounts as well as acquiring new client accounts by leveraging case studies of existing ones. Such industry-centric ABM strategies work the best for a group of similar accounts dealing in the same industry, or those with similar types of products and services.
Moreover, new prospects also heavily rely upon relevant case studies and success stories of existing players before entering in the market. That’s why industry-centric account-based marketing strategies enable marketers to use stories and case studies of their present customers to generate interests of new prospects as well as measuring their own marketing and sales strategies for a specific industry and sharpening their tools to target new prospects.
Customer Accounts:
For present customer accounts, marketers can deploy customer-specific messages to them, to deliver customer service and other post-sale engagement messaging. Marketers can rely on various tracking metrics to accelerate the engagement, increase customer retention, boost cross-selling and upselling efforts and improve customer success behavior – for both accounts with dwindling revenue rate and accounts with scopes for high-growth rates.
Target Accounts:
The target accounts-based strategy indicates more of a hybrid approach which combines strategies for customers of different types, sizes and industries with enterprise account-based ABM strategies. Major share of the marketing strategies for target accounts includes building and managing key decision makers of the account and creating and testing messages for the account.
There are three different themes that marketers rely on when using this approach:
1. IP-Based Account Based Marketing
Several market analytics companies offer clean and analyzed B2B market analytics information and data sources including information relevant to specific IP addresses. Most businesses have designated IP addresses and with IP-based analytics data available at marketers’ disposal, they get useful information on contact details and company profiles.
These kinds of IP details enable marketers to target the decision makers in those IP addresses, targeting accounts with those IP addresses and in creating strategies to launch an effective account-based marketing campaign plan.
2. Email, Social Media & Google-Based ABM
Your contact list, grown using IP-based analytics and contact details data, can itself be leveraged in determining how to create solid ABM campaigns. There are various types of marketing campaigns marketers can devise using major online marketing channels such as email marketing, social media ads such as, Facebook and Twitter ads, ads, and also ads for Google Search and YouTube ads.
a. Facebook Custom Audiences
Marketers can simply upload and use their email list data to create Facebook ads optimized for contacts in those email lists, on Facebook Ad manager platform.
b. Twitter key influencers
Marketers can use their email list in finding key influencers in Twitter and target users to send messages. They need to upload the list of the email addresses of existing customers and target present customers with optimized Twitter ads or use Twitter profile name handles to reach target influencers.
c. Google Custom Match
Customer Match of Google allows marketers use their email lists on various Google ad platforms including for Gmail, Google Search, and YouTube. Marketers can use Customer Match for their account-based marketing campaigns to set and tailor ad copies based to the data on their existing clients.
Google lets adding email lists through API to AdWords or in manual process. Custom Match has this tool called ‘Similar Audiences’ that lets marketers match and search customers by similar interests and preferences.
3. Predictive ABM
Another widely in use account-based marketing strategy is predictive: marketing plans set the data points into motion in creating a predictive campaign. Marketers can use their existing email lists and essential customer data on their behavior to estimate which client account will engage and convert into sale.
For this, they need to take account of the intent data instead of firmographic or demographic data to carve the ABM campaign that will attract highest rate of conversions.
Predictive account-based marketing approaches enable companies to make use of intent data in targeting and engaging accounts with relevant gated and ungated content including whitepapers, videos, webinars, e-book, infographics among other.
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