Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is a customised B2B strategy to identify the right potential customers by creating buyer persona to effectively market your products and services. According to insights shared by industry experts, ABM leads are capable of generating 50% more relevant traffic, while only requiring half of the costs associated with other types of marketing campaigns. Regardless of the size of your business, here are some simple ABM strategies you can roll out today:
1. Utilise lookalike modelling.
For lookalike modelling, first analyse your current customers to identify which of them are the most valuable to your business. Look at which ones bring in the highest ROI, and have provided the most referrals. When you have your list of top customers, many online advertising channels will enable you to load the list and automatically target similar audiences for you.
2. Personalise the prospect account’s experience on your website.
With Pardot’s dynamic content capability you can easily personalise the experience prospects and customers have with your brand and website. Using Pardot’s dynamic content you can customise your call-to-action, tailor content based on specific pain points and more. Creating a more relevant and personalised experience will increase your conversion rate and improve top of funnel lead conversion.
3. Align Sales and Marketing together
When Sales and marketing work together they drive the best results from the high-value/high-growth accounts. With Pardot for Lightning experience, sales and marketing can deep dive into data and insights together to easily craft personalised messages for target accounts.
Add the Engagement History Dashboard to the Account record tab. Use this to explore and understand prospect engagement on the account level and get a clear picture of what strong account engagement looks like. Together with sales look at strategies to replicate this success across target accounts.
Add the Engagement History Dashboard to the Account record tab.
4. Create promotional sales offers designed to get you meetings.
This is a special sales offer designed to help you secure a meeting with prospects. For instance, you could follow up with an offer to provide clients with a free on-site research report analysing their social media efforts versus their peers. Other examples include free technology assessments or free security audits designed to get your in the door.
5. Use retargeting to keep your brand visible to key accounts.
Retargeting is an excellent time-tested method to repeatedly engage a specific account, as representatives from that account view online content. Companies like Demandbase now utilise Account-Based Insight and Targeting programs that uses ip-addresses to identify target accounts on the internet. When such accounts visit a website connected to the Demandbase network, they are automatically served the vendor’s advertisements.
6. Use social intelligence to gauge what matters to your prospects.
This involves monitoring an account’s social activities. People often use social to share good news that matters to them, such as personal achievements. Responding to such events with congratulatory messages fosters engagement and relationship building. Enterprise class social intelligence platforms include InsideView and Linkedin.
7. Acquire white paper and webinar leads for target accounts.
Previously, when a vendor purchased leads from a media company, they were only allowed to filter by factors such as the company size, title, or geographic location. More online lead generation organisations are now allowing companies to filter their lead purchases by company names. When you only buy leads from specific companies, the cost-per-lead will be higher, but it is well worth the price for your ABM campaigns’ success.
8. Create valuable and relevant custom content.
Focus on creating content that caters specifically to your target accounts. It’s a good way to set you apart from your competitors. Provide something valuable with the resources and information that are already accessible to you, and put time into creating a bespoke report that provides real value. Creating a new resource that is unique and useful to your targets is likely to be worth the investment.
9. Send target accounts creative gifts.
Most ABM strategies are implemented online, sometimes you need to think a bit outside the box. Think of something that’s unusual, but directly related to your product or service. If you can figure out a memorable, fun or useful giveaway to send ABM targets, the cost can be well worth the impression it makes. Make your business memorable.
10. Find connections to target accounts via employees who aren’t salespeople.
The Linkedin Sales Navigator has a feature called TeamLink, which provides visibility into the connections other employees in your company have with contacts at your target account. Oftentimes, there is a connection that no one realised was there that you can use to your advantage in upcoming ABM campaigns.
It’s abundantly clear that shifting your mindset to embrace ABM can pay off in better leads that convert at higher rates and bring in more sales. For more strategies, you can check out a comprehensive guide on ABM with Pardot and Salesforce here.
