Account Based Marketing

Account-based marketing, or ABM, is a targeted approach to B2B enterprise marketing — one that involves reaching in on specific accounts, creating hyper-targeted content and campaigns, then delivering a personalized experience to companies that you want to target only.

Traditional marketing tactics rely on casting a wide net, buttering contacts through a wide sales tunnel, account-based marketing can be thought of as “dear hunting”. It’s targeted, it’s calculated, and when executed correctly, it can be highly effective and beneficial. It all starts with a four part planned project.

Align Sales and Marketing
Successful  ABM starts with solid sales and marketing alignment. As you move in on your target accounts, you’ll naturally shift to a mindset of quality over quantity, leaving the masses behind is the new era. With account-based marketing, it’s less about the number of contacts you have in your database, and more about the quality of those contacts. Every interaction and every experience that you share with those key accounts now has more value. You’re invested in those relationships even before a deal has been opened. Choosing a CRM that allows you to organize, track, and nurture those relationships across both your sales and marketing team is critical to executing a successful ABM strategy

Identify Key Accounts
With account-based marketing, it’s important to take time to identify your key accounts. True account-based marketing really focuses on creating a handful of hyper-targeted, made to order campaigns that are crafted for each individual account. Of course, the ability to practice this and still be successful with account-based marketing is going to be largely dependent on your industry. In some cases, it just doesn’t make sense to be that hyper targeted. If you’re selling a low-price-point, non-enterprise solution those type of campaigns aren’t going to work for you. Still, there are ways you can practice account-based marketing. For example, you can target specific industries or segments, developing campaigns that are targeted towards a very specific type of account.

Personalize Your Outreach
Creating targeted, personalized marketing campaigns is critical to any account-based marketing strategy. If super customized, made to order campaigns don’t work for you, there are still simple ways to create personalized content for your key accounts. With account-based marketing, it’s all about building relationships. That means delivering content that’s helpful, specific, and relevant. Risking an important relationship by sending a cold, basic email just will not do the trick. Unique is the key word here.

Work Your Contacts
The last and perhaps most important piece of account-based marketing is working your contacts. With account-based marketing, you tend to work backwards. First, you identify your target accounts. From there, you build a network of contacts within that organization. Every single one of those contacts plays a critical role in the selling process. With account-based marketing, you’re not focused on one single contact at a company, you’re focused on the entire info structure of employees who play a role in influencing that decision process.