As a marketer, you know it’s entirely possible to generate a ton of leads, work diligently to convert them, and still end up with lackluster results. Why?
It’s often the quality of the leads.
And that quality is tied closely to strategy. An effective way to level up strategy and get better results is account-based marketing (ABM). ABM is reported to give 87% of the marketers that use it a higher ROI. These marketers also report shorter sales cycles, and who doesn’t want shorter sales cycles, right?
But marketers aren’t getting these results by accident. In fact, it’s totally possible to implement an ABM strategy and still underperform, which is why we compiled our favorite account-based marketing best practices to help you get the best possible results from your efforts.
Align Your Sales and Marketing Teams
A common challenge that undermines successfully deploying account-based marketing best practices is marketing and sales being out of alignment. Without seamless alignment, even the best ABM strategy can fall flat because everyone isn’t working together.
So what should you do?
Everything starts with having shared goals. These goals are the foundation of your ABM efforts, so you’ll want to work with sales to define common objectives and KPIs. And once you align, you’ll want to keep that communication open. So, schedule frequent meetings between sales and marketing to share insights and feedback about target accounts and ongoing ABM campaigns. And, of course, you’ll also want a seamless lead handoff process to ensure that marketing passes qualified leads to sales at the right time.
Pick and Choose Your Highest-Value Accounts
An account-based marketing strategy is most successful when you choose high-value accounts that tie to key business initiatives.
Typical initiatives might include expanding into a new market, increasing market or wallet share, or landing a major brand. When choosing your target accounts, consider your ideal customer profile (ICP). It’s basically the type of company your organization wants to focus on to win the most deals, get the best margins, and be the most profitable. It’s similar to your buyer personas but for the entire company and is usually defined in collaboration between sales and marketing. (And if you don’t have buyer personas already, you’ll want to consider building them out so you’re speaking to decision-makers within the targeted accounts more effectively).
Also, follow account-based marketing best practices by choosing your accounts wisely. Don’t rush the selection process. And, of course, don’t make any final decisions without input from sales.
Define Your Messages and Targeted Content
The secret sauce within any successful ABM strategy is highly customized messaging. To make things easier for yourself, start by taking an inventory of all of your existing content and mapping it to buyers’ profiles.
By understanding which pieces of content benefit individual audiences, you can fill in critical gaps and avoid creating excess content for your new ABM strategy. You can correlate your content directly to buyer personas, firmographics, and customer journeys, and use your content to speak directly to the targeted accounts’ needs, wants, struggles, and goals.
Once you have your content mapped to buyer personas, you can leverage marketing automation to get results at scale. For example, Avery Dennison struggled with silos and had teams working across nearly 50 offices worldwide. Using Act-On’s marketing automation helped them triple email open rates. As a result, the company generated so many well-nurtured leads that their largest concern was putting enough staff in place to follow up with them. Deploying the right content at the right time helps connect with your targeted accounts more strategically.
Determine Which Channels Are Best to Reach Your Audience
For many companies, sales cycles are getting longer. Half of those recently surveyed reported longer sales cycles, and one in five reported the number of decision-makers is growing (never a good thing for the sales cycle!).
Account-based marketing works best when you follow industry-standard practices like using a combination of channels to market to your targeted accounts. Treat each touch as an ongoing conversation with your prospect.
And remember to keep your messaging consistent across all platforms. This builds trust and underscores your value proposition. The channels you use vary based on audience behaviors, but here are a few to consider:
- Targeted display ads: Consider advertising to a range of named roles at a company to deepen relationships.
- Email marketing campaigns: Create personalized email marketing campaigns for various decision-makers within a targeted company.
- Live events: Consider holding live events, such as small round tables about industry topics in your city.
- Social media: Create targeted campaigns focused on specific accounts. For example, you could design a series of LinkedIn posts and tweets highlighting stories that explain how your solution addresses the pain points of your target audience.
- SEO/SEM: Leverage research to find keywords related to your targeted accounts’ needs. Optimize content, such as blog posts, to ensure that when a decision maker at a targeted account searches a problem, your content appears in search results. You could also use the targeted keywords in SEM campaigns to attract the attention of an account’s decision-makers.
Analyze and Adjust
Analyzing and adjusting is one of your most important ABM tactics. Next to identifying the best accounts to target, it’s the tactic that will lead to the most success — because it’s all about the data.
Consistently reviewing results helps you spot potential issues faster so you can iterate. Leveraging tools that track marketing efforts more efficiently will tell you exactly which activities are successfully moving prospects down the funnel and which aren’t. And one more thing: don’t forget to share these insights with sales.
https://www.act-on.com/blog/abm-kpis-to-measure-and-those-to-ignore/
Replicate Your Best Account-based Marketing Tactics
The needs and priorities of your target audience are a moving target. That’s why it’s important to continually check the pulse of your messaging. Is it still relevant? Does it still hit the mark with your audience? Or is it becoming “noise” that your audience is tuning out?
Closely monitoring the successes and failures of your ABM campaigns will help you diagnose potential problems. For example, signs of success might include increased website traffic from target audiences and more conversions and opportunities. And these things translate directly into increased revenue. And, as a marketer, doesn’t it feel good when that revenue increase can be tied directly to your marketing efforts? We think so!
And the good news is that when you’re working to deploy the best ABM tactics and improve ABM conversion rates, you don’t need to go it alone. We can help you leverage software to nurture your highest-priority opportunities to increase engagement and efficiency and get the results you want. It’s the shortcut you need to make your ABM strategy work harder for you.
Account-Based Marketing Best Practices FAQs
What are ABM tactics?
Account-based marketing tactics are focused on creating personalized marketing outreach to highly targeted accounts rather than a general audience. They involve tight alignment and collaboration between marketing and sales.
What are ABM objectives?
ABM objectives are goals set by an organization aimed at high-value accounts. These objectives might include boosting customer acquisition, increasing retention rates, generating higher revenue from key accounts, and more.
What are ABM conversion rates?
ABM conversion rates are the percentage of targeted accounts that complete a desired action, typically centered around engagement or converting high-value accounts.