10 seconds to share with you what happened in last 10 years. Marketing spend increased significantly. MarTech did make cold calls monotonous, repetitive, and doable by all. Target customers are/were being fed up of nonsense marketing calls that
show upin their email box without homework being done. Marketers are and will be forced to adopt target (or account) based marketing approach. This is not ONLY true for enterprises who have deep pockets but true for SMB (also). Here are the steps that have now become well known.
1) Identify right target.
Finding your target audience. In case you don’t know that, one has to experiment. Identifying target accounts is a collaborative effort between marketing and sales. It’ll require data from both areas — firmographic data, that consists of things like industry, company size, location, and annual revenue, as well as strategic factors, like market influence, likelihood of repeat purchase, and expected profit margin.
2) Research right accounts.
Once we determine who our targets are, the goal is to treat those companies like big, organization-level personas. However, it can help to have that detailed information and representation of your ideal business customers.
Being familiar with elements like the company structure and who the critical players are can, in turn, dictate how we convey our product or service to those targets, especially if we know who the decision-makers and influencers are. Sometimes, this information might already exist in-house; perhaps someone on our team previously researched this target, but didn’t complete the ABM process of reaching it the right way.
But if we don’t already have that information on hand, manual research might be required to get it.
3) Create right content.
Now that we’ve got the names of the key players within each account, we’ll want to create new content for them. That content should speak not only to the pain points of those specific employees, but more to those specific businesses.
Remember — at risk of sounding like a broken record — the ABM strategy is less focused on individual personas, and more on casting a wide net for new business. For that reason, this content should be focused on the single deals we’d like to make with each specific organization.
With this step, we might start to see how ABM and inbound marketing are able to work together, as it’s clear that quality, compelling content plays a role in reaching your account-based targets.
4) Choose right channels.
Even with the best content to reach your accounts, it won’t be very effective if you don’t use the right channels to promote it. It’s important to choose the right channels to deliver it, based on what’s most effective for a given organization or role.
Here’s where it might be helpful to know where the specific people within each target “live” online. Are your customers online on social media platforms — Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter. That should shed some light on which channels the people within each account are mostly likely using, and how they consume the content you’re custom-creating for each of them.
5) Run right campaign.
At this point, we have selected your targets, built out the specifics of their respective compositions, created content, and selected the channels wee would use to promote it.
Running our campaign will require some care. We would have to coordinate our messaging across the various channels.
6) Measure results right.
Every campaign needs to have its results measured properly, especially with methodologies that are somewhat new.
Ask the right questions when you’re measuring the results of an ABM campaign. According to our aforementioned team of experts, these might include:
- Are we growing our list of known individuals within the target account?
- Have there been any changes to the way these accounts are engaging with our brand and its content?
- How much revenue have we generated from these target accounts?
There are also some tools available to help evaluate your marketing ROI. This guide, for example, explains how to measure your marketing campaigns using the HubSpot Sources Report.
Ready to GO Account-Based?
This article is a summary of various articles such as:
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/account-based-marketing-guide
How are you using account-based marketing? Let us know in the comments.