Articles

How to Create a Winning ABM Strategy for Your Business?

by David Jones Digital Marketor
Is ABM the right approach to your business?
Some safe ways to determine if account-based marketing is the right choice for you is to determine if:

  • The sales cycle involves a research or evaluation phase, and it often involves several stakeholders.
  • Your sales and marketing teams want to have more influence with a more strategic focus.
  • You've noticed that existing buyers that generate the most revenue have different characteristics, or that you've identified accounts with different characteristics that can generate more revenue.
  • There are organizations with needs that your solution clearly meets.
  • Your organization seeks to break into a new segment, territory or vertically or follow your competitor's customers.
  • Your organization offers more products or services and has set goals to increase the buyer's lifetime value through up-selling and cross-selling.

How to create a winning ABM strategy for your business?
The choice of target accounts varies for each company, as each organization has unique business goals and a personal strategy that determines its criteria. Before you start putting together a solid plan, there are some account-based marketing benchmarks you need to research:
  • The purpose of your ABM program
  • Accounts you target
  • Views within the accounts you are targeting

Identify and select your ICP (ideal customer profile)
Before you embark on your ABM efforts, your marketing and sales process needs to do some heavy research to help you make an informed decision about the accounts you choose. Decide which industry, company size, location, annual turnover, sales opportunity, profit margin, etc., is the right one to give your business the highest long-term profit. This research must be both qualitative and quantitative.

If you do not know which accounts to target or have exhausted your original list, work with the marketing team to build a predictive model. Predictive analytics takes into account millions of data attributes from both internal and external sources (company tech stack, hiring trends, social media activities, funding level, marketing solution, CRM, blog posts, third-party websites, social media channels, etc.), then applies machine learning to understand who has the greatest tendency to buy.

Then you need to prioritize your accounts and decide which ones to go first. Prioritizing the lists is crucial to demonstrating early success and maximizing your ABM ROI.

Map your accounts
Once you have prioritized your target accounts, start mapping personas within each key account. This gives you a closer look at which buying groups are best to target. You need to understand your audience well - what challenges each person faces, what influences their decision, and who makes those decisions.

Have a plan that focuses on the central part of the organization. Consider

  • Economic health
  • Business initiatives
  • Staff development
  • Technologies
  • Organizational structure
  • SWOT analysis
  • Industry analysis

Successful and effective marketing must start with understanding your audience. This is especially important when the audience is an entire buying group or a specific set of key people who decide when, what and where to buy.

Create the right content
You need relevant content to communicate the value of your solutions to your ABM audience. To offer tailored branding experience across all channels, consider customizing content to the contacts on your accounts.

Creating scalable content to support your ABM model across the entire buying cycle may sound a little overwhelming at first, but not impossible. Before you start creating original content from scratch, look at what you already have in your library. You may have a comprehensive list of content with details about its date, audience, and so on that can be used or help you find potential gaps.

This way you know what content to update, reuse or discard from your archive. Start by building an effective content strategy for your target accounts once you have a clear idea of ​​what content you have, the gaps in the content index, and who you are creating the content for. You can use a content / message matrix to map out what content you want to use to reach your goal across the buying journey.

Distribute your content across social, email, web sites, etc., and make sure the process is organized so that no target account receives the same content twice or any irrelevant content for the stage they are in.

In order to engage your ABM audience, your content must be personal, relevant and timely.
Measure and optimize your account-based marketing results
You cannot measure success with any of the strategies without understanding its revenue impact. So you need to make your ABM results actionable, tangible and accessible in real time. It is reported that around 60% of CMOs have difficulty proving their ROI - one of the main reasons for this is not asking the right questions.

Once your campaign has run for 30 to 60 days, check to see:

  • Whether your personal content turned out to be engaging? If so, how?
  • If the accounts become more involved in your brand?
  • Whether you are expanding the number of well-known stakeholders within these organizations?
  • Did you move any of these targeted leads down the funnel?
  • Whether you have generated any revenue from these campaigns?
  • What could you do better in the future?

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About David Jones Committed   Digital Marketor

612 connections, 24 recommendations, 1,480 honor points.
Joined APSense since, October 6th, 2020, From La Jolla, United States.

Created on Feb 11th 2021 05:03. Viewed 296 times.

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