Account-Based Marketing (ABM) Strategy
Account-Based Marketing is all rage recently. But how do we know if our business can benefit Account-based marketing? To answer this question, we have to devise the ABM strategy. This will validate our assumptions and provide a list of to-dos for Account-Based Marketing.
Purchasing a piece of technology or account-based marketing tool does not mean your organisation is ready to Implement ABM strategy and methodology.
There’s a process that goes into planning ABM Strategy and ABM itself.
In fact, if you purchase any technology before developing the strategy, you might be going down the wrong path. Moreover, for a successful Account-Based Marketing campaign, you need to consider the following.
- Collaboration and compatibility from various departments such as product team, marketing team, sales team, etc. And,
- Account-Based Marketing is focused on select accounts, but it requires extra efforts from many departments of an organisation.
When you combine the following it adds up to a huge expense for a very few accounts. This means if the worse happened and you generated no leads, your organisation just spend a lot of money on a failed venture.
In order to mitigate this, it is advised to follow these two rules:
- Implement a full-fledged ABM Strategy before you begin ABM plans.
- Account-centric approach should be an addition to your existing lead generation strategy.
In this article, we will look at planning an Account-based Marketing Strategy.
Seven Steps To ABM Strategy
This segment we will talk about creating an ABM Strategy. This will take us through 7 steps which are
- Is Your Business Model Account-Based Marketing Ready?
- Assemble Organisation Wide ABM Team
- Identify Target Accounts
- Create Engaging Content
- Engage Across Channels
- Measure, Analyse, Optimise
- Select the Right Technology
1. Is Your Business Model Account-Based Marketing Ready?
You can implement Account-Based Marketing if one of the following conditions is true for your business model.
The sales cycle is long and complex
Due to the cost or level of commitment required by the buyer and often involves multiple stakeholders.
Strategic Sales and Marketing Focus
Your sales and marketing team wants to make a greater impact with a more strategic focus.
Precisely Identified Accounts
Your high-value customers who generate the most revenue for your business have distinct characteristics OR You have identified accounts with distinct characteristics that have the potential to generate more revenue.
Broad Target Audience
There is a market of organizations whose needs are clearly addressed by your solution.
Expanding services Horizon
Your organization’s goals include expanding into a new segment, territory, or vertical, or going after your competitor’s customers.
Range of Products
Your organization offers several products or services and has set goals to grow customer lifetime value through upselling and cross-sell.
If your business model can encompass ABM, there are a few foundations and best practices that you should address. This video below considers you are running an organisation, and helps you get started with ABM.
2. Assemble Organisation Wide ABM Team
Team up, define goals and strategy
Before you begin planning your first ABM campaign, you’ll need to assemble a core team and dedicate them as a strategic initiative.
This team of stakeholders across the organization will vary depending on your organizational needs, but at the minimum, it should have participation from leaders of sales, and marketing.
Now that you have a team, define goals and objectives to be achieved through ABM. This will encourage pooling in of strategies and metrics monitoring as we go forward.
3. Identify Target Accounts
Once you are staffed up and everyone agreed upon the goals, it’s time to select top target accounts to achieve your goals.
It’s recommended you have the ideal customer profile, or ICP, pre-defined. If you don’t have the ICP documented, you can leverage technology to define and identify these best suitable accounts with a high possibility to buy.
If you haven’t already, you’ll also need to define your buyer personas. While ABM is focused on accounts rather than leads, each account is still made up of individuals with diverse roles and priorities.
While identifying target accounts, your ABM team must work with momentous alignment.
4. Create Engaging Content
Content is the basic component of any campaign, but with ABM, you must ensure your content and messages must reach both far and wide within a single account.
Right content for ABM is personalized, relevant, and planned that resonates with problems of the audience.
There are tricks to creating such content at scale for different buyer personas, verticals, company sizes, deal sizes, or stages of the sales cycle.
5. Engage Across Channels
This is it, this stage is about putting ABM into action. You listen, learn and send the right message across to your buyers.
Unfortunately, there is no one channel or device, that the contacts in your account use to interact with you. You should be well equipped and available across multiple channels to truly penetrate and engage the key influencers within the account.
6. Measure, Analyze and Optimize
Like any other business strategy, it is essential to accurately measure the effectiveness of the ABM approach and optimize when needed.
It can get complex here, but a good strategy always starts with setting goals and analyzing the movement towards these goals.
7. Select the Right Technology
Technology is always a must-have for SMBs to effectively implement powerful ABM methodology at scale. Utilising the best suitable technology will keep all the teams in-sync and informed.
Intandemly offers a customised tool for ABM which encompasses all the stages and all the teams’ requirements. Alternatively, you might need five different tools for the execution of account-based marketing.
It’s highly recommended to choose from products which provide all the tools supporting your organization’s ABM goals under one platform.
Intandemly has helped 300+ organisations to win dream Accounts with ABM. Book a demo session with us and start winning accounts.
Conclusion
ABM has a huge conversation ratio but it requires a significant amount of planning. On paper setting up ABM strategy is very straight forward. you start by asking a question and based on the answer you plan your strategy.