A Complete Guide To Account-Based Marketing

Account-based marketing is a strategy where marketers take advantage of existing marketing elements to help sales engage with prospects and close deals with key accounts. Businesses can use account-based marketing to acquire new accounts and expand their current business dealings.

Why is account-based marketing important?

The return on investment is higher and easier to measure

Account-based marketing is essential to both marketing and sales teams because the return on investment is more elevated and easier to measure. Unlike other B2B marketing methods, account-based marketing focuses on narrowing down target accounts.

Maximizes resources

Because account-based marketing narrows down target accounts, it is easier to avoid customers who are not an excellent fit for your company. Thus, you can spend your resources wisely to build a relationship with sure leads.

Account-based marketing stands out amidst the noise

People receive emails, text messages, and phone calls from salespeople every single day, which is why generic sales pitches are often left unanswered. With account-based marketing, marketers generate personalized messages to your target accounts. That way, your messaging will stand out among others since it is more compelling and interesting on your customers' end.

Then, once you receive customers' interactions, you can leverage data marketing to gain insights and develop more personalized strategies to increase your return on investment.

What are some examples of account-based marketing?

Owned media

Owned media includes the channels that your company has complete control over. Some examples include blogs, websites, print catalogs, company events, communities, and many more.

Earned media

Earned media includes the free impressions gained by your company through promotional efforts. Some examples include customer reviews and testimonials, mentions on any social media platforms you have, word of mouth recommendations, retweets or shares of your content or anything related to your brand, blog posts, magazine articles, and the like.

Paid media

Paid media includes paying to leverage a third-party channel, TV ads, pay-per-click, print advertising, paid search results, and other sponsored opportunities. Furthermore, the difference between earned media and paid media is that others voluntarily give the former. In contrast, the latter involves a paid placement.

Paid social media

Paid social media is when companies display their advertisements and other sponsored marketing messages on popular social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and many more. That way, they can target a specific sub-audience. Some paid social media examples include display ads, pay-per-click advertising, branded or influencer-generated content, and many more.

How to plan and scale account-based marketing

Onboard sales

Onboarding the sales team can be quite a challenging task, mainly because they are always busy. They might think that introducing them to account-based marketing is an additional heavy workload since it also needs them to collaborate with the marketing team. However, there are a few ways you can try to discuss with them and elaborate on how it can be of help to them.

• Value proposition - both the sales and marketing team should agree on the products and services offered to target accounts and how they can help them.
• Share goals - it is essential that you discuss your goals with the sales team and the KPIs you will be using to measure them.
• Who will be involved - you should make it clear from the start of your account-based marketing campaign if what sales and marketing staff will be affected.

Identify key accounts

It is vital that you partner with your sales team to create an ideal customer profile (ICP) that will be used to identify target accounts once your account-based marketing campaign starts. You can use infographics such as annual revenue, industry, company size, location, and many more.

After identifying target accounts, you can then determine which customers present opportunities more effectively. Then, you can create workflows within your CRM software to quickly identify target accounts in the future.

Furthermore, you can also leverage data-driven marketing strategies to keep track of accounts or customers who previously interacted with your brand. This will make it easier next time to determine who your best target accounts are.

Research

After identifying your target accounts, you can start conducting your research regarding who is responsible for their decision-making process. Bear in mind that account-based marketing requires you to win over an account, not the individual. In cases like this, you can utilize LinkedIn to identify company employees and their respective job titles.

Identify key marketing channels

Now that you have identified the people involved in the decision-making process, the next step is to determine where these people spend most of their time. Then, you can use that marketing channel to reach out to them and receive an immediate response. LinkedIn is usually a popular platform for B2B lead generation and B2B marketing. So, most employees have a profile on the platform.

Create a targeted outreach plan

After identifying the most effective channel to reach out to decision-makers, the next step is creating a plan or strategy on how you will reach out to them. You can take advantage of the research you conducted to create personalized messages and content compelling enough to gain their attention. This will be your chance to showcase your products or services, so simply listing off features will not be enough.

Monitor and track results

The only effective way to determine your account-based marketing campaign's success is by monitoring and tracking your results. Besides, the information you will be gaining from this can help you improve the future campaigns you want to have. Some of the useful KPIs you can measure is the percentage of the deals closed, the number of account sales, deal value, and the number of engagements in your messaging.

What to consider when tracking account-based marketing results

Some of the metrics you should measure are the following:

• Account coverage - this is where you can determine the quantity and quality of the data you have gathered on the decision-makers.
• Brand awareness - one of the best questions to ask yourself is how much does your target accounts know your brand and what it can for them. Make sure they fully understand your products and services and how they can help them.
• Account engagement - you should determine how much attention you are receiving from your target accounts. If there is higher engagement, then you can claim that they are responding positively to your campaigns.
  

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Cosider partnering with ABM experts, such as Skief, to ensure the peformance of your campaigns.