A study conducted by Sirius Decisions in the year 2016 showed that more than 70% of B2B firms are either already using or planning to use ABM marketing. These companies will be using employees in teams designed explicitly for ABM, which shows the rise of account based marketing tactics in the modern-day era.
Now, more and more firms and marketers are realizing the role of ABM in improving ROI. And all the firms that are already using ABM marketing in their firm are getting palpable results, that too without putting in lots of effort. But this doesn’t mean that ABM is an entirely new concept that popped out of nowhere in the modern era; it took ABM several years to become highly effective for every firm and marketers.
One of the significant challenges faced by modern-day marketers and firms in terms of account based marketing tactics is implementation. Without proper implementation, ABM marketing will be nothing more than your usual marketing medium with a lower ROI. This is why, to make things easier for you, we have come up with a six steps process for implementing ABM marketing in your firm.
Define strategic accounts
If you are a marketer, then defining a persona will be nothing new to you. But you will need to level up your existing strategy and approach because when it comes down to ABM, you are targeting an entire organization, not just a person.
You can begin by picking up those organizations with the most significant chunk in terms of profit contribution to your firm. In ABM, these are the accounts that you will need to target. You might even need to collaborate with strategic leaders while defining strategic accounts, as this will involve a lot of research.
Investigate the market
After defining strategic accounts, you will have to investigate the market to learn the decision-making process used by the target account. You will also have to identify the decision-makers as a decision-maker will be your prime target or point of contact while running an account based marketing strategy.
When it comes to ABM, then knowledge is power. Therefore, you will have to do detailed research to understand the different types of complexities of the organization you will be targeting. You can use the people in your company who have already worked with these organizations to have a better understanding of their work.
Create personalized content
All the information that you have gathered in the last step will be used to create personalized content. The more relevant your content to the audience will be, the better outcomes you will get through ABM. You will need to create content that will speak directly to the company’s decision-maker or the company itself. You can identify their pain points and design your content around them.
You will need to make your design and marketing team work together to develop such a type of content that is visually enticing and texturally appealing. There are many examples of B2B content out there, and you can customize them according to your specific needs.
Decide on best channels
It doesn’t matter how good your research has been so far or how ideal your content is; if it is not used on the right channel, then all your effort, time, and money will go astray. This is why you will have to be very specific while choosing the channel for ABM.
Do a little bit of research to understand where your target accounts spend time. So, instead of bringing the audience to you, you should reach out to the audience where they are already present.
Execute your campaigns
One of the unique things about ABM is its highly targeted nature, and this is the main reason you will need to make sure that you have not set a very high frequency of your message as this will turn out to nothing more than spam for the audience. Try to have a proper balance between several touchpoints and marketing channels.
You can fail even with an ideal ABM strategy if you do not execute your campaigns well. Ensure that your message doesn’t only reach a single individual in the organization as you will be targeting the organization as a whole.
Measure results
After running your campaign successfully for around 30 to 60 days, you will need to start working on measuring your campaign results. You can ask the below-mentioned question to measure the effectiveness of your campaign.
Was the content enticing enough to engage the audience?
How many leads have moved up in the sales funnel?
What can be improved in the future?
Have you been able to generate any revenue through the ABM campaign?
There is not much to invest in ABM marketing campaigns as even with a limited budget; you can design, implement, and execute a successful ABM campaign. But you will have to ensure that you are implementing the ABM campaign in an ideal way; otherwise, you will not make the most of it.
