Account-based marketing offers many benefits, including better ROI, stronger sales and marketing alignment, and deeper customer relationships through personalized engagement. With its efficiency, it’s no surprise that ABM is becoming a top B2B sales and marketing strategy. To successfully implement ABM, you’ll need to consider some best practices, as well as some potential stumbling blocks that could derail your efforts if you’re not careful.
In Part 1 of this blog series on ABM, we explained how to maximize your B2B marketing with proven ABM strategies. In this second installment, we’ll explore best practices for making sure your ABM strategy is personalized and precise, so that you can engage and nurture the important accounts you’re trying to target. We’ll also look at pitfalls you can avoid with some preparation and attention to detail. We’ll also look at pitfalls you can avoid with some preparation and attention to detail. We’ll also look at pitfalls you can avoid with some preparation and attention to detail.
BEST PRACTICES FOR A SUCCESSFUL ABM STRATEGY
When you’re ready to take on this sales-and-marketing-amplifying approach, make sure you follow these recommendations to keep your strategy on track.
- Make Data Management a Priority: Robust data is the backbone of any successful ABM campaign. Conducting comprehensive market research and regularly analyzing data are critical to identifying and understanding the accounts you want to target. With the data you gather, you can create detailed profiles of your customers and personalized marketing tactics.
- Choose Your Tools Wisely: Effectively collecting and analyzing this data requires that you have the right ABM tools and software. These include a customer relationship management (CRM) system that can help you target the most meaningful accounts, digital analytic tools that let you see how campaigns are performing, advertising tech tools that help ensure the right recipients receive customized ads, email tools for personalizing communications, and other advanced analytics and marketing automation platforms. Make sure that any ABM software and tools you choose integrate with your existing systems.
- Speak Directly to Your Audiences: Because account-based marketing is a focused approach targeting a select group of high-potential accounts, creating personalized, high-value content is a must. Customized landing pages, tailored email campaigns, bespoke social media strategies, as well as blog posts, webinars, and eBooks can address specific needs and pain points and create engaging experiences. Keeping content fresh and varied so it continues to correspond to each stage of a customer’s journey is also essential. At each step of that journey, you want to show customers that your specific services, products, and expertise are what they need to achieve their goals or solve their problems.
- Reach Decision-Makers Wherever They Are: An integrated omnichannel marketing strategy that delivers a seamless experience across various channels and platforms shows your target accounts that you are consistent, professional, and available to communicate with them and meet their needs wherever those audiences may be. Your business customers expect to be able to move freely from channel to channel throughout their journey, engaging with you through your website, social media platforms, emails, and more – and to know that their specific needs will be met along the way.
- Keep Marketing and Sales on the Same Page: Through regular communication of shared goals and progress, joint planning sessions, and key performance indicators that illustrate your progress, you can make sure your marketing and sales teams are unified in their mission. Everyone needs to know how to engage customers in the right way at the right time at various points in their journey to ensure the success of ABM.
- Define Segments Among Your Target Accounts: Use your technological tools, like your CRM system, as well as data pulled from your social media accounts, website, and customer interactions to segment your accounts based on the marketing and sales goals you seek to achieve. Once you’ve defined these segments, you can create content and communication that aligns best with specific accounts’ journeys.
- Measure and Optimize Often: Advanced analytics and reporting tools allow you to track the performance of your ABM strategies and make data-driven decisions for continuous improvement. The more often you are able to track progress and refresh or redirect your campaigns in response, the more relevant you’ll remain to your target audiences.
COMMON PITFALLS – AND HOW TO AVOID THEM
There are certain common pitfalls with the potential to derail your ABM strategy if you’re not careful to avoid them. Being aware of these potential stumbling blocks and preventing their ill effects through a strategic approach, attention to detail, and a commitment to continuous improvement will help you achieve your marketing and sales objectives.
- Neglecting to Research and Build Well-Rounded Account Profiles: To be successful in ABM, you must understand your target accounts’ business models, preferences, pain points, and decision-making processes. If you don’t know your audience and respond to their specific needs, your marketing efforts just won’t resonate.
- Trying to Get by With Generalized Marketing Strategies: Without a personal approach to each of your target accounts, developed based on that profile you have carefully researched and created, you cannot succeed with ABM. The decision-makers within your high-value accounts have distinct needs, preferences, and pain points. Your goal is to develop a personalized relationship that gives them confidence you can meet those needs and help them overcome any challenge they may face.
- Failing to Align Your Sales and Marketing Teams: When sales and marketing goals, communications, and strategies for engaging accounts don’t match, your customers may be left dealing with inconsistent messaging and disjointed experiences. Success in ABM depends upon seamless, consistent communication and experiences throughout the customer journey.
- Letting Your Content Go Stale: Diversified and up-to-date content is essential for effective ABM. Your customers expect to be engaged throughout their journey with you, and that means you need to provide creative content tailored to their needs and goals at every stage.
- Getting Lazy About Measuring Metrics: Without thorough analysis and metrics, you cannot accurately gauge the performance of your ABM campaigns and make the necessary refinements or redirections required for continued success.
- Underestimating the Commitment: To continuously nurture and engage your high-value account relationships, ABM requires consistent sales and marketing collaboration, analytical and creative efforts, and exploration and adoption of the tools and resources you need to better understand and resonate with your key audiences.
Ready to explore this transformative opportunity? If the prospect of implementing ABM seems daunting, we can help make your journey a little easier. Our agency specializes in providing essential marketing support and creating compelling, targeted content tailored to your specific ABM goals. Contact us to learn how LIGHTSTREAM can help.