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ABM Strategy
An account-based marketing (ABM) strategy is crucial to success for B2B marketers seeking higher ROI on marketing investments.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
How to Craft an ABM Strategy
For a B2B marketer, an account-based marketing (ABM) strategy is crucial to success. However, ABM strategies can be somewhat complex to execute, and getting marketing and sales teams aligned comes with challenges of its own.
This guide will help you create a strong account-based marketing strategy that’ll help you:
- Formalize your account selection process,
- Align your marketing and sales teams, and
- Equip your marketing and sales teams with the right tools for the job.
Read on to get started with your ABM strategy.
What Is ABM?
Account-based marketing (ABM) is a focused approach to B2B marketing that allows marketing and sales teams to work together. Using tailored marketing and sales support, they target best-fit companies — referred to as accounts — that represent expansion or growth opportunities.
Survey data shows that account-based marketing approaches are well worth the effort that should go into them. Among many benefits — including better insights and shorter sales cycles — ABM has been found to yield higher return on investment than other marketing investments.
Learn more about ABM here. Read on to learn how you can create an ABM strategy.
How to Create Your ABM Strategy
Step 1: Formalize Your Account Selection Process
The most important aspect of your account-based marketing approach is your understanding of the accounts and audiences you’re targeting. And ABM strategy requires a thorough and reliable understanding of your target accounts and audiences. This is what enables your sales and marketing teams to strategically select and nurture target accounts through customized and personalized content, engagement, and support.
In order to formalize your account selection process, your marketing team should design target personas based on the high-value accounts that are most likely to convert and/or grow. To create these target company personas, you should start by evaluating what business objectives and values your high-value accounts tend to share. You also need to know what major steps precede purchase in these accounts’ buying journey.
The data points you include in your target personas should be drawn from the following primary categories or attributes:
- Demographics: Industry, location of HQ, company size
- Psychographics: Values, motivations, purchase decision patterns
- Technographics: Resources and technologies used by the organization
- Life cycle: Development stage and maturity of target accounts
There are different ways of sourcing this information — e.g. via CRM software and customer surveys. The more data you can collect for designing your target personas, the more accurately your marketing team will be able to identify your high-value target customers.
Step 2: Align Your Marketing and Sales Teams
The next step to creating an ABM strategy is to align your marketing and sales teams. Working with account-based marketing requires a different and far more coordinated approach than traditional lead generation.
Traditionally, marketing will forward a lead to the sales team. Once the sales team accepts the lead, marketing-led outreach stops, and the sales team is now in charge of executing the client engagement process. But for ABM strategies, successful account engagement requires a far more collaborative approach based on proactive, ongoing coordination between marketing and sales teams.
To build an impactful, sophisticated, and personalized campaign across multiple channels, marketing and sales teams must work together from the very first interaction. We recommend continuing this collaboration throughout the sales process. This allows you to maintain a strategic marketing presence beyond the moment when the lead would traditionally be handed off to the sales team.
As your target accounts continue to gather information and seek purchase assistance, the ongoing collaboration between marketing and sales creates further opportunities for your marketing team to offer personalized content.
Successful personalized marketing requires the right communication channels. For that reason, marketing and sales teams should also evaluate existing marketing and communication channels for the target account. This will allow them to identify the channels best suited for recurring personalized outreach, communication, and retargeting.
Communication channels well-suited for account-based marketing include:
- Events, partnerships, and sponsorships
- Social media networks
- Email marketing
- Content syndication and paid media campaigns
- Product sites, brand sites, or landing pages
With this in mind, your marketing and sales teams should work in unison to build a list of planned/executed engagement and nurture tactics. Using this list, your marketing leaders will be able to continually tweak their outreach and engagement activities for an account-based marketing approach.
The easy way to plan your ABM strategy
Step 3: Equip Your Marketing and Sales Teams with the Right Tools for the Job
A successful ABM strategy requires the right tools — specifically, the right software stack and technological investments.
From account selection through engagement and nurturing, ABM software is designed to enhance every crucial step in an ABM strategy. ABM software also has reporting and analytic capabilities, allowing you to make informed decisions about whether any strategic adjustment is necessary in accordance with the most current, collected data on your ABM performance.
There are two ways of equipping your marketing and sales teams with the right tools for an account-based marketing strategy:
- Adopt end-to-end ABM software that provides all functions needed for every individual step of the ABM process, or
- Using the marketing technology stack you already have, establish an ABM program by adding supplementary tools as needed to scale.
Some of the common core features of end-to-end account-based marketing software solutions include:
- Analytics and prospecting tools
- Engagement monitoring
- Lead scoring
- Marketing automation
The choice between an end-to-end software solution or supplementary tools for your marketing technology stack is entirely up to you. An ABM strategy revolves around personalization, and so should your choice of software/tools.
If you’re interested in an end-to-end platform solution, you’ll find all you need to get your ABM strategy started at Ocean.io: the only data platform designed for account-based marketing. Ocean.io’s artificial intelligence solution allows you to find and prioritize the right accounts for your ABM strategy, giving you better personalization options and increasing conversion rates through micro-targeting.
If you’re looking for supplementary tools for your existing marketing technology, we recommend identifying solutions with capabilities such as:
- Enhancing audience management,
- Proprietary intent data, or
- Sophisticated reporting and data modeling.
Conclusion
Account-based marketing (ABM) allows B2B marketing and sales teams to work together to target best-fit accounts and gain expansion or growth opportunities.
To craft your ABM strategy, you need to:
- Formalize your account selection process,
- Align your marketing and sales teams, and
- Equip your marketing and sales teams with the right tools for the job.
These steps will help you base your strategy on the right data points, identify the most relevant communication channels for your campaigns, and choose the most effective software solution to aid your marketing and sales efforts.