Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is a phrase you may have heard before, but never truly understood it.

ABM is a B2B strategy where marketing and sales teams join forces to personalize buying experiences for valuable transactions. These specific high-value prospects’ accounts or groups of customers are identified, characterized and pursued.

With ABM, companies use the information they’ve gathered about their customers to create and deliver tailored relevant marketing messages that are most likely to reach and interest them. This, in order to create custom products and experiences while improving Customer Lifetime Value.

Essentially, ABM entails building a relationship with your customers through individualized interactions instead of through mass marketing campaigns that bombard the public with unsolicited messages. This contrasts with traditional marketing methods, which focus on a mass marketing approach.

Why use Account-Based Marketing?

Account-Based Marketing allows businesses to manage their customer base more effectively, better understand their needs, and create powerful loops of communication between customers and brands that leads to a higher degree of satisfaction among customers.

Other benefits include helping business to:

–        Target their customers more effectively.

–        Increase the reach of a company’s marketing message.

–        Build more intimate relationships with customers.

–        Better manage Customer Acquisition Costs (CACs).

–        Boost sales by providing customers with new and better ways to use products and services, and

–        Increase brand awareness and loyalty among customers.

By leveraging digital platforms and accounts across various mediums, such as social media, email, website, and even phone calls, a company can target specific accounts within broader audiences and increase its chances of being successful.

How To Implement Account-Based Marketing (ABM)

The rise in ABM has led to an increase in services that allow companies to easily implement it. There are now many different platforms that offer comprehensive ABM solutions, including HubSpot, Salesforce and LinkedIn for customer engagement, Omniture for data analysis, and Hootsuite for managing multiple social media accounts.

Here’s a general high-level look at how we can implement ABM.

Step 1: List 20 – 30 of your most ideal high-value prospective customers. Segment the list by grouping them according to similar characteristics, aspirations and psychographics. Allocate marketing, sales and service personnel that’ll match the competences and sophistication to each account.

Step 2: Understand your customer’s preferred buying process and how they interact with yours or similar companies. This includes understanding the marketing channels that best represent them and allocate a budget to these channels.

Step 3: Create appealing, relevant, educational and fun content that demonstrates the value you provide to customers – content that helps them reduce costs, improve productivity, increase their revenues and make their business and personal lives that much better.

Step 4: Implement reliable systems for capturing contact details along with interactions, feedback, and customer’s ratings of their experiences, to support improvements, repeatability and consistency over time.

Step 5: Monitor the performance of your team’s execution of ABM, the performance of each channel and make adjustments as necessary in order to reach your desired results.

Step 6: Celebrate the winnings and incentivise your teams and leaders who deliver ABM success. This helps motivate and inspire your people and to retain the highest contributors.

Where To Start

Account-Based Marketing (ABM) has long been seen as a superior method for generating leads because it forces marketers and salespeople to place their bets on the best prospects.

It encourages customer intimacy by creating a consistent relationship with active buyers who are more likely to buy when they know their needs are being met. And finally, ABM enables marketers to measure results in real time so they can adjust their strategy as needed.

To get started or to build upon your existing ABM strategy:

• Click here for a FREE download of the ebook titled “How to Execute Account-Based Marketing with HubSpot”.
• Click here to create a FREE HubSpot CRM account to run and manage your ABM strategy.
• Click here to book a FREE consulting with myself or one of my team members.

To your ABM success!

KK Diaz

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