Digital marketing may seem simple on the surface. But when you go deep, you’ll find many jargon-heavy sub-categories. One such sub-category is Account based marketing or ABM.
In ABM, you craft sales and marketing messages for specific accounts. Thus, this takes personalization to a whole new level. In this article, you’ll learn about the best strategies to run a successful account-based marketing campaign. Moreover, The sprint retrospective template is usually designed for the Scrum team to run effective individual sprint retrospectives. Many teams will do it immediately after the sprint review.
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How Account-Based Marketing Works?
Account-based marketing is a growth-focused marketing strategy that involves a mix of marketing and sales. So as you market your business or products, you measure sales numbers concurrently.
ABM starts with selecting a group of customers or accounts you can target.
These accounts must share a common trait and should be in the same position of the buying funnel. You create strategies to communicate with these users and deliver a delightful experience before converting them to customers.
Account-based marketing is closely tied to inbound marketing. These two go hand in hand. In the subsequent sections, you’ll learn about some proven ABM strategies.
Build an ABM Team
Before creating a strategy, you must set up an ABM team. This team should consist of both marketing and sales employees. Thus, ABM requires cross-team collaboration to be successful.
It’s essential to give equal importance to both sales and marketing departments. Together, they should create content that’d relate to the accounts your business is targeting.
Besides sales and marketing, you should also include team members from other departments like customer support or accounts as per your requirement. The more diverse the team, the higher the success percentage is going to be.
Target and Manage the Right Accounts
ABM is highly focused and targeted. So you cannot run after every user in your CRM. You can need to pick and choose and create a customer persona.
To get started, you must hold thorough discussions with your marketing and sales reps on creating that ideal customer persona. You should selectively pick the existing accounts in your CRM that you want to target and ultimately convert to paying customers.
These should be of high-quality. In other words, they should be pre-qualified and evaluated. Without the quality of accounts, your ABM campaigns won’t be as effective as you’d have liked them to be.
Then you should set metrics and benchmarks. These entirely depend on the type of campaign you intend to run. Once you’ve defined the metrics, you must benchmark them before you run the campaigns. It’d allow you to measure the effectiveness of the campaigns.
Run Cross-platform Campaigns
To succeed in ABM, you must adopt a cross-platform campaign strategy. So all your campaigns should be inter-linked rather than isolated from one another.
So you might create content for the account and then target them through search engines and paid search. But then you need to retarget them on social media and emails so they can complete the purchase.
Most marketers make the mistake of treating their marketing channels as separate channels. But to succeed at ABM, teamwork and cross-platform work is necessary.
Measure and Optimize
The last strategy — and an equally important one — is to measure the campaigns and improve them. To measure, you should have KPIs in place. So if you’re sending out emails, you might want to track the opening rate or click-through rate. If you’re running social media campaigns, you can track shares, comments, or opt-ins.
Once you have the initial KPI numbers, you should find ways to optimize them. You must run A/B tests to see which campaigns perform the best. Optimization also helps you reduce cost as you squeeze the most revenue out of your budget.
Account-based marketing is highly effective. But it might not be for everyone. Before running ABM campaigns, you should ensure that you have a qualified set of customers on your CRM database. If not, it’s better to acquire and qualify leads before you run ABM campaigns.