If you want to succeed with your Account-Based Marketing (ABM) campaigns, then check out these five key areas in which you need to excel.
- Account Selection: 1 to 1 Sales and Marketing Alignment
Don’t have marketing throw darts at a piece of paper and hope for the best. Pick the accounts which Sales know intimately as the ones with greater revenue potential. So, pick the accounts with which you are totally familiar, and that includes who are the key decision-makers, what they do, how they buy goods and services, and how they operate. Blend in your own strategies and objectives, and you have a good platform from which to start. This will constitute the best proof-of-concept from which larger ABM campaigns can be designed.
2. Creative Content
So many teams sweat the processes, the profiles and the desired outcomes, yet fail to ensure that a good content strategy is in place.
Traditional communication strategy is formal here: blend the right targeting with the right content and you’ll achieve the desired engagement.
Content is there to enforce, educate and entertain. Is it not there to turn off a customer with irrelevant material which is cut and pasted from old sales brochures. If you mess up on this step, you will quickly find yourself with less potential customers than you started with.
3. OmniChannel Planning
If you can properly combine the account marketing plan, together with the content and channel delivery, then you will be most of the way there to creating a highly successful ABM campaign. Great planning is all about making sure you have good vision across all your channels and that you understand as to how each channel fits into the overall picture.
4. Delivery with Control
If you don’t think about your best delivery mechanisms, once the nuts and bolts are all in place, then you will struggle to build upon the strong foundations: frequency and timing are essential. So, you will need to consider all the weapons at your disposal, including account-based advertising, emails, website, social platforms and search marketing.
5. Measure – Report – Improve
Measurement has to be centred on the level of activity within the chosen account. In other words, has the chosen account bought and if not, why not? If your key performance indicators are not in place and directed towards the right targets, your efforts will be wasted. And those targets are not how well a channel has performed, or if great engagement has been achieved with a particular strategy.
Final Word
Account-Based Marketing (ABM) campaigns usually fail because most people look at the parts of the process in isolation
Marketing and Sales working as one team means that the overall goal for everyone is revenue: creation, acceleration, retention.