The Complete Guide To Account Based Marketing (ABM)

We’ve put all our top tips for getting started with Account Based Marketing in one handy-to-read place. Enjoy!

The method of traditional marketing, of throwing the net wide to see how many leads you can capture, is still a popular method of increasing sales.

However, when you are looking at a more direct, focused approach, the traditional method may seem too generic or impersonal; especially when trying to get those ‘perfect’ clients.

Account based marketing can be the answer to your marketing challenges.

We’ve covered account based marketing, and how you can get started, a lot in 2020. To help you get to grips with everything you need to know, we’ve put all our guides in one hand place!

Here is our complete guide to account based marketing.

What is Account Based Marketing?

Account based marketing is a more focussed approach to campaigns. Rather than aiming your messaging at a wide network of potential customers, you are targeting a select number of companies.

In an Account based marketing campaign, you may even solely focus on select individuals in a company and target them directly. In this type of marketing we are focusing on quality over quantity.

There are plenty of benefits of account based marketing for both you and your target market. As you are focusing the campaign on a select few individuals, the content can be much more personalised and who doesn’t like receiving more personalised communications?

By personalising the marketing you are likely to find a higher rate of interaction from the target client, plus this will help you with the relationship building stage of the campaign.

Who is account based marketing suitable for?

The simple answer is that any company who wants to increase their client base through focussed targeting can use account based marketing to help increase awareness and sales.  Did you know that according to HubSpot’s recent report, 67% of brands already use account based marketing.

However, this type of marketing is most successful for larger B2B companies. If you are a smaller B2B business, you may want to look at your business model and decide if it is feasible and realistic for your company before you use this marketing method.

How to choose which accounts to target?

There are several steps to consider in order to decide which accounts to focus on. Firstly, you need to have already clearly outlined your goals for this campaign. Is it, for example; to increase sales? Increase brand awareness? Once you have done this you can then think about the accounts to target.

Now you clearly have your overall goals in your head you can start looking at companies to focus on.

There are several questions you should be asking yourself when deciding who to aim the account based marketing at. These are:

  • What businesses will bring credibility to my company?
  • Are there any particular target markets we want to expand/explore?

You also want to look at companies which meet your ideal customer profiles. 

Keep reading: What is Account Based Marketing?

Should your business be using Account Based Marketing?

The simple answer to this is that any business can use this method of marketing but that doesn’t mean it is right for everyone.

This type of marketing requires extra resources and budget as it is more time consuming and in-depth than a simple email campaign. You also need to have a solid idea of who you want to aim your campaign at using your buyer persona.

Account based marketing is more suited to established companies who have a good idea of who they want to sell to, and which brands or companies would help grow their own business more.

Keep reading: Should your business be using Account Based Marketing?

Account Based Marketing tactics you should be using

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Once you have decided to use account based marketing and identified your key targets to focus on the next step is to decide how you will approach your target. For this type of campaign to succeed both your sales and marketing teams will need to work together as one team in order to be successful.

Make sure that both areas are on board and both understand the end goal and every step in-between. Then, the first thing you then need to do, is to gather the target market’s contact details and any information you can gather on them, so how do you do it?

One of the best tools you have at your disposal is social media. You can search for the individuals on LinkedIn, Facebook, any platform. You may be able to get their email address and even other contact details especially from LinkedIn.

Make sure you keep track of all their details on a spreadsheet. On here you could include their name, phone number, LinkedIn profile URL… anything you can find on them. This spreadsheet should be shared across marketing and sales to ensure there is no duplication data in order to save time and resources.

It will also help you see where you are missing crucial information.

Once you have found out more about your targets, it is time to plan how you will approach them. To make it easier we have provided 6 top account marketing tactics to try.

  • Email marketing – this is probably the most obvious way, but it is also a highly effective method of reaching out to your targets. 
  • Personalised video – create a video which is personalised from the account manager who will be carrying out the follow ups.
  • Social media – social media platforms aren’t just a good place to gather their contact details. These channels are also great to start building relationships with your target audience. 
  • Battle cards – by creating battle cards for your account based marketing campaign, your sales team can have a small, condensed document with all the information on the company.
  • Content marketing – look through previous blog posts and articles to see if any can be repurposed for your target market.
  • Advertising – if you are aiming your account based marketing tactics as several employees in businesses, you may want to consider advertising.

Keep reading: 6 Account Based Marketing tactics you should be using

How to get started with an Account Based Marketing strategy

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For an account based marketing campaign there is a lot more involvement from all parties including marketing, sales, and your stakeholders. But if you put the time and effort in the results make it worth it.

Make sure you know what your overall goals of the campaign are. This will help you create your campaign. Then it’s time to build your ABM dream team.  

Once you have done this consider who you want to target, identify what companies will benefit your business and who will be best to target from these areas.

Find out as much as you can about the target individuals through company websites, social media, and any other pages you can find.

Making a personal profile of each target to use as reference will help in the creation stage to make the messaging and subsequent calls more personalised.  Ensure you store all this information on one spreadsheet, so everyone involved has access to the same data.

After this it’s time to get creative with content for your account based marketing campaign.  Whether you use social media, videos, or something entirely different make sure you add in the personal touch.

This is what account based marketing is about, it’s about narrowing down your targets and focussing a lot of time on individuals and building relationships with them to achieve your end goal.

Keep reading: How to get started with an Account Based Marketing strategy

With a lot of experience in all marketing tools including account based marketing we are here to help you succeed and achieve your goals. To find out how we can help with your latest marketing campaign contact us today.

From content to strategy we can help with any and all steps of the process to help increase sales, engagement and drive your company forward to succeed.