ABM or account-based marketing is a strategy that focuses on creating unique and personalized buying journeys for high-value accounts.
…and it might be the solution your B2B company has been looking for.
But, here’s the problem.
It sounds like another buzzword, and there’s so much material on it that it sometimes seems daunting to implement.
In this guide, we’ll fix that. We’ll not only demystify how ABM works but even provide you with a quick start-up guide on how to start implementing it in the next five minutes.
Ready?
Let’s own it.
How Effective is ABM?
Very.
Some even say that 96 percent of marketers who’ve used it succeeded in their marketing goals.
The reason ABM works is the way it appeals to human connections.
ABM prioritizes building a relationship instead of making a sale because the whole thought process behind it is that relationships precede business transactions.
Many of the things that we do at BAMF are rooted in ABM. We ensure that our clients have highly-targeted and personalized interactions with their prospects.
Because we know that relationships are the key to growth.
Let’s begin.
Start with an ICP
It all starts with your ideal customer profile or your ICP.
This determines the ideal types of customers or clients you want in your funnel.
We’re not just talking about identifying demographics or job titles here.
You want to go further.
You’re looking at habits, their corporate culture, the universities they’ve attended, their interests, group of friends, etc.
After you do that, you want to take it a step further.
Analyze the industry, company size, corporate doctrine, pain points, and opportunities.
Here’s the thing.
You won’t always get the customers that you want in your funnel, and that’s fine.
But, it would help if you tweaked the way you look for customers so that you won’t waste your resources with a “generalized” approach to targeting.
Marketing costs money, yes, but beyond that, targeting uses a lot of human hours and effort; you want to be efficient with your time because you can’t make more of that.
Note: you don’t need to have just one ICP; you can have multiple for one or more product lines.
Remember, this is the most critical part of ABM.
Change Your Lead Qualification Framework
Once you’ve identified your ideal customer profile, it’s time for you to integrate that into your lead qualification framework.
Use the ICP that you have to ensure that all your lead generation means are using the framework to filter and bring in leads.
If you already have multiple campaigns up and running, this means doing an audit to make sure that they appeal to your ICPs.
Here’s how to perform a Facebook ad audit.
Also, this is the time to talk to your sales team and get them aligned with your plan for lead generation.
You want everyone on the same page, whether the guys from marketing or sales.
Segment and then do it Again
If you have existing contact lists, it’s time for you to look at them, and we don’t just mean this for good email hygiene. You need to be able to segment.
Remember the ICP that we built a while ago?
You want to pull that out and check which prospects are a direct match as an ICP with your ABM campaign.
Take that list and set it aside.
That will be your main focus with your ABM strategy.
You want to take that list and segment it even further, try to find patterns within the prospects that match your ICP and make separate lists out of them.
(Also, don’t forget to start segmenting all the other lists into possible leads, even the cold and warm ones. You want to take stock of who you have in your database or CRM while you’re at it.)
The Customer Experience
Now that you’re done with all the segmentation, it’s time for you to enter the customer experience part of ABM.
This is the fun part.
You’ve technically laid down all the paperwork for you to get this part of this guide.
It’s time to build a connection; it’s time to be a human.
The Buyer Journey
First of all, you want to start crafting the buyer journey.
If you did your homework on ICPs, you’d know a couple of essential facts about your prospects and a few of their distinctive patterns. For example, B2B healthcare and education only make purchases once a year, B2B tech requires that you take care of the technical teams. For business coaches, you might already know that depending on their field, the industry can be seasonal.
You want to leverage these facts into a unique experience for all of them.
Design a timeline from the moment of the first touchpoint to the time you can start coming in from the close.
Here’s where you design your awareness, consideration, outreach, nurturing, and closing stages. It’s also the section of ABM where you create the touchpoints and plan how they’ll progress through the pipeline based on their behavior.
What you want to craft here is a “story.”
It will be an essential part of the buyer’s journey.
You can show them how you’ve helped other people that they’re familiar with achieving goals that they want.
The Content Segment of ABM
There will always be some content involved with ABM; it could be the posts you put out for awareness, the emails you send as reminders, or the types of lead nurturing resources they get from you while they’re still making a decision.
Here’s where you’ll have to hyper-personalize.
Now it would be great if you could personalize for every prospect you have, but we all know that that isn’t practical most of the time.
If you are in an industry with hundreds of players, you won’t have the resources to personalize a hundred emails, let alone track them.
So, use your segmented lists here and personalize as much as possible.
Personalize based on traits, pain points, and challenges your prospects have; this will elicit a more human response.
The Concierge Segment of ABM
But, ABM doesn’t just stop with content personalization.
We now go to the concierge approach when dealing with your high-value prospects.
It would be best if you started splitting up your team to go after the whales.
Now, this is all dependent on how many members you have versus how many prospects you’ve got.
If you have 20 prospects and 5 SDRs or sales reps, you can have one rep for every four high-value prospects. If there’s a senior team member, they can probably handle more – or less if you want to give them the critical accounts.
The magic here is that your potential client won’t have to deal with everyone on your team and adjust have one point person that will take of their every need.
The point person/concierge will be responsible for:
- Communicating with the prospect
- Following up with them
- Getting to know them and building rapport
And more importantly
- Ensuring that they build a relationship with them
Think about a local grocer or shop that you frequent, they know you by name, they’re aware of your likes and dislikes, and you have a semi-personal relationship with them.
It’s the latter that always makes you want to go back.
The Omnichannel Segment of ABM
Part of providing a personalized experience for your prospects is ensuring that you have an omnichannel setup so that communicating with you is always streamlined.
They could start a conversation via email, engage with you on LinkedIn, and you’ll still be able to pick from where you left off. This makes everything feel as if it was seamless, and plus, it allows you to use social media platforms as ways of gently remarketing and nurturing leads.
More importantly, don’t be pushy.
One thing we like the most about using omnichannel ABM is the fact that it doesn’t appear to be pushy. You can just gently guide prospects slowly into your funnel by using the different platforms that you have.
How Long Does It Take?
Let’s get one thing straight about ABM.
The goal isn’t to make an immediate sale.
If that were the case, you’re better of with another strategy.
The goal of ABM is to build long-lasting, high-LTV relationships with prospects that you can count on to consistently bring in business.
These clients will refer other clients to you, become prominent stakeholders, and provide more repeat business.
It takes only a couple of weeks or months for some deals before they buy from you. However, it’s not the first sale that counts; the relationship is critical.
It’s perfect for B2B companies because the goal is long-term clients that you can count on.
Measure Your Results
Say it with me:
You can’t growth hack if you don’t track.
And, that’s true even with ABM.
Not every single ABM strategy works in the beginning, and that’s why you need a sound monitoring system in place to make sure that you’re constantly tweaking for better results.
Pay attention to your statistics over time:
- Are your prospects still opening their emails from you regularly?
- Do they still seem interested?
- Are they engaging with your posts? Has it gone higher or lower?
- What platforms are most effective for reaching out to prospects?
- What’s stopping them from buying for you?
- Have your stats improved after the adoption of ABM?
- What are ways that you can improve what you’re doing?
These are all things that you need to keep in mind to make sure you have a good strategy in play.
Make sure you get a proper monitor system in place before you even start your ABM efforts.
Schedule check-ins with all your ABM stakeholders and make sure that your teams take ownership of the prospects that have been assigned to them. This helps ensure that everyone is keeping an eye on each other and helping out.
What Do You Need for ABM to Work?
- You need a solid plan, ABM takes a lot of effort to execute correctly, but it doesn’t mean it’s not easily deployable. Map out the different steps in your current buyer journey and how they can benefit from ABM tactics.
- The right team is the key. You want the best team in the entire organization handling the accounts; they have to be personable, kind, and the type of people your ICP intends to deal with.
- Get marketing and sales to work together. Many great ABM strategies result from these two departments getting together trying to work out how to best target their ICP. You want to promote that particular synergy and bring into play.
- CRMs are crucial. As your number of warm leads gets more extensive, you need to be able to keep track and monitor the status of the different deals that you have. A CRM helps centralize the process and keeps things in check.
- Reporting and flexibility. Tracking your campaigns with a CRM is just one part of the puzzle; after that is gathering feedback and attempting to get better at your ABM practices. You need flexible campaigns that can quickly adapt to the people they are targetting.
- Get your communication right. This means that automated emails are evenly spaced out with multiple iterations and waypoints, your material appeals to your ICPs, and you’re constantly tweaking your responses.
Takeaways
Account-based marketing is in no way a magic bullet.
No way at all.
But, it’s one of the most effective ways of destroying the competition.
The reason it works is simple.
It’s personal.
Prospects like that because they’re people.
The more you start treating them as such and appealing to their human side by building genuine connections, the more you’ll succeed.
Anybody can sell, but it takes a lot of time and effort for a real connection.
It’s all about the connection.
And that’s where ABM rules all.
Need help setting up a lead generation campaign? Let us know how we can help you out, we’re here for you!
