An Intro to Account Based Marketing: Part 6

Account Based Marketing Intro

Executing Your ABM Strategy

Welcome to the exciting conclusion of our six-part Account-Based Marketing (ABM) series!

To recap the series thus far, we’ve touched on the basics of ABM like aligning your sales and marketing teams, identifying target accounts, doing thorough research, and creating great content.

In part six, it’s finally time to put it all together and execute your strategy. Here’s how to do it in four easy to follow steps.

Let’s get started.

1. Identify Online Habits for Ideal Engagement

The first step is to identify where your stakeholders spend the bulk of their time online and the ways they like to view content. To illustrate this, we’ll base our example around an ABM approach to social media.

Once you have their habits and preferences identified — for instance, a preference for Facebook vs. Instagram — it’s time to carefully coordinate your messaging across key touchpoints. This means a multi-faceted approach.

For example, you might get the ball rolling by demonstrating value through social media engagement. In this scenario, you’d find groups and conversations decision makers from your target accounts are participating in. You’d then join the conversation, ideally with some relevant content your team has created.

Hopefully this would lead to a more direct dialogue — after you’ve established yourself, you can further the conversation via direct messages on social media. This is a great strategy, particularly when supplemented by more traditional means of approach, like personalized email outreach.

2. Build Out Customized Channels for Engagement

Having an attractive and convenient means for deeper engagement is crucial to building your relationship with those in control of target accounts.

This “means for deeper engagement” most effectively takes the form of a multi-channel approach to promotion such as:

  • Building custom landing pages tailored to the needs, questions, and concerns of accounts
  • Offering gifts for engagement and interaction (e.g. prizes, swag, and discount codes) while utilizing dimensional mail and PURLs
  • Distribute content such as blog articles across channels that are relevant to each account (e.g. website, social media, and emails)
  • Creating ad campaigns and social ads to target different factors such as location, skill, and job title
  • Inviting contacts to (physical or digital) events and asking attendees to invite their colleagues

3. Forge Strong Relationships with Buying Committees

Here’s an obvious statement: swaying the buyer is the most important part of making the sale.

So how do we do that? Buyers rarely fall for glitz and superficial offerings, which means you need to take the right approach.

The right approach is basically comprised of the following:

  • A focus on educational, value-add pieces
  • Hyper-personalized content
  • One-to-one (not one-to-many) communications
  • Hosting events and webinars that speak to your target buyers

4. Measure Success and Plan for Your Next ABM Campaign

Once you’ve launched, the execution isn’t complete. You’ll need to look back on your efforts and evaluate their success. Remember, ABM is a long-term strategy, not a quick one-off.

You’ll want to turn to easily interpreted metrics for our evaluation separated into three categories: awareness, engagement and relationships.

The best ways to measure awareness is by evaluating things like website visits, social media mentions, and social shares.

To measure engagement, you’ll assess website behaviors like page visits, number of return visits, time spent on site, content downloads, product demos, and email sign-ups/response rate.

Finally, you’ll want to look at your relationships. To put numbers on what appears to be an intangible, take a look at things like the number of decision-makers reached, meetings set, proposals submitted, trial sign-ups, etc.

A Final Note On ABM

Over the course of our six-part series, we hope one thing has stood out above all others: the importance of relationships.

That’s really what ABM is all about — relationships founded on providing opportunity. Above all, ABM is about meaningful connection to create mutual success.

We hope you’re enjoyed this series. For more information on Strata and launching your own ABM strategy, contact us to see what we can do for you.

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