Account-Based Marketing: Tactics And Examples That Work

What Is Account-Based Marketing?

As new B2B and SaaS services flock to the market, companies are tasked with standing out from the crowd. That’s why B2B content marketing agencies focus on building interpersonal, one-on-one relationships that focus on individual challenges and solutions. Account-based marketing tactics allow businesses to strengthen their lead generation efforts and engage high-value prospects. But how do you do account-based marketing? For starters, it requires a perfect alignment between various teams in your organization, including marketing, sales, and even customer service. Since your goal is to fish out one client at a time, you need every team member to know exactly who they’re dealing with. This way, you can curate highly personalized content and make unique offers based on each prospect’s budget.

Don’t treat ABM as a product of its own, though; it should be complementary to your B2B marketing strategy. You still need to employ a talented team with strong digital marketing skills so they can create a compelling strategy. It’s your experts who will identify which accounts are worth pursuing on an individual level and which will stay in the generic basket.

Are you ready to find out more about ABM marketing and how you can create wonderful campaigns? Stay with us as we unfold more information.

The Benefits Of Account-Based Marketing Tactics

1. Aligns Marketing And Sales

One of the main reasons account-based marketing is so important is because it keeps everyone on the same page. Communication and organization are integral to any company’s success, and account-based marketing tactics help all teams interact well. Everyone tries to achieve the same goal, knows their individual roles, and works with the same budget in mind. It’s pretty much like a marketing plan template. With such an organized workflow, it doesn’t matter how long an account is active with your organization. Any team member can pick up where the other left off and offer a positive customer experience.

2. Increases Business Relevance

B2B content marketing is pivotal when it comes to attracting and converting clients. With ABM marketing, you can cater specific content to the right accounts. By personalizing and customizing your content, you become highly relevant to your prospects, increasing your conversion chances. Why is that? Just because you operate in one industry doesn’t mean that all companies have the same issues. When you approach each account like a unique case, you speak straight into their hearts. You show them that you understand their challenges and have a solution for them.

3. Streamlines Sales Cycle

If you have a SaaS startup, you probably know how long the sales cycle is and how complicated it often gets. However, an ABM strategy makes this cycle two steps shorter. A typical sales cycle goes from prospects to connection, to research, to presenting, to closing, and nurturing. Account-based marketing tactics simplify this process. You start by identifying high-value accounts, presenting your brand to them, closing the accounts, and keeping them happy. Therefore, the whole process is accelerated as you engage clients before they even communicate with sales. Captivating prospects early on means improved conversions.

4. Personalizes Customer Experiences

A successful ABM plan requires perfect collaboration between sales and marketing. This means that all team members must know the unique journey of each customer. Therefore, you can create the right content, design relevant campaigns with intriguing copy, make product suggestions, and offer competitive pricing. You must make your ideal buyer persona feel like they are your number one priority and that you work tirelessly to meet their needs. So, ensure all team members know exactly the demands of each account so no mistakes happen along the way.

5. Offer High ROI

There are many B2B marketing tactics, but an account-based marketing plan has the highest ROI of all because you don’t waste time and resources on accounts and customers with low intent. You already know who is interested in your product and brand and focus your efforts on converting them. Therefore, you minimize the risk of ineffective spending. Once you’ve converted high-intent accounts, you can nurture long-term relationships. Additionally, you can locate similar accounts that may also be interested in your services.

8 Steps To Create An Effective Strategy

1. Identify High-Value Accounts

One of the top account-based marketing best practices is to analyze your current customer base and those who subscribed to your email list. How engaged are they with your content, and how often do they interact with you? Also, take a look at your existing customers to identify those with the highest repurchase intent. Who wants to repeat business with you? Are they interested in forging a long-term collaboration? You want to focus your ABM campaigns on the most profitable customers who are already happy with your brand or have a great perception. This way, their lifetime value will be high, and you’ll enjoy profits for years to come.

If you’re dealing with new accounts, check whether these customers have an urgent problem you are able to solve. Maybe you have the right offer at the right time to entice them. In these cases, your marketing and sales teams must act swiftly to address these accounts’ needs and create timely content. Make sure to make a proposal that aligns with their budget. Once you’ve done your research, you can start creating your strategic marketing plan.

2. Create Targeted Messaging

The next account-based marketing tactic is to start creating content and campaigns that align with each account’s needs, challenges, and preferences. One of the best demand generation practices is to create content for all stages of the sales funnel. First, create educational content, like articles, eBooks, and infographics, that gets your audience’s attention and demonstrates your knowledge of the industry. Next, invest in case studies and testimonials as social proof. You should treat each account individually and use the right messaging that addresses their pain points and offers actionable solutions and tips. Every piece of content you create should contain a clear value proposition and viewpoint. Your audience should know exactly where you’re standing and how you can help them.

Additionally, you want to deliver the produced content at each account’s preferred channel. For example, one client may prefer email marketing over social media. Others may require a strong social media strategy through targeting on platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter. When you approach customers at their preferred location with relevant content, you show them how much you care and how valuable they are to you.

3. Develop Personalized Offers

To generate new leads and maintain your existing clientele, an ABM marketing strategy should be personalized and customized. This goes beyond creating unique content and campaign copy. You must approach each account with one-of-a-kind value propositions and offers. That is because no two companies have the exact same problems, needing the same solution at the same price. So, dig deep into each prospect’s needs and pain points. Ask them about their budgets and create an irresistible offer. Generic messaging won’t get you anywhere when it comes to ABM B2B marketing.

But how can you grab businesses’ attention initially? Whitepapers, webinars, and podcasts are wonderful lead generation techniques that hook clients and inform them about your services. Your promotional efforts should have one goal in mind: to book meetings. For example, a B2B digital marketing agency doing SEO may offer an SEO audit to identify faults in a company’s marketing approach. Then, they complete the puzzle by explaining how they would improve the situation with their techniques.

4. Use Retargeting

This is an invaluable account-based marketing tactic that many marketers implement to recapture the interest of prospects. Did someone watch a product demo or add something to their cart before leaving without checking out? These actions prove a high level of interest by people. Yet, not all actions are created equal. Some visitors may read your articles to get educated with no intention of buying. You should create a ladder where you’ll be grading each action’s importance. This way, you’ll be able to create retargeting account-based marketing campaigns at a low marketing cost and with high returns.

For example, GumGum, a contextual intelligence company, created a personalized comic intended to grab T-Mobile’s attention. The company depicted T-Mobile’s CEO as a superhero, with GumGum being the trusting sidekick. This personalized effort grabbed the telephone company’s attention, securing the account for GumGum. The CEO even shared the image on his personal X account, exposing the smaller company to a large audience.

5. Ensure Organizational Alignment

No matter how many account-based marketing tactics you enforce, nothing will work unless all team members are aligned toward the same goal. Start by discussing every detail with all stakeholders, ensuring they are on board with your account-based marketing strategy and fully informed. Marketing and sales should also work closely to make SaaS lead generation seamless and streamlined. Everyone should know exactly the ins and outs of every account so the transition from marketing to sales is smooth. Also, a perfect alignment ensures that each department doesn’t exceed the budget. Even when there is disagreement, communication should lead to a solution.

To achieve such a tricky feat, you should fill out a marketing plan template, jotting down all aspects of your promotional tactics. As a result, your account-based marketing approach is clear and directs team members toward the right pathway. Lastly, don’t forget to include your customer service reps in this conversation, as they will need to know every little detail regarding each account.

6. Foster Trusting Relationships With Prospects

Making a good impression on prospects is a process ABM sales have to go through in order to convince clients to make a purchase and stay for the long haul. But this isn’t easy for just any software sales strategy, as it usually takes months to build trusting relationships. One of the best account-based tactics is to use various tools to get insights regarding your accounts. When do companies receive their funding, and what technology do they use or want to use? This sort of information will help you approach them with ideal offers and solutions. Case studies are the perfect way to showcase your expertise and win people’s trust. Additionally, don’t restrict yourself to emails. Communication should be on a one-on-one basis, making buying committees feel respected and valued.

If possible, arrange physical meetings with account decision-makers to meet them on a personal level. Make sure that everyone in marketing, sales, and high-ranking positions is aware of the latest developments so they continue conversations efficiently. While sales are more involved in this ABM step, marketing should be right around the corner to offer assistance if needed.

7. Utilize Social Intelligence

You may have heard about the importance of market intelligence reports and why companies must conduct them to build powerful B2B marketing strategies. And what about social intelligence? It is the art of listing what a company is saying in the digital world so you have the perfect conversation starter. Since ABM marketing is hyper-personalized, knowing unique information about prospects is vital. If you’re wondering how to start, it’s quite simple. Locate your potential customers online, on social media platforms where they are frequently active. Like their posts, leave comments, and share their content often. If you have a relevant piece of content, leave a link in the comments. They might read it and find it interesting.

LinkedIn is a powerful social media tool, too. You may contact prospects directly if you are sure that your services will be appreciated. Moreover, account-based sales and marketing require carefully crafted social media accounts. Keep your profiles updated and upload content as often as possible. Another account-based marketing tactic you can enforce is mastering search engine marketing intelligence to improve your SEO results. It’s important for prospects to find your articles at the top of Google results, as it shows them you are an expert.

8. Measure And Optimize

While you may know how to measure content marketing performance, ABM metrics differ, as you want to push accounts, not individuals, down the sales funnel. Analyzing your account-based marketing tactics frequently allows you to improve your strategy and accelerate business growth. If you want to start measuring your ABM advertising’s health, find buyers associated with target accounts and track interactions with these buyers. Then, note the revenue attributed to these accounts and the number of new contacts added to them. The engagement rates of these accounts are also crucial to measure.

Once you’ve gathered your ABM marketing results, let your teams reorganize themselves and create a new course of action. Maybe they have to retarget some accounts or upsell and cross-sell to others. What is important is to attract and maintain high-value customers who repeatedly purchase from you.

4 Account-Based Marketing Tactics That Work

1. Find The Right Tools

Did you know that having the right ABM tools helps 86% of B2B marketers gain more customers than traditional marketing methods? To successfully attract high-intent accounts, convert them using relevant content, and delight them, you must identify the right tools and software. Let’s start with trustworthy customer relationship management (CRM) software. This is your “holy book” when it comes to collecting, organizing, and managing customer data, helping you create personalized pathways for each account. In addition, you may want to leverage the benefits of AI in marketing by using automation tools that attract and engage clients. You may also use these tools to personalize your website and your email links.

Other tools, like Demandbase, help you identify and analyze your target base, helping you craft the best promotional campaigns. With audience profiling, marketing analytics, and real-time intent, no one will resist your customized experiences. Vainu is another piece of top software that lets you track each interaction and the reason behind it. Why did someone download an eBook? Was it for educational purposes or because they wanted to buy something? The platform will give you insights regarding their motivation.

2. Craft Unique Experiences

The future of digital marketing and ABM marketing, in particular, belongs to personalized and customized experiences. We already mentioned how important personalized value propositions are depending on who you’re targeting. But that’s not all. If you want to take things one step further, you can implement another account-based marketing tactic. You may build landing pages for each account, mentioning their specific needs and offering relevant solutions. Include case studies, reviews, eBooks, and CTAs that align with each account’s preferences and challenges. However, don’t make the content overly personal, as it may seem bizarre and overwhelming. Sure, companies expect you to do your research about them, but too much information can feel like you’re crossing boundaries.

If you don’t have the resources or personnel to create multiple landing pages, you may perform landing page optimization to make your domain inclusive. Tend to the needs and pain points of all buyer personas and accounts to show that you can serve all of them.

3. Invest In Paid Advertising

We can’t miss paid ads when we talk about account-based marketing tactics. Banner advertising is one way of delivering personalized ads that retarget your prospects and regain their interest. But ABM advertising isn’t only about existing accounts that have shown interest in your offers. It is also great for generating interest from new accounts and boosting brand awareness on a larger scale. Start by finding the right ABM partners and platforms and choose your tactics and channels carefully according to your needs and budget. Additionally, programmatic advertising is useful to ABM marketing since it helps you target accounts and devices that conducted a specific search. Thanks to cookies, you can serve your ads on websites through Google, Bing, and other networks.

LinkedIn advertising is another powerful option that lets you promote content to profiles and companies outside of your connections. You can choose the characteristics and demographics of the accounts and clients your sponsored content will approach. Furthermore, LinkedIn enables you to experiment with various ad formats based on your campaign goals, the funnel stage you aim to target, and the scope of your chosen strategy. Last but not least, a content syndication strategy helps you promote your content in B2B environments, including websites, social media channels, and blogs.

4. Host Events

Hosting dinners may not always be a feasible account-based marketing tactic, as your customers may be spread all over the globe. So, you can arrange online conferences and webinars, talking to each account’s decision-makers. You need to customize your agenda and content for each customer to address their challenges and needs. You may also need to invite different speakers depending on the subject matter. Your ABM strategy should include a press release sent to all stakeholders in each account to ensure every important figure attends. Webinar marketing allows you to demonstrate your service’s value and showcase your knowledge and thought leadership. Make sure to add value to your presentations, share similar customer experiences, and provide networking opportunities. For startups, it may be important to start from the basics since they may lack the knowledge large corporations have.

Key Takeaway

Account-based marketing was given life thanks to the increasing demands of customers who don’t want to be fitted into a certain mold. There are many content marketing strategy examples that personalize and customize their content according to their clients’ needs and challenges. To do this and succeed, you must align the efforts of all team members, especially marketing and sales. Start by identifying high-intent accounts and create personalized content that appeals to them. Make them offers based on their budgets and use retargeting to recapture their interest.

To foster loyal and trusting relationships, you must ensure your customer service reps are also in the loop. Social listening should also be in your account-based marketing plan, as it helps you understand your prospects better. Don’t forget to research the right tools for your needs, curate great paid ads, and measure your marketing efforts frequently. Hosting events on a personal level is another ABM step you may need to take if you want to close deals and melt your accounts’ hearts.