Account-based marketing is a strategy that focuses on the customer’s journey, not just their purchase. It is an approach to marketing that leverages the data collected from customers’ interactions with a company’s website or app.
The first step in account-based marketing is understanding your customer and what they want. By analyzing and segmenting your customers, you can create personalized content for them and therefore increase their loyalty.
This type of marketing helps companies grow their business by increasing customer engagement, generating leads, and increasing sales.
Account-based marketing helps small businesses by providing them with a platform for building relationships with their customers. It also helps them drive more sales, increase brand awareness, and improve customer retention.
The best way for small business owners to benefit from ABM is to hire an account manager who will help them build the right strategy and execute it to attract new customers.
ABM helps small businesses by providing them with a better understanding of their customer’s preferences and habits, so they can create content that will be relevant to their audience.
If you’re interested in using more ABM strategies in your small business, here are some tips on establishing that.
6 Account-Based Marketing Strategies
1. Formalize your account selection process
This strategy is crucial because it helps companies find leads and target potential customers more efficiently. To achieve this, you need to formalize your account selection process by following these steps:
1) Define your target audience
2) Create an account selection matrix
3) Develop a scoring system for your accounts
4) Create an account-based marketing plan that includes specific goals and tactics for each type of account
Following these steps will make it easier for you to repeatedly try and capture accounts efficiently and effectively rather than just going with your gut feeling.
2. Align Your Sales and Marketing Teams
Your sales and marketing teams mustn’t be separate from one another for a successful ABM strategy. Instead, their efforts should blend and influence each other in a balanced way.
While sales and marketing teams are not interchangeable, it does make sense for them to work together. They can share insights from what they are doing and work on cross-selling products or services. This approach will also help with customer retention, which is vital for any business.
When you align your sales and marketing teams, you can have more leverage in managing your ABM strategy, see this account based marketing example.
3. Identify Your Business Key Accounts
To be successful in your account-based marketing strategy, you need to identify your key accounts. Identifying them is essential because these accounts are the ones that will drive the most sales and profits for your business.
Key Accounts are the people who drive the most sales and profits for a business. You need to identify these people before setting up an effective ABM strategy because they provide significant revenue for a company. They are usually high-level decision makers such as executives or influencers who have their hands in multiple products or services offered by a company.
They can help you grow as a company and ensure you get the success you deserve.
4. Use Account-Based Marketing Tools
Account-Based Marketing tools are one of the best ways to implement ABM strategies because they allow businesses to automate and scale their marketing efforts without investing in expensive technology.
The best thing about account-based marketing tools is that they offer a wide range of features you can use for different purposes like lead generation, customer interaction, content creation, and more.
ABM tools are essential for this strategy to work. They allow businesses to track customer interactions, nurture leads, and identify potential customers who might be interested in your product or service.
They can also help measure crucial account-based marketing metrics to help you figure out which strategies work and which don’t so you can adjust accordingly. These tools help you create relevant content for your target audience and provide analytics on how your content campaigns perform.
5. Assemble Your Core ABM Team
As small businesses, we often rely on very limited resources to get things done. This situation can be a struggle, especially when we are just starting up because we lack the resources that more established companies have. What’s more, as small businesses, we often don’t have the budget for a full-time marketing team.
The core account-based marketing team comprises social media and content marketing, analytics, and strategy experts – all of which are essential parts of ABM strategy implementation.
If you want the most efficient and effective use of your resources, assemble only the critical members of your ABM team and grow from there.
6. Identify and Prioritize Your Target Accounts
There are many ways to identify the target accounts for your ABM strategy. One way is to use an Account Based Marketing Toolkit, which helps you identify the target accounts for your ABM strategy.
You can’t afford to waste time on accounts with low potential revenue or buying power as a small business. You need to identify and prioritize the most critical account for your small business to succeed as an ABM strategy.
Identifying target accounts is not a difficult task. You need to figure out what kind of audience you have, their demographics, and if they are receptive to your product or service. Once you identify these target accounts, it’s time for you to prioritize them based on their importance to your business and how well they align with your marketing goals.
Conclusion
So there you go, some useful tips to consider when working on your account-based marketing strategy.
Hopefully, the tips will also sharpen the ABM strategies that you already have in place so that they are more adaptable for your target audience and easier to do for your team.