5 Steps to Building a Successful Account Based Marketing Campaign

“Marketers need to build digital relationships and reputation before closing a sale”, believes Chris Brogan, the immensely popular American marketing consultant. True that!

The best-in-class companies are shifting focus towards Account Based Marketing (ABM). The findings of a survey conducted by SiriusDecisions in the mid of 2016 suggest that around 70% of B2B companies are fully or partly engaging their workforce in ABM campaign building. A well- designed ABM campaign that resonates with a specific brand’s value would earn the best ROI on your marketing efforts.

Listed below are steps to run a successful Account Based Marketing campaign:

Essential Components of an Ideal ABM Campaign

Step 1: Identifying Target Accounts

We all know spray and pray marketing is certainly not the most effective strategy. This makes, identification of target accounts one of the most crucial aspects of a marketing campaign because if accounts are chosen randomly, it will only amount to wastage of resources. But, how do you zero in on relevant accounts? Here is the key:

• Begin with selecting accounts based on their verticals, business experiences, target markets and personas involved in decision-making process
• Imbibe a strategic layout by incorporating measures such as firmographics, business intelligence, company credibility, etc
• Identify MQLs to approach the best of accounts to be targeted in your campaign

Step 2: Building Account-Specific Profiles

Identification of targeted accounts is followed by building account-specific profiles or personas. For successful implementation, work out the following measures:

• Discovering Leads to be Mapped to Accounts: Note that you will be marketing to many, if not all of the leads in your contacts. Therefore, utilize existing or even external databases to map leads to accounts. Remember that these leads can play the role of key influencers within your accounts.
• Generating Account Relevant Content: A well-crafted, non-generic approach is vital to ABM, so you need to work towards creating personalized content for both the target accounts and the targeted personas. A complete profile can be developed based on the top business initiatives of accounts, business challenges faced and goals set forth.

Here’s an example of a persona.

Step 3: Executing Well Targeted & Coordinated Campaigns

Your ability to accelerate the movement of personas from the top of the funnel to the bottom is the foremost priority of an ABM campaign, so delivering productive information at the right time is vital in executing a well-coordinated campaign.

• Depending on your business model, there are diverse tactics that can be adopted, including website personalization, human emails, holding live events, advertising at the most productive touchpoints, voicemails, personalized messages, etc.
• During execution of account specific touchpoints, make sure that the consistency of information is maintained across diverse channels.

Step 4: Re-targeting- an Influential Strategy

As part of an ABM campaign, re-targeting is an extremely successful strategy for conversion optimization. It gives you an opportunity to advertise a brand in front of bounced back traffic yet again.

• Its success is driven by the fact that you will be spending resources on the traffic that has already expressed interest in your brand, which increases their conversion chances.
• Walmart is an excellent model working on this trend

Step 5: Knowing How to Optimize Results

From identification of potential accounts to closing deals, there is a gradual shift in strategies in an ABM campaign. Thus, it is recommended that you keep gauging the performance of different accounts and accordingly fine-tune the metrics involved.

• Parameters like marketing funnel velocity, value of contacts, successful conversions, retention rate can be measured to realize how successfully the targeted accounts are engaging with you
• In the event of successful engagement of target accounts, it becomes essential to distinguish between unused resources and the ones driving conversions to boost ROI

B2B companies like Panaya, Siemens, and Adobe among others are investing in ABM to drive revenue. Therefore, in order to build long-term strong relationships with the decision makers in target accounts, it makes sense to say that ABM is the future of B2B marketing.

Need help with running an ABM campaign?