Among the first lessons in good marketing is, trying to reach everyone puts you at risk of connecting with no one. It pays to get specific when you picture your audience. And for a lot of B2B brands, going a step further with account-based marketing and really identifying certain businesses and contacts to reach is proven to get big results.
Around 80 percent of marketers doing ABM say it outperforms their other marketing tactics in terms of ROI. But just like any marketing tactic, getting good results requires doing ABM well. If you are considering Account-Based Marketing, there are some account-based marketing tactics to craft your strategy.
First, you need to create a customer marketing strategy. Ask yourself how much of your current marketing strategy is based on getting new leads. Marketers have a tendency to prioritize finding and cultivating new prospects, when most of the time the best source for increasing your sales is looking to the customers that you already have.
Keeping your present customers coming back could increase profits by anywhere from 25 to 95 percent. And your probability of converting a new lead to a sale is between 5 percent and 20 percent, whereas for a current customer that goes up to 60 to 70 percent. The first step in accomplishing just about any account-based marketing tactic is identifying the specific business to target. Some of our most valuable targets are also those that are most easily reached and converted because they already like you, and you already have a lot of information about them.
You can also use lookalike modeling. In addition to becoming among your most valuable targets in account-based marketing strategy, your customer base is also a useful tool for helping you identify the best new leads that you should focus on. In order to do lookalike modeling, first analyze your present customers. Ask which of them are most valuable to your business.
Look at which bring the highest ROI and which have sent the most referrals. If working with a specific customer has raised the profile of your business and helped you get more clients by association, you should also consider it. Once you have a list of top customers, many online advertising channels are going to allow you to load the list then automatically target audiences that are similar to you. For your internal uses, you could also use the list to better define what companies to find out based on the main attributes your customers have in common.
Follow and engage with target accounts on social media. Social media provides marketers with direct access to your audience. As soon as you’ve developed a list of prime account-based marketing target accounts and pinpointed some of the main contacts through their website or LinkedIn, you want to find all the associated accounts you can on Twitter, LinkedIn and other relevant industry platforms.
Follow and connect with your target contacts and start paying attention to what they say. It is important that your first step should be listening. You want to become familiar with how your prospects use social media before you begin interacting more directly. Over time however, you could start strategically interacting with them on social media sites.
Email marketing works better when it’s personal. Emails with a personalized subject line get opened 26 percent more often, and companies that use segmented lists to increase relevancy for their recipients have seen a 760 percent increase in revenue from email marketing. Customizing your email messaging for the particular recipients is easier when you know exactly who is receiving the email, what their role in their company is, and where they are in the buyer’s journey. All of that is information you should have on your targets in an account based marketing campaign.
Lastly create highly valuable custom content. Free content on the web abounds, but content that is created specifically for one business not just for people in a specific job title in an industry, but for a single specific business that is rare. And it could be a good way to set your company apart from other businesses vying for our prospect’s attention. For example, a business that offers an SEO analytics tool could produce a multi-page report for a target prospect which includes valuable data on their current rankings, competitor analysis as well as some of the best topic areas to target moving forward.