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Account-Based Marketing: What it is and how to start

B2B businesses today struggle to find the best ways to market to ideal clients. From the Buyer’s Journey to cold outreach to everything in between, it can be a struggle to determine the best marketing strategy for your business. One technique that is gaining in popularity due to its effectiveness is Account-Based Marketing (ABM).

What is Account-Based Marketing (ABM)? 

Hubspot defines account-based marketing as: 

“a focused growth strategy in which Marketing and Sales collaborate to create personalized buying experiences for a mutually-identified set of high-value accounts.” 

In short, ABM is a marketing strategy that closely aligns sales with marketing to target key accounts with personalized marketing efforts. This means that a target company would see an ad targeted specifically to them and their unique needs as opposed to a general ad targeting a group of companies. 

Why Use Account-based Marketing? 

One of the biggest benefits of ABM is that you can directly see the results of your investment. For example, if you spend $10,000 on campaigns targeting one key new account and you sign a $1 million contract with that account, then you can more directly tie this back to the marketing efforts. Similarly, because ABM is focused on accounts, this marketing strategy creates close alignment between marketing and sales, which overcomes a common pain point for most companies. 

ABM also allows you to focus on the companies that matter. Done well, you can guarantee that you are only reaching your target organizations rather than companies who would not be interested in purchasing from you. This creates an improved use of your marketing budget. 

The close alignment with sales enables your sales team to plan and prepare for the moment when the account reaches out for more information. By narrowing the focus of your marketing efforts, your sales team can focus on researching the target accounts rather than preparing to speak to any number of interested customers. This targeted focus results in better sales meetings, and ultimately better projects. 

Getting Started with Account-Based Marketing

If you’re read to start using account-based marketing in your business, there are a few steps to take to best prepare.

Step 1: Align marketing and sales. Before you start developing any ABM campaigns, you first need to ensure that marketing and sales are prepared to work together to achieve this common goal. In general, this is a win-win for both teams, but establishing roles and expectations up front will prevent wasted resources and ensure all timelines are met.

Step 2: Identify key accounts. The total number will vary depending on the size of your business and your potential clients. If in doubt, start with a smaller list. Each client will receive personalized marketing campaigns, which means a large list will quickly become expensive. 

Step 3: Develop account plan. This should be a combination of sales and marketing tactics to reach key decision makers at the account. 

Step 4: Execute plan and form relationships. After creating the plan, it’s time to implement! Here the marketing and sales efforts should result in increased communications with key people at the target account, which will allow you to establish key relationships.

Step 5: Win project, review, and repeat. The next step is to progress towards signing the new customer and guiding them through your sales process. Once that happens (and even more importantly, if it doesn’t), review your process, identify what can be better next time, and update to continue targeting key accounts. 

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