Smart account-based marketing (ABM) is the marriage between sales and marketing to build relationships with a highly targeted set of accounts.
This approach narrows down your research to a very exclusive set of customers, allowing you to offer tailor-fit messages that resonate with each account.
This is why account-based marketing works perfectly for new businesses. Let’s be honest, you (probably) don’t have the budget to throw the proverbial kitchen sink at anyone and everyone. But, with ABM, you can focus sales and marketing efforts on specific lucrative accounts.
With a staggering 97% of marketers reporting that ABM has a higher ROI than other marketing methods, new businesses should jump on the bandwagon without wasting time.
Ready to jump in? Here are 6 really smart account-based marketing strategies new businesses can start with:
1. Dig deeper
Look for quality leads, not quantity. Your contact list can’t be filled with just email addresses and names — it has to do more, way more.
To achieve break-even quickly so your business can finally start making profits, build a client list that digs deeper; highlight the pain points and challenges plaguing the accounts you’re targeting.
Concentrate your efforts by working closely with your sales team to find out:
- The current technology your prospects are using.
- If the current system is compatible with your product.
- If the company works in an industry that has benefited from your offering or similar offerings.
2. Embrace site-level matching
(Source: DiscoverOrg)
Say, you reach out to an account to pitch your services, but it so happens they are just a subsidiary company. You would have to repeat the process of researching the parent company, customizing the sales content, and creating an entire new outreach campaign.
It’s a waste of time and resources, something your new business can’t afford. That’s why your account-based marketing needs site-level matching.
Site-level matching helps you reach the right people by mapping out each account’s organizational chart to find out where exactly the lead fits into the company’s ‘family tree’.
To bring this level of nuanced insight to your sales and marketing team, use a sales intelligence solution. They help to improve the quality of data, ensuring a sophisticated lead-to account matching process.
3. Use pixel-based retargeting
(Source: Drive Customers)
Pixel is a javascript which can be embedded on your webpage. When a visitor navigates to that page, your web browser leaves a ‘cookie’ on their browser. This way you can track visitor activities like when they click on a certain link or sign up.
Use these insights to retarget accounts with relevant content that will push them further down the sales funnel and accelerate your time-to-close.
Say, a website visitor clicks on product A. You can retarget the visitor by offering product documentation that details the unique selling propositions (USPs) of product A. This way your new business can close more deals faster and better.
4. Use a recommendation engine
(Source: Netflix)
Take a cue from brands like Netflix and Amazon Prime which use recommendation engines to increase engagement while reducing customer churn.
Support your ABM with a powerful recommendation engine to help your marketers better understand your customers. It gives them the ability to offer highly-targeted follow-up recommendations to each account based on their previous activities.
Predictive analytics tools analyze current and historical account activities and make predictions/ recommendations. Essentially, the sales team would be able to follow-up even before the business has asked for anything.
5. Create an online portal
(Source: DocSend)
A chunk of money and time is spent on creating awesome sales enablement resources like brochures, company profile, product presentations, and more. But, all the hard work goes to waste if your sales team can’t use it because they can’t find it.
Use an online portal like DocSend to keep all your sales enablement resources in one place which is easily accessible by the sales team.
It enables sales and marketing team to work closely and develop a communication strategy that allows for seamless sales communication.
6. See what’s working and what’s not
New businesses need to understand one thing: ‘ABM is not a do-it-and-forget-it strategy’. It’s important to keep constant tabs on every account.
Teams need to be aware which accounts are actively engaging with the content and which ones are not. It enables teams to make swift decisions, ensuring accounts are moving further down the sales funnel.
Winding up your smart Account-Based Marketing program
ABM grows your new business from the inside out by aligning sales and marketing efforts to target specific high-value accounts.
It’s the next step in B2B marketing evolution that’ll drive high-quality opportunities with shorter sales cycle. Honestly, there’s never been a better time to implement ABM strategy.
What are you waiting for?
About the author
Niraj is the founder of Hiver, an app that turns Gmail into a powerful customer support and collaboration tool. When not working at Hiver on programming or customer support, Niraj likes to play guitar. Niraj can be reached on Twitter @nirajr.
