A beginner’s guide to Account Based Marketing

A whole lot of B2B Marketing strategies are now available for the organisations to speed up their growth process including account based marketing. Account based marketing is a marketing methodology that helps a business target a specific group of customers that are a right fit for the organization’s product, unlike the traditional marketing strategies that target a wide number of customers, even the ones who have nothing to do with the products of the business.

With the stiffening competition, using just the traditional marketing methods will not fetch results that are actually desired. Account based marketing methods remove the spray and pray methodologies, making the strategies more precise and to the point.

But how does account based marketing actually work?

5 steps that will help a business implement account based marketing methodology are:

1. Identifying and finding the target accounts

The first step is to determine the accounts that might be the most profitable accounts for the business, dividing them into separate targets with specifications such as demographics, industry, turnover and more. Such target groups can be searched fro through automation, or through various other marketing channels.

2. Identifying the people need to be contacted

Once the target accounts have been identified, the next step is to identify the source of contact, the type of the company structure they belong to, existing pain points.

As soon as the person who should be contacted is found out, businesses should start interacting and engaging with them through various social media platforms, in order to make them aware about themselves and develop a strong brand image.

3. Customizing Marketing Campaigns

The content that will be amplified amongst the target customers, needs to be personalised as per their position in the sales pipeline. It is very crucial for the businesses to know where their prospects are in their journey with them and have content in accordance to that.

The marketing campaigns must be able to contribute to the prospect’s shared story as the account based marketing strategies do not target individual stakeholders but buying groups as a whole.

4. Identifying the correct channels

The next step in the process would be identifying the platforms where the prospects spend most of their time, where the content will be absorbed the most. In order to protect the content from going into vain, the businesses need to know the correct channels through which the content needs to be amplified.

It has to be kept in mind that differing opinions or messages should not go the same target groups.

5. Evaluating the success

The most important step in the entire process is to know how successful the campaign was, whether the accounts had started engaging more with their brand, whether the personalized content prove to be more valuable.

One thing that needs to be kept in mind is that success is not evaluated through how many deals were closed but whether the potential customers have progressed in the sales pipeline. At times, it takes months to convert a prospect.

Once the sales teams and the marketing teams join hands to work together, the businesses are bound to be successful in their ventures. Account based marketing methodology will improve the customer lifetime at a more rapid rate, than the traditional marketing strategies.

Blog Link Resource

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