Winning Clients Through Account Based Marketing

What is Account Based Marketing (ABM)?

Account Based Marketing is a B2B marketing strategy that treats target businesses as markets of one.

It is a particularly successful strategy to use when you are targeting medium and large organisations that have many stakeholders involved in making any purchase decision.

Account Based Marketing leverages collective decision-making in your favour. It's based on the understanding that purchasing decisions within a business are very rarely taken by one individual. Traditional lead generation rarely target more than one or two individuals in a business and therefore will only influence part of the purchasing process. By targeting all the stakeholders involved in a purchasing decision with your marketing messages, you reach and activate the entire stakeholder body and gain more influence as a consequence.

Identify Your Target Accounts

The first step in building a successful Account Based Marketing strategy is to build your target account list. These are the potential high value target prospect accounts that you want to turn into customers. This list can be as small or as large as you are able to service from 10 target accounts upwards.

Identify The Entire Audience Within Each Prospect

You will need to identify all the influencers and everyone who has a part in making a decision to purchase your services. These individuals are your marketing audience within that prospect. This audience can be made up of employees from the lower levels of a company, the general management and senior leadership teams as well as non-executive leadership.

These days, prospective customers don't enjoy feeling like they're being sold to. That’s why it’s crucial that your Account Based Marketing programme is seen to provide value, doesn’t push your products or services excessively, but leads on a value proposition. You’ll want to create new content for them. That content should speak not only to their individual pain points, but also to the businesses issues you know that specific business has that you can address.

Remember your Account Based Marketing strategy is focused on casting a wide net for new business within each specific target organisation. It’s about getting all the stakeholders talking together about you. When the whole stakeholder group is aware of your brand, and the value that you can deliver for their organisation, then you are much more likely to win that customers business.

Choose your channels

Even with really well focused content, it won’t be very effective if you don’t use the right channels to enable its reach within each specific organisation and your targeted stakeholders within that organisation.

This is where your general inbound marketing, advertising and other comms programmes will help to support your Account Based Marketing activity. Your general marketing activity should combine with your Account Based Marketing activity to build the right level of awareness of your product or service and make a connection with the value it can deliver.

Measure to succeed

No matter the size or scope of your campaign, the final critical step to success is to ensure you can track and measure your results. The customer lifecycle is a continuous circle and your Account Based Marketing strategy should be continuous also. As you go through the various stages, your measurements and analysis will impact decisions including iterations and tweaks to both Account Based Marketing and your outbound efforts, your content and direct campaigns.