Account-based marketing is a strategy that your company can use to strengthen its connection to larger accounts that have the most potential for driving growth. With this B2B marketing strategy, your team will use information about each account’s attributes and needs to generate personalized campaigns that are designed to increase engagement.
Although general lead generation may still play an important role in your company’s marketing plan, choosing to focus on existing accounts provides you with the opportunity to use sales strategies, such as up-selling and cross-selling to get more from your largest accounts. Initiating an account-based marketing success involves working through a few simple steps to ensure that it is a success.
Identify the Most Valuable Target Accounts
You can’t create a personalized campaign until you know which accounts your team needs to focus on. Take a moment to look through the data to determine which companies you routinely sell goods or services to along with which ones provided your business with the most revenue. Usually, these will be older accounts that have a long-standing history of working with your company, but you might also choose to focus on newer accounts that have the potential to drive growth as well.
Conduct Research On Each Target Account
Similar to how your marketing team would put together a buyer persona, you’ll need them to do the same by creating a company persona for each account. This involves doing research to generate information that falls within several important data points. For instance, your team needs to know the account’s demographics, purchase decision patterns, preferences for technology and overall stage of development to begin to understand what motivates the decision-makers to use or purchase a product.
Create Personalized Marketing Campaigns
Account-based marketing campaigns can take many different forms. In-person events with VIP invites, personalized gifts and swag tend to be popular and highly effective. Direct mail and email campaigns are also easily converted into account-based marketing plans. Whichever type of campaign you choose, you’ll want to use the information that you received from the research to tailor it to fit the account’s interests and needs.
Launch the Campaigns and Monitor Their Success
The final step is to put your plan into action. If the campaign involves an in-person event or webinar that takes place at a specific time, then make sure to send out the invites one to two weeks in advance so that the target account member has time to make plans to attend. Other types of campaigns can be launched immediately. Once the campaign launches, make sure to monitor its effectiveness. Tracking which strategies yield the highest ROI helps your team to refine their account-based marketing strategies for future campaigns.
As your business grows, taking a moment to zero in on the accounts that have the most impact on its revenue helps your team divert their resources to the areas where it makes the biggest difference. Considering that larger companies are already using this marketing strategy, initiating an account-based marketing plan helps you maintain a competitive edge as you begin to build a bigger business.
