Marketing platforms often provide tips and tactics for reaching the largest audience possible. We work on sales funnels, picturing thousands of customers falling into the top of the funnel and those worthy enough coming out as loyal customers at the bottom. Account-based marketing, although it has been around for quite some time, seeks to individually reach out and nurture each person inside that funnel, guiding them on their journey to the bottom and increasing the likelihood that they will become long-term, loyal, customers.
Essentially, account-based marketing focuses on marketing specifically to each customer closely instead of aiming your marketing to the sky and losing much of it to the wind.
Account-based marketing is a powerful tool with access to verified business data and trusted prospects’ emails.
90% of marketers surveyed by Salesforce say that account-based marketing is extremely important to their business, which means we must all be doing it pretty well.
It sounds simple, right? Focusing on each important customer rather than trying to reel them all in. Many marketers struggle with building effective B2B account-based strategies that work to grow their conversions.
Best Practices That Aim to Increase The Success of Account-Based Marketing Strategies
Build Buyer Personas
Fewer marketers are developing real, useful buyer personas and are instead choosing to market to everyone within a specific demographic. It’s important to bring in accounts that are likely to grow and become big customers to your business. Take a look at the customers you already possess and what similarities they may have between them.
By building buyer personas that create representations of the accounts you’d like to have, keeping in mind location, role within the company, their industry, and even their revenue, you’ll already have an idea of their habits before you even make that initial reach-out.
Create an Account List of High-Valued Target Accounts
Create a list of accounts you want to aim to bring in and measure their likelihood of buying based on specific data points such as previous partnerships, location, etc. From there, learn as much as you can about the business and develop a sub-list of contacts that are likely to be the point of communication for you to reach out to. What else can you learn about them that will aid in your endeavor and make the contact as personal as possible – without getting too personal.
Customize Your Content Across All Channels
Every time you engage and interact with each customer, you’re creating a touchpoint that is building that relationship. You can create content to use as a template with multiple accounts as this will minimize the amount of time curating emails, content, etc., for each account, but it’s important to add customization and personalization to each piece of content that is speaking directly to a person.
If you’re using multiple platforms to communicate and engage, perfect, but keep that messaging consistent within each one so customers/accounts can predict their interactions and become familiar with your brand.
Get Creative – Don’t Just Send an Email and Hope for The Best
If you’ve gathered the contact information of a potential buyer, do more than just send an unsolicited email or Linkedin message and expect a prompt and friendly response. You can use other targeted advertising methods that are specific to certain roles within multiple companies or reach out to them in places they don’t necessarily expect. If you can advertise to them and essentially have them be the first to formally reach out, then even better.
- Try sponsored and targeted ads on Facebook based on their role within a company and the other brands they follow.
- Plan a conference or event – with food – and personally invite these notable and target accounts.
- Build content with SEO -targeted keywords that bring potential accounts to your website and contact page when they search for relevant words correlated with what you can offer.
Measure and Analyze Your Data
Communicating with customers is excellent. Gathering data each time and analyzing what you find to figure out if you could do it more efficiently, better, or need to reassess is incredible. You need to have some way to measure your account-based marketing strategies either based on each account or overall as a whole. There’s no way you can tell if something is working if you aren’t keeping tabs on what isn’t. You don’t need to do all the math alone either. Measure your analytics using online platforms and applications that are geared towards growing your account-based marketing.
Team Up Your Marketing and Sales Departments
If your Sales and Marketing Teams can’t recognize each other in the elevator or a name in an email, you’ve got a problem. Both should be collaborating and working strategically together to nurture your accounts. They’re connected and your customer accounts need to be as well. Start opening up communication. If you must, plan some out-of-office events to start building trust and friendship between your teams. You’ll notice a huge improvement in the consistency of the overall customer journey, the strength of your accounts and their willingness to buy, as well as the ability for each team to do their separate tasks within each account.
Before you go, remember that…
Account-based marketing can be a huge game-changer for your B2B company. By focusing on the accounts that are or could be important to you instead of wasting energy on the ones that don’t consider you important, you’re really nurturing those relationships and guaranteeing a long-lasting buyer. It’s far easier and cheaper to keep customers coming back than bringing in new ones, remember that. Especially when you’re trying to bring in literally everyone instead of the ones likely to convert.
Interested in learning more about account-based marketing and how you can effectively strategize your marketing to boost your B2B conversions? Reach out for a conversation with the OutlastedData team today!
