If you’ve been doing your research on account-based marketing, then you’ll know it’s one of the smartest ways you can structure a campaign.
As a refresher, account-based marketing (ABM) involves narrowing your focus to specific target accounts – the polar opposite of mass marketing. This approach means you can create customized campaigns and (hopefully) increase your chances for success!
If you’re keen to implement account-based marketing practices, but don’t know how to get started, this article is for you. We’ve rounded up 6 of the best account-based marketing practices to help you kick off your ABM strategy.
Account-based marketing strategies
If you’re new to account-based marketing practices, they can seem a little intimidating. It’s hard to know how to get started! But we’ve made things simple by creating a list of ABM best practices you can get started with today.
1. Research and rank your prospects
Research! It’s account-based marketing 101 to spend some time getting to know your prospects.
What does that look like in practice? In addition to basic demographics, you’re going to want to gain a thorough understanding of your target client, inside and out. In addition to demographic data, you’ll also want psychographic data (motivations and values), technographic data (what technologies they use), and where they are in your sales life cycle.
If that sounds like a lot of information, that’s because it is! Part of what makes ABM practices so successful is the research you do upfront, so it’s smart to not skimp on this step. Once you understand your prospects, you can rank them in order of how close you think they are to converting, and refocus your efforts on those with the greatest conversion potential.
2. Get your teams on the same page
One of the most significant advantages of account-based marketing strategies is the emphasis on bringing your sales, marketing, and content teams together. In other marketing models, these teams may work more linearly — marketing teams, then content teams, then sales teams, for example.
In ABM practices, rather than passing a baton from one team to the next, all three teams come together from the very first point of contact. This way, your teams can collaborate to create a strong, personalized campaign where each element is in sync.
Aligning your teams is a great strategy as it allows for intuitive, ongoing contact with your prospects and clients, collaboratively working towards a communal goal.
The best way to achieve this is to start assigning roles once your common goal has been determined. Make sure everyone understands the part each other plays. Then you can create joint KPIs so no team is acting in a silo. On that same note, you’ll also want to combine your workflows and strategies, so all team members can understand where everyone is at.
With this step, unification is key!
3. Customize your content marketing
Making sure your content marketing is personalized for your target audience is crucial — but it’s also not something that can be achieved with quick, band-aid fixes.
Instead, you’ll want to lean on the research you’ve done to understand your potential clients and their concerns. Then, you can start building microsites tailored to address those unique issues.
Simply repurposing your general content with a few new keywords won’t work. Instead, you’ll want to ensure that all of it, whether emails, blogs, or white papers, is updated to fit the specific needs of each customer or audience. To make sure your customized content is doing the best possible job, here are a few questions to ask yourself before you hit publish:
- Are you addressing your audience’s concerns?
- Are you providing information they’ll find helpful and useful?
- Is your content easy to read and understand?
- Do you end with a clear call to action (CTA)?
4. Create unique microsites
This point is closely tied to the previous one. Essentially, if you’re going to customize your content for each of your target audiences, then you’re going to be creating a lot more microsites to host all of that information separately.
The reason you’ll want to separate this information is to make tracking and analyzing the data you collect from these sites easy to do! If target audience A is being drawn to the same subset of microsites, then you don’t want to draw target audience B there as well. This will muddle your data and make it harder to determine what each audience is gravitating toward.
This is part of why you’ll want to look for microsite hosting solutions that allow for unlimited site creation. It should also allow you to easily access analytics from every site you create so you can have a robust understanding of your entire microsite collection.
5. Provide plenty of social proof
Social proof is one of the most powerful marketing tools at your disposal, which is why it’s among the top ABM best practices.
Most people read a review or look for recommendations before making a purchase, so this is a chance to put your best face forward. You can include elements of social proof everywhere from your microsites to emails and more. Wondering what to focus on? It depends on the format and the point you’re trying to make, but here are a few tried and true suggestions to get you started:
- Case studies
- Customer reviews
- Testimonials
- Positive press quotes
- Awards or certifications
6. Start small, then scale up
Account-based marketing practices can take a lot of work to get up and running, so it’s a good idea not to overload yourself at the beginning. Start with the accounts you were able to label as your priorities back in step one. This way, you don’t need to feel like you’re abandoning your current strategies, and indeed you shouldn’t be!
Scaling up will give you time to iron out any kinks, whether it’s in your team structures or data collection. This means increased chances for your success.
7. Don’t forget about content analytics
Once your ABM campaign is up and running, it’s best practice to monitor the success of your campaign through data analysis. Continual monitoring of key metrics will provide you with rich data about your accounts – analyzing this information is what transforms your data into actionable insights.
By assessing what is and isn’t working for your accounts, you can adjust your existing campaigns and gain valuable insights to inform future campaigns. In this way, content analytics can be used to not only measure the success of your campaigns – a crucial step – but also to improve your overall account-based marketing strategy.
Choosing a content platform that offers comprehensive data analytics is an easy way to ensure that you’re ahead of the game when it comes to content analytics.
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Zoomforth is the perfect choice for microsite creation and hosting. An easy, user-friendly interface makes building sites a breeze, and drag-and-drop tools can help you design, build, and adjust an unlimited number of sites without the hassle of contracting a designer. Even better? Zoomforth’s microsites give you access to real-time analytics — so you can have prospect data right at your fingertips.
If you’re interested in implementing account-based marketing or learning more about the ways microsites can boost your marketing strategy, check out what Zoomforth can offer your company, or request a demo today!
Photo by Jason Goodman on Unsplash
