Many business owners assume that promoting their businesses to a large audience increases their chances of finding new customers. While this logic can be true to some extent, it usually comes with caveats. For any marketing strategy to be effective, you need to promote your business to the right people at the right time and place. An effective way to do that is account-based marketing.
What is account-based marketing and how does it work?
Account-based marketing is an approach where you promote your business to a select group of potentials instead of a broad audience. It's mainly suitable for B2B businesses that are looking to win specific customers. You can implement this approach by consistently creating highly-tailored marketing campaigns considering factors like the business' location, industry, and size, and the technologies they use.
Based on your business, account-based marketing can be executed in three tiers:
One-to-one: Creating a marketing strategy for a single prospect.
One-to-few: Targeting 5-20 prospects, usually with identical pain points and challenges.
One-to-many: Delivering a personalised marketing campaign to a large group of potential customers with similar business attributes.
Although account-based marketing can be an effective method of attracting high-value clients to your business, you shouldn't neglect your other marketing activities. Due to the time commitment required to achieve results, it is advisable to use account-based marketing to complement your overall lead generation efforts.
Why do you need account-based marketing for your business?
One of the most significant advantages of account-based marketing is that it can help you easily analyse the effectiveness of your campaigns and calculate your return on investment. In a survey by McKinsey & Company, three-quarters of consumers (76%) indicated that personalised communications are crucial to their decisions when considering a brand. Given that account-based marketing requires you to learn about a potential customer's business objective and create personalised content, it's safe to assume that it could improve your chances of winning a lead.
If you think account-based marketing is only a promising strategy for mid and large-size organisations, you are mistaken. Yes, executing an account-based marketing strategy can be quite labour-intensive, but if you have the resources, it can help any business meet its desired sales target.
Remember, account-based marketing is an ongoing process, and it can take several months to find your first client using this approach. Commit to the strategy only if you have a long-term goal in place.
How to implement an account-based marketing strategy
Identify your target accounts
The first step to implementing your account-based marketing strategy is to clearly identify the accounts you want to target. For this, you must research and narrow down the prospects that best fit your ideal customer profile. Start by filtering from a list of people who have already expressed some interest in your business, or by employing professional list builders and online tools to find qualified prospects. You can also use the lead-scoring feature in your CRM to determine which prospects you need to pay extra attention to. Once you have a list of prospects to target, divide them into the three tiers mentioned above and target them based on their revenue potential and scope.
Find the decision makers
If you run a B2B business, you may need to do extensive research to find out how the target account's business is structured, how important decisions are made, and who makes those decisions. This information will play a key role in shaping your marketing campaign and help set the overall tone of your messaging. Professional networking platforms like LinkedIn can help you learn more about a decision maker's background and interests.
Get your marketing and sales teams in sync
For account-based marketing to work, it's important that your sales and marketing teams collaborate to develop a strategy. Aligning your sales and marketing efforts not only helps prevent unnecessary miscommunications, but can improve the customer experience to drive better results. From the start, encourage your marketing and sales departments to take cues from each other. Just as your marketing content is being personalised, ensure that your sales pitch and follow-up activities are also personalised to create a seamless journey for your prospects.
Pay extra attention to content personalisation
The next step in the process is to gather all the details you need about your prospects, and start working on your content and delivery. Whether you promote your business through email, online advertisements, or social media, the key is to address your target audience's pain points. Remember, while people appreciate seeing promotional content that best resonates with them, you shouldn't get too intrusive. Avoid collecting data or doing promotions based on one's ethnicity, personal shopping habits, medical history, or social life. You don't want your prospects to assume that you've been closely monitoring their actions. Keep your marketing messaging simple and customise it in a way that doesn't cross the line into creepiness.
Launch your campaign and measure the results
Once you've clearly outlined your goals and laid the groundwork, it's time to implement your strategy. Launch your campaign and closely monitor how your prospects respond. The more insights you discover about how your target audience engages with your campaign early on, the better your chances are of finding success. Continue tweaking your strategy at regular intervals to enhance the effectiveness of your campaigns. You can use an analytics tool to better understand your prospects' online behaviour and measure your overall results.
Account-based marketing can require trial and error to figure out what works for your business. Be sure to give it enough time to see how it plays out.
We hope this blog helps you understand the benefits of account-based marketing and how you can implement it in your business. Are there any other topics you'd like us to cover? Let us know in the comments below.
