Important tactics to drive your ABM process

The world of marketing keeps on evolving and this is why firms out there need to always keep tabs on what’s trending in the market otherwise they will keep using the same outdated marketing tactics and will never get palpable results from their efforts.

A new marketing practice that is gaining popularity among most of the B2B businesses is account based marketing.

The success of account based marketing (ABM) is being backed up by theories, research, and results being given by bloggers, research companies, and vendors. You might be witnessing the influx of ABM in the last couple of years but you will be dumbfounded to know that the first time the term ABM was used was in the year 2004 by ITSMA.

For many years, both marketing and sales teams have been working on getting a different perspective on-demand generation, marketing automation etc. And soon, these departments realized that since they sell directly to companies, they need to create their marketing and sales strategies accordingly. The crux of ABM is to develop a marketing and sales strategy in alignment with the targeted and specific accounts. But there are several types of consideration that you will need to focus on in order to drive your ABM process and this is what we are going to address in this blog post.

Create specific offers for to-be clients

The success in ABM marketing lies in better personalization and relevance. The no. of target accounts in most of the ABM campaigns is very small and this is why you cannot settle with a low conversion rate with this type of approach. The best way to keep the conversion rate high is to use a personalized approach in which offers will be created according to targeted accounts only. The best part about this type of approach is the buyer will feel valued if they will receive an offer that will be personalized and relevant to them.

For example, if you are running a digital analytics firm then you can make 1–2 pages of a social report on the basis of your prospect and when you will reach your buyers, you can send the specific social media report to that prospect. This will make your prospect feel valued and they will be more interested in responding back to your offer.

Try direct mail with execs

Direct mails might be one of the oldest forms of marketing tools that are still in existence. But when the world witnessed the influx of digital marketing, direct mails stepped back. In the world of ABM marketing, direct mails can prove to be a fruitful medium for reaching a targeted set of accounts. This is true for all the executives out there because such people don’t sign for white papers, give reply to spam emails, follow firms on Twitter, or register for webinars.

You can find the success of direct mails in ABM when a company just sent Ipad boxes to their executives through direct mail and asked them to come to the webinar in order to get the Ipad. Soon, the company witnessed an increase in the number of executives that joined the webinar. This simply means that you can target a set of accounts through direct mails but you will have to be really unique with your approach.

Create sales offers to get meetings

Most of the marketers out there curate offers that are developed with the basic motive of generating leads from whitepapers and webinars. You can say that the sales offers are specifically curated to support sales lure prospects for a meeting.

You can take the above example of the digital analytics firm that sent 1–2 pages of the social report to the prospect to understand the implication of the said offers. The same company can stay in constant touch with its prospect for providing live social media research reports in comparison to their peers. This type of approach will make the prospect agree to a meeting and thus you will have chances of generating leads.

Some other egs. of sales offers used as an account based marketing tactics are technology assessment and security audits. The type of sales offers that you will use will depend totally on the type of industry you are in.

Buy white paper & webinar leads for the accounts you wish to target

There were only a handful of filters available for a lead buyer when they bought some leads from a reputed media firm. These lead buyers were limited to filters like geographical location, firm size, and title. But in the modern era, the lead generation companies out there are giving the freedom of filtering the leads purchased on the basis of the name of the company as well.

So, in case you are using the approach of targeted accounts then you can ask your lead gen company that you will be purchasing leads from the companies listed by you only. There is no doubt that the cost per lead with such an approach will be much higher but the support that you will get with this type of approach for your AMB marketing will be worth the price.

Soon, you will see companies making ABM the star of their marketing department and if you want to act as an early bird in the world of ABM then you will have to start using the tactics mentioned in this blog post.