4 Account-Based Marketing Best Practices Every Marketer Should Know

If your B2B company hasn’t tried account-based marketing yet, yours might be one of the few left in your industry that hasn’t. ABM has quickly become one of – if not the – most popular strategies for B2B marketers.

Even among companies that can’t completely adopt the account-based approach, a hybrid version that leverages ABM for the biggest prospects has proven valuable.

With that said, like any strategy, account-based marketing must be used properly in order to produce results.

4 Tips for Getting the Most Out of Account-Based Marketing

Whether your company is brand-new to account-based marketing or you’ve struggled to see its potential realized, here are four important ways to get the most from this popular approach.

1. Prioritize Your Prospects

While you probably don’t want to tell them this, all of your prospects aren’t the same. It’s okay if you treat them like they are, but if you have that mindset when marketing to individual accounts, your success rate may look good, but your revenues won’t.

For example, say you have 10 accounts you want to approach. You have to get clear about how much each one could be worth to your business. If one account is worth $1 million, but the rest are only worth $1,000, it’s probably pretty obvious where you should be making your greatest efforts.

Accounts with the greatest potential deserve the most attention, which means everything from your marketing team spending more time studying their needs to even having executives jump on initial calls.

The best way to make the most of your team’s limited time is with lead scoring. Go through all of your leads and give them a score based on how valuable they are to your company and then market accordingly.

2. Ditch Your Personas

In traditional B2B marketing, buyer personas are just as important as they are in the B2C world. Without them, you’re forced to reinvent the wheel with every marketing campaign, which isn’t much of a strategy at all.

When it comes to ABM, those personas will do more harm than good. The entire point is that you need to look at the unique features of an account and market to them specifically.

It’s okay to learn from what has worked with other accounts. Obviously, two companies in the same industry will share certain similarities. Even with ABM, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel completely.

However, if you try forcing an account into a preexisting buyer persona, you’ll most likely lose to a competitor that has taken the time to learn what makes them so unique.

3. Don’t Limit Account-Based Marketing to Personal Contacts

You should absolutely make personal contact with your accounts at some point. Usually, this means sending a personalized email, but it could also involve an introductory phone call.

At the same time, this shouldn’t be your only way of providing an account with personalized attention. They’ll most likely decide to visit your website at some point, too.

Unfortunately, this is when a lot of B2B companies lose their leads. This person has become accustomed to receiving highly-customized individual attention, but then, when they visit your website, they’re reminded that they’re just another account.

This is why you must implement personalization on your site. It should react differently to each visitor, especially those key accounts you’re trying to convert.

One way to do this is by including specific pages in your emails with these accounts. Literally point them to the pages that are most relevant to their unique needs. Landing pages can be great for this, as well.

4. Don’t Give Up Until You Have Your First Sale

This last tip is extremely important because the chances are that you won’t knock it out of the park the first time you target a specific account. Remember, many of your competitors are probably taking a similar approach.

You’re also far from alone. The biggest challenge most companies face with ABM success is a lack of experience.

So, even if it takes several tries before you finally convert that key account, keep going. Once you’ve had success, you’ll know what to tweak to see even more of it in the future.

Putting Account-Based Marketing to Work Right Away

One of the biggest misconceptions about account-based marketing is that it’s an approach that requires a long implementation process. The main reason is that you need to both acquire contact information and prove your company’s value before initially reaching out.

At Hushly, we’ve helped more than 100 companies skip that prolonged first step. Our software lets them better leverage the content they already have to gain the account-specific content they need.

If you’d like to learn how, please contact us today. Also, feel free to download our ebook: A Beginners Guide to Account Based Marketing