Account-based marketing is a strategy that involves tailoring marketing content to specific accounts, or buyers, that your company has identified as being high-value.
The idea is that a few high-quality, loyal, and scalable partners are more valuable than many smaller partnerships that don’t develop over time. To keep clients interested in doing business with you long-term, you need to keep them coming back to you with individualized treatment and content. In other words, account-based marketing (ABM).
ABM campaigns can take many forms, but all of them have a few key features in common. We’ll go over the broad details of ABM campaigns, how to create one, and the steps you should take when running one for the first time.
What is ABM?
ABM stands for account-based marketing. It’s a marketing strategy predicated on the concept that each buyer, even B2B buyers, are individuals with unique desires and needs. Catering to these needs is the best way to deliver value to these buyers and convert them from prospects into buyers.
What is an ABM Campaign?
An ABM campaign is a concerted effort on the part of a marketing team to create content and marketing materials directly targeted to convert idealized buyers.
Account-based means each prospective buyer you’re working with should receive unique information and communications. These communications should be tailored to the business’s specific needs and the things the buyer has indicated are important to them.
It’s important to conceive ABM campaigns because, ideally, a prospect should find themselves on a journey that starts with them encountering customized content that addresses their specific problems and promises solutions. Then, a natural stream of content should unfold that proves your in-depth knowledge of the customer’s pain points and why your solutions are proven to work.
At the end of the campaign, the customer should trust that your solution is right for them and be ready to buy.
5 Steps to Create and Run an ABM Campaign
If you’re going to market soon and are interested in creating your own ABM campaign, here are a few things to plan for when starting.
1. Target Buyers
Your list of ideal buyers will be unique based on your industry and products. To keep it simple, try to identify which portion of your customer base is most valuable. This should be based on things like loyalty, scalability, and how confident you are in your ability to solve problems for that client.
Once you have a list of companies, you can decide if true one-to-one marketing or a one-to-few approach makes more sense.
2. Personalize Content
Next, you’ll need to work on creating personalized content that users will engage with. This content should be tailored to these buyers.
If using a one-to-one approach, you can speak directly to the buyer who the content is for. One-to-many marketing will require a more general message – be careful it doesn’t get watered down too much by trying to speak to too many people at once.
3. Engage Through Multiple Channels
There is no best way to reach buyers. This means you should try and cast a wide net. Your content should reach buyers through ABM email campaigns, texts, phone calls, organic search results, and more.
4. Synchronize Sales and Marketing
Regardless of how you get them on board, your sales team needs to be in sync with your marketing strategy. Make sure sales leaders understand the process you’re using to capture and enrich leads, and implement their feedback to make the process as smooth as possible for all involved.
5. Define Success
Finally, you’ll need to make sure all parties involved in the creation of the strategy understand what success looks like for them. This may mean picking and choosing certain metrics that everyone agrees are important.
No matter how you define success, ensure that everyone understands their role and is held accountable for it before starting any strategy.
Tip: You can create ABM campaigns with an account-based experience platform like Hushly. Hushly makes it easy to create self-nurturing landing pages, dynamic web pages, and deep customer insights that will help you tailor products and content to drive conversions.
Examples of Successful ABM Campaigns
What does an ABM campaign look like? There is no right answer to this question because each ABM campaign should be unique to your company, buyers, and industry at any given time.
ABM campaigns are right for B2B sales at any scale and in any industry. This is because the basic principle behind ABM is customer focused. Since every industry has customers, every industry is capable of catering content and marketing directly to consumers with their best interests in mind.
We’ve collected three examples of companies that hired Hushly to be their ABM campaign manager. These examples provide proof of concept. They could also serve to inspire your next ABM campaign.
Mindtickle
Mindtickle’s goal was to increase the rate at which prospects consumed content to quickly eliminate obstacles to the buying decision. The challenge here is that while your content might be valuable no matter who is reading it, not every customer consumes content at the same rate or with the same interest.
Together with Hushly, Mindtickle created visitor and account-based personalized websites, landing pages, and content experiences. These personalized landing pages and websites were designed to improve the customer experience and drive engagement.
The result was an impressive 50% rate of click-throughs on landing pages and content.
Smart Selling Tools
Smart Selling Tools realized independently that individualized landing pages made sense from a customer point of view. However, as their number of clients grew, founder Nancy Nardin realized she couldn’t justify spending the time it would take to customize hundreds of landing pages herself.
Not willing to give up, Smart Selling Tools hired Hushly, which made it easy to turn one landing page into many distinct ones with just a few button clicks. The result was conversion rates 8x higher than the industry average and an increase in leads and lead quality thanks to Hushly’s unique back-end enrichment process.
NVIDIA
NVIDIA knew that personalizing content for individual users was the best way to improve lead capture, lead quality, and get those leads into the hands of sales to drive conversions. Hushly made it easy for them to create self-nurturing landing pages, personalized webpages, and dynamic websites that can be tailored to speak to individual buyers and customers.
Moreover, NVIDIA was able to implement Hushly’s solution across their entire organization with no pain points.
Account-Based Marketing Isn’t Going Anywhere – It’s Time to Join In
Customers’ expectations regarding content quality, ease of access, and value are only going up. The day may come when all customers, B2B and B2C alike, demand personalized content everywhere they go.
Until that day comes, companies and marketers who use proven ABM campaign techniques will have a leg up on their competition.
Hushly can help take your content marketing to the next level with easy-to-create ABM campaigns. Request a demo, and see how Hushly can help your business grow.
