You may be totally confident in your ABM experience strategy today and unsure of how it’s going to scale tomorrow. This is a reality many small-to-medium business owners and marketing executives face and brings the problem of scalability into sharp focus.
For decades, companies have relied on traditional lead generation in the form of regular advertising and content marketing. There is nothing inherently wrong with this approach. In fact, it’s still a great way to generate sales and is the bread and butter for many industries and companies.
However, as your revenue increases, so too will the cost of generating a high volume of decent-quality leads.
As knowledge of how to create and execute scalable account-based marketing (ABM) improves, it becomes more important that companies targeting B2B clients at least try them out.
In today’s list, you’ll find information on how ABM works and eight actionable steps you can take to begin the process of optimizing ABM experiences today.
What is an ABM Experience?
Account-based marketing is the practice of crafting marketing content, sales strategies, and experiences tailored to individual B2B buyers. The main idea behind the ABM experience is to keep your biggest and best customers happy long term. These are your partners who you should be growing alongside, hopefully becoming indispensable to them in the process.
A company using ABM will hope to build these relationships with the effort of the entire sales and marketing departments.
How Does ABM Experience Work?
Targeting high-quality clients with customer-focused engagement strategies represents a big shift in the traditional attitude towards marketing.
In the past, the sales funnel involved generating as many leads as possible and converting the small percentage of them who will go on to become customers. The process of generating leads can be costly and, more importantly, inconsistent with regard to quality.
The ebbs and flows of lead quality, combined with similar fluctuations in content quality, economic conditions, and sales and marketing performance, can all contribute to a lack of accountability among sales and marketing teams.
A Different Philosophy
ABM is all about flipping the sales funnel on its head.
Instead of generating many leads and hoping that a few of them will close, ABM strategies identify and go after the largest targets in their industry.
In doing so, they pick up invaluable insights into market conditions, the happiness of their customers, and any growing needs that new or improved products could address.
Flexible and Powerful
The beauty of ABM experiences is in their adaptability. By definition, you’ll be catering experiences to individual B2B customers. This allows you a lot of room to sculpt messages, branding, and even products for those buyers.
This level of commitment is a form of marketing all on its own: Imagine the impression you’d leave on a buyer if your company created a whole new product just to make their lives easier.
8 Ways to Optimize Your ABM Experience
Keeping your best customers happy is not as easy as it sounds. But there are ways you can improve the ABM experience for your customers:
1. Make Sure Your Data is in Order
If you’re relying on first-party B2B data that’s been generated with landing pages or by other means, you need to be aware that your data could be unreliable.
Even if you invest in third-party data to shore up your own reserves, it’s important to parse that data to ensure its quality is high enough to act on.
Remember that you’re flipping the sales funnel on its head: You can no longer count on a high volume of leads to offset a low conversion rate. ABM is about targeting the accounts you really want, meaning each one is critical to the success of your business.
Asking these few questions each time you uncover a promising ABM lead can help offset the effects of unreliable data:
- How old is the data?
- Are key personnel at my target company still the same?
- How certain are we of their intent?
- Are our solutions still right for this company’s niche?
2. Define Success
While it’s important to be open-minded and patient with a large shift in strategy, you also need to know what your goals are. These should be established well in advance, ideally with the input of all who have skin in the game. This means marketing and sales working in concert with senior management.
3. Target the Right Accounts
Selling to the wrong account will offset all of the great work your sales and marketing team will put into the campaign. If your company’s solution doesn’t address any of the pain points the client cares about, you won’t make the sale. The specificity of ABM campaigns means these kinds of interactions can make or break the sale.
4. Identify Key Personnel
Once you’re certain the company is a good fit, you need to know who to impress at that company to make the sale. Find the decision-makers and get them involved as soon as possible. These are the people ABM is meant to work on, so focus on building this relationship first and foremost.
5. Choose the Right Messenger
Just like your client has key decision-makers, your own company has personnel whose strengths lie in account management. If you have contacts in your own organization familiar with your target, get them involved. A friendly face can go a long way towards closing a sale of any size.
6. Use Multi-Channel Content
Focus on creating a mix of content that works through multiple channels. Mix emails with videos and personalized written content. Utilize social media, your blog, and other resources.
When coordinating this content creation, always keep in mind who you’re marketing to. You should also aim to coordinate the timing of these campaigns for maximum impact.
7. Measure Results and Take Stock
Stay accountable to your original plan. If you decided on metrics in advance, now is the time to measure those and take stock of how well your strategy is performing.
Though ABM strategies close at a far higher rate than traditional leads, they will still be less than 100%. Look at where your failures are coming from, and you’ll see the clearest paths toward improvement.
8. Try Hushly
A content marketing and management platform like Hushly can eliminate the stress of creating ABM experiences for clients. Hushly makes it easy to deliver personalized account experiences with our platform.
Our solutions will scale with you, adapt to meet your needs and those of your customers, and promise to create unique account experiences for every client you approach.
ABM Scales with You
ABM experiences do not need to be a costly investment or even a major commitment.
They can start simply with just a few personnel on your side finding key targets and potential problems those targets may have. From there, you can set yourself to convince the target that your solution is the best one they’re ever going to find.
Once you’ve landed a few key targets, the ABM experience can begin in earnest because you can really begin to impress your new client with the level of effort and dedication to their growth. Your own growth will naturally come as a result, which makes ABM an easy choice for scalable marketing solutions.
Check out Hushly’s eBook, Efficient Growth at Scale, for more information on how to maximize your ABM experiences.
