Account-based Marketing is a significant investment if you expect to see results.
Your whole sales and marketing team need to be on board. The majority of your resources will be directed towards the accounts you’re targeting.
No matter how much you strategize, plan, and painstakingly review your campaign details, one thing is always certain: one day, those tactics won’t work.
It’s crucial that you continue to invest in new tactics if you expect your ABM campaigns to deliver results in the long run.
In this article, we’ve put together some of our favorite account-based marketing tactics for B2B sales and marketing teams. You’ll be able to use them to get noticed by your prospects and get ahead of the competition.
So, without further ado, let’s jump in.
Use Intent Data To Find In-market Buyers
Would it be useful if you had a way to identify which of your target accounts were actively looking to purchase?
Intent data can show you exactly that.
You’ll have the ability to identify companies who are actively searching for solutions like yours online, and be able to reach out before your competition has the chance.
Intent-based marketing is only going to increase in popularity as more sales and marketing teams realize its potential.
It’s also particularly useful when creating your target account list, as you can assess how likely accounts are to convert depending on the buying signals they display.
Build A Strong Foundation With Your Target Account List
Being able to focus on accounts that are a perfect fit for your solution is one of the most significant benefits of using ABM in the first place, so it makes sense to take a step back to consider your TAL before launching a campaign. Your target account list is going to guide all of your actions, and your final results will depend on how relevant your target accounts are.
To make the target account list selection process more manageable, considering using a B2B data service to help you identify companies that match your ideal customer profile. Choosing companies that match your ideal customer based on aspects such as their firmographic details, or technographic details, is an excellent first step.
If you ignore the importance of creating a detailed, accurate Target Account List, you’ll pay for it later with low conversion rates and poor campaign engagement.
Use Content Syndication To Warm Up Leads
Cold outreach is used in almost every ABM campaign, but it can have mixed results.
Consider using content syndication to warm up leads before your sales team engage with decision-makers to help educate them on the problem you solve.
This can be done through a simple email, a phone call, or across social media.
Put your most useful content in front of your prospects and help educate them on how your business can help solve their most pressing issues.
If you start your ABM campaign by providing value, decision-makers inside your target accounts will trust you and your company more than if you were reaching out cold.
Send Personalized Cold Email Campaigns
Cold email is still an effective way to get in front of decision-makers within your target accounts.
It’s tempting to load up 500 contacts into your CRM or other cold email software and send out a blast campaign. The problem with that is you lose all elements of personalization. It can work, but if you’ve invested time into building a relevant target account list, you’ll want to slow things down. The whole premise of ABM is to enable you to personalize your messaging to every account.
Take your time to personalize every outreach email you send. Your results will be far better than if you didn’t.
Create Custom, Personalized Content
The goal of all the ABM tactics I’ve mentioned above is the same. Start a conversation with decision-makers in your target accounts. However, too many sales teams lose the sale at the last moment because they forget to personalize their final interactions.
Consider taking actions such as:
- Creating personalized sales decks
- Sending prospects a unique case study that relates to their pain point
- Create a slide deck showing exactly how your solution could work for them
You don’t need to reinvent the wheel, but do need to make sure your leads feel as if the sales experience is unique to them. If you can do it successfully, you’ll see a big uplift in SQL to customer conversion rates.
Publish Detailed Research
If you’re running ABM campaigns, it’s relatively safe to say your solution has a high ACV, and your sales cycle takes time.
You need to continually be proving to your target accounts that you’re a trusted player in your industry. One way to do this is to regularly publish unique research that adds value to your industry and positions your company as an authority.
This could be publishing whitepapers on the state of the industry, or publishing reports on strategies, industry pain points, or other relevant topics that you know your sales leads will care about. These can be used in your sales and content syndication emails as a way to provide value, and they’re likely to get shared by relevant people in your industry if the research is high-quality and unique.
These can also be used for lead generation, as you can gate content behind an email capture form and offer it in exchange for contact details. Your sales team can then follow up with everyone who downloaded and read your research to evaluate if they’re a qualified lead.
In Conclusion
You always need to be finding new account-based marketing tactics, if not, your campaigns will stagnate, and results will diminish with time.
These ABM tactics are going to help you approach your campaigns from a new angle, and interact with decision-makers in ways you may not have tried before.
