Bullseye! Is there any better exclamation after completing a difficult task? We all know it means someone just hit exactly what they were aiming for. What if you could take some of the difficulty out of hitting your targets? What if you could help guide your shot right to the target? You could be experiencing the thrills and rush of scoring your bullseyes more often.
Get Acquainted with Account Based Marketing
Account Based Marketing (ABM) is something of a different approach to marketing your products and services. Rather than casting a wide net to appeal to as many people as possible in as wide an audience as possible, ABM relies on a more focused approach. The idea is to strategize and pick certain accounts to focus your efforts on by delivering highly personalized, strategic campaigns to the people and organizations that are the best fit for your company.
An ABM marketer is less concerned with driving high volumes. They tend to focus on finding a select group of customers considered high yield. The definition of high yield might vary from marketer to marketer or even customer to customer. The target may be to find a new big logo that will be using your services. Or, the target may just be people you expect are big spenders. Maybe you want to target records that typically have short close times on their deals. Whatever the case, the point is that an ABM campaign is built specifically with its audience in mind.
The identification of which accounts to target for a particular ABM campaign is the result of collaboration across departments. Both the Marketing and Sales Teams should look at their data to determine the profile they want to aim for. This means looking at existing opportunities that are examples of the kinds of accounts you want to target. Look for commonalities among existing opportunities to start to build the profile of the kind of record you will target.
Get the Most Bullseyes for Your Money
Companies tend to become interested in ABM strategies because they offer better ROI than a traditional wide net approach. A well built ABM campaign will have its goals and analytics set up and running, ready for the campaign’s launch. You should set these up early in order to establish some baseline behavior. An established baseline allows you to judge how the campaign’s contents are performing. How active were your targets before? Did your efforts actually drive more people to your website to request demos? You can really only answer that knowledgeably if you understand how those accounts behaved before the campaign.
Data begets more data. As your campaign runs, you can use the analysis of it to start informing even more personalization in your already targeted audience. For instance, you can start putting together the profile of those inside your audience that were a quick win. Then you can start developing content further personalized to seek out more quick wins.
Sharing data and collaboration between Marketing and Sales is a vital component of ABM campaigns. The Marketing Team can provide Sales with top-of-funnel information so that the Sales members can watch activity and possibly ascertain signals from those potential buyers. Sales should be keeping Marketing up to date for any changes in trends in closed deals that might affect future ABM campaigns.
Planning It All Out
Sharing the data won’t be the only things Sales and Marketing will be doing together. Working together, your team should be able to come up with your customer’s typical journey. The general example is Awareness, Interest, Evaluation, Desire, and Action. Once the journey and its stages have been defined, your team can start planning what content and assets will be applied at each step in the journey. How fast a company moves through the stages, and/or where they entered will affect what type of content they should receive. For instance, if the targeted company has never even been to your website before, the approach will be different than another who has already filled out a Contact Me request.
Targeting and personalization continues inside each organization. The structure of targeted companies also matters. The value of an interested IT tech is probably less than the Director of IT which is also less than someone in the C-suite. The value of the first party might just be in your introduction to their boss. What each level of employee cares about is also different. The high ROI of ABM strategies comes from the high return on targeted content. If there’s value in different content for different levels of employees, keep narrowing your targeting down. At the very least, make sure your content encourages working your way up the targeted company’s hierarchy.
Marketo, Leadous, and ABM
All of this data collection and organization is made incredibly more manageable when using Marketo as your marketing automation platform. The Leadous team knows how to leverage all the reporting and tracking Marketo brings to the table that you need to plan, build, and execute ABM campaigns. Every click, website visit, content download, and form fill will be recorded so we can help you and your team analyze the results.
Additionally, Marketo will allow real-time personalization in emails and landing pages. ABM campaigns are all about ROI, and ROI is highest on personalized content. Leadous’ team can help build content for you with personalization in mind. That includes everything from making sure your company’s relevant data is making it into Marketo to building custom email templates and designs.
Reach out to Leadous today to setup and hit your bullseye.