By now you know that B2B customers want to be treated more like B2C customers with personalized marketing that doesn’t waste their time. Rather than salespeople pestering them, sending random product sheets and generic messaging, customers want content that is tailored for them that addresses their needs.
As buyer expectations have changed, B2B account based marketing has grown in importance.
ABM using a B2B marketing platform allows marketers to combine potential and existing customer data and track their behavior during the entire buyer journey. By nurturing these accounts with relevant content at each stage of their journey, ABM significantly increases engagement and conversions.
Nearly two-thirds of markets say their ABM strategy is producing significant results.
The Benefits of Account Based Marketing
Account based marketing combines your B2B demand generation with content marketing. When you employ a B2B marketing platform to manage your ABM strategy, you can turbocharge your marketing and realize several important benefits:
- Better internal alignment between marketing and sales
- Improved optimization using data-driven marketing strategies
- Clear metrics for measuring KPIs and performance
- More efficient processes using ABM automation
- High engagement and retention levels
- Shorter sale cycles and higher average contract value
- Continuous A/B testing and optimization of marketing
Of course, the biggest benefit of content personalization using ABM is increased revenue generation and ROI. 87% of marketers report ABM delivers higher ROI than any other form of marketing.
Gaining a Competitive Edge with Account Based Marketing Execution
When you embrace an ABM strategy using an ABM platform, you can gain a significant competitive edge. Here are some of the tactics to make your ABM approach successful.
Build Target Customer Profiles
Because ABM can micro-target groups and individuals, start by building targeted customer profiles based on your existing customer base. Not only do you need to do this when you are deploying ABM, but you also need to review your target profiles regularly as your customer base expands or new products are added.
Segment Profiles
Customers should also be segmented by profiles, such as revenue and industry. The more you segment your database, the more personalization you can perform. For example, you can create custom nurturing sequences based on:
- Firmographics and fit
- Intent data
- Relationship data
- Engagement
Create Content for Each Stage of the Buyer Journey
Buyers are looking for different information at each stage of the buyer journey. Make sure you develop content for each stage to answer the questions customers may have.
- Attract: Content designed to demonstrate expertise and start conversations
- Engage: Provide insights and solutions that align with customer goals and pain points to build relationships
- Delight: Provide an outstanding customer experience that adds value and creates loyal customers
Another way to approach this is through the traditional marketing funnel and create content that is designed for the top, middle, and bottom of the funnel. Here’s an example of the type of content you might want to consider.
- Top of the Funnel (TOFU): blogs, articles, product videos, infographics, FAQs
- Middle of the Funnel (MOFU): eBooks, case studies, white papers, video tutorials
- Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU): Demos, free trials, coupon codes
Employ Content Personalization at Scale
Automation within your ABM platform can target and personalize content for groups as they move through each stage of the buyer journey. You can create nearly unlimited sequences based on their engagement, behavior, and buying signals.
This allows you to do something that would be impossible manually: personalize at scale. Not only can you customize content to prospects, buyer groups, companies, and buyers, but you can deliver the right content designed to nurture them and move them through the buyer journey.
Create Product-Specific Offers
An effective ABM strategy is to create product-specific offers that are built specifically for particular accounts. When content is personalized with relevant information, you’ll see higher open rates for email marketing and more engagement with content.
Create 1:1 C-Level Campaigns
Create specific campaigns that target high-profile individuals within target groups. For example, if you are marketing a B2B Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering, you should develop separate content pathways for different individuals, such as:
- Nurturing CFOs by demonstrating how your product or solution can reduce headcount, improve cost-efficiency, and increase output.
- Nurturing CISOs by expanding on your robust security to prevent breaches and your resiliency to reduce downtime.
- Nurturing Managers by showing ease-of-use, training modules, and productivity gains.
High-value prospects can be targeted individually for even more effective outreach.
Measuring Results
Not everything you do gets the results you want. If only it was that easy! Just as it is important to measure what is performing, it’s also important to know what misses the mark.
One significant advantage of using an ABM platform is that you can measure results beyond traditional metrics such as email open rates, clickthroughs, page visits, and engagement. While you still measure these components, you can also follow buyers through every touchpoint throughout the entire customer lifecycle.
By measuring across the customer lifecycle, you can see more clearly what behavior leads to what actions. For example, are there behavior patterns for those buyers that spent more total revenue or committed to a larger deal size? Are there customer pathways that result in shorter sales cycles? When you can uncover these patterns, it can give you a competitive advantage by identifying high-value customers earlier in the sales process.
Embrace Continuous Optimization
You should always be testing and tweaking your marketing to optimize performance. This means running continuous A/B tests within your ABM platform. A/B testing, also called split testing, allows you to measure the performance of two things to see which delivers on your goals.
For example, you might test two different subject lines for the same email by splitting your target group in half and then judging the impact on open rates.
Advanced ABM platforms can automate the A/B process and measure results throughout the entire buyer journey, helping to detect patterns to continuously improve conversion rates.
Take Your ABM to the Next Level
Folloze empowers the next generation of B2B sales and marketing teams to collaborate and deliver account-based experiences that engage and build trust. Request a demo today to see Folloze in action and take your ABM to the next level.
