What is Account-Based Marketing?

With more than 70% of B2B marketers zoning in on account-based marketing (ABM) strategies, it’s imperative that your team have a good grasp of what ABM really is. As a newer approach to digital strategy, about 85% of marketers who measure ROI have found account-based marketing to deliver higher returns than any other marketing approach! 

So, what exactly is account-based marketing? ABM is a personalized, strategic marketing strategy where key business accounts are marketed to directly. Here, accounts are treated as units of one, rather than the typical one-to-many approach. With ABM, high-value accounts or prospects are identified, key stakeholders are targeted, and marketing strategies are implemented through various channels to appeal to these specific personas needs. 

If you’re wondering how ABM could work for your business needs, take a look at some of the reasons why ABM is beneficial. 

Should You Implement an ABM Strategy?

Now that you’ve learned a bit more about what ABM actually is, you might be wondering if it’s actually a worthwhile strategy to implement. While 97% of respondents reported that ABM had a much higher ROI than other marketing campaigns, it isn’t an optimal strategy for every business. Account-based marketing is typically a B2B marketing approach that works with larger-scale organizations.

If you work at a smaller company or are not a B2B business, it might not be realistic to tackle marketing to specific accounts as you may have limited time and resources for marketing.

However, if you’re intrigued and want to try pursuing this strategy, you definitely should! Account-based marketing works to start off the sales process with higher-value opportunities, get the highest ROI possible from marketing campaigns, as well as align marketing, sales, and account management for longer-term success.

How to Implement an ABM Strategy

With ABM, you’re no longer targeting demographics or personas, but rather specific organizations. With this in mind, you’ll need to come up with a strategic and tactical approach to perfect your strategy. 

Take a look at these tips and tricks on how to implement a good account-based marketing strategy:

1. Define Your Strategic Accounts

Marketers are used to defining personas, but account-based marketing is about marketing to a whole organization rather than an individual. This is a critical difference in approach and should be the first thing in mind when implementing your strategy. 

You may want to start your ABM efforts by defining the industry, company size, location, annual revenue, upsell opportunity, profit margin, etc. for the accounts that are yielding your business the highest long-term profits. These are the types of accounts you want to target in your ABM strategy.

2. Begin Your Research

Once you understand the makeup of the organizations you’re pursuing, you’ll need to find sales leads that match your research. 

Once you’ve identified some target organizations, try to learn more about how decisions are made at these target accounts, determine who the decision-makers are, and learn more about how decisions are made. With this knowledge in your tool kit, begin to strategize on how you can influence the stakeholders at each target account.

3. Create Personalized Content 

Now it’s time to put your knowledge to use with content that speaks directly to these target organizations. When creating personalized messaging, you’ll want to understand these stakeholders’ specific pain points and appeal to how you can solve them.

You’ll want to ensure your content is visually engaging and communicating the right messages to these key leads. Remember, personalization is key here!

4. Decide on the Best Channels for Your Campaigns

In order to promote your campaigns and be creative in the right places, you need to understand what social platforms these target leads are spending their time on. 

Generally, Facebook and LinkedIn can be powerful platforms to target these stakeholders because you can run campaigns to appeal to specific organizations, as well as titles within those organizations. Once you have the proper space and content to target your lead stakeholders and organizations, it’s time to execute our ABM strategy!

5. Measure Your Results

It’s time to see some results! Once your campaign has been running for a few weeks, it should be time to measure and evaluate the effectiveness of your account-based marketing plan. You may want to reflect and ask yourself and your team some critical questions like:

• Did our personalized content engage well with our audience in mind?
• Which accounts are becoming more engaged with us?
• Did any of these targeted leads move down the sales funnel?
• Did we generate revenue from these personalized campaigns?
• Should we change our approach?

If your results are not what you expected after your first ABM campaigns, don’t be discouraged. Take your results and make thoughtful changes to your approach for round two, or if you found ABM is not your personal style, look into hiring a digital marketing agency for all your business needs!

Ready to Start Your Account-Based Marketing Strategy? 

Interested in implementing an account-based marketing strategy? Pyxl can help! We’ll walk you through the strategy process with your team and we’ll work alongside you every step of the way to make sure you’re getting what you need to satisfy your business goals. 

Or if you’d like to learn more about how Pyxl can provide further services to your business and help you hit your marketing goals even faster, check out all the digital services and solutions we offer.

Updated: Jan 18, 2023