Account Based Marketing 101- How to get started

ABM is a type of corporate marketing approach that focuses resources on a specific group of target customers within a market. To engage each account, it uses customised campaigns that base its marketing message on its particular characteristics and requirements.

ABM also considers marketing more broadly than just lead creation. One key to getting the most value from your largest accounts is marketing to existing customer accounts to encourage upselling and cross-selling.

Knowing your target customer is crucial for any business. A common mistake business owners make is failing to identify their target clients. After all, your marketing strategy’s success no longer depends on the volume of leads you generate. It depends on your capacity to enhance your clients’ experiences.

That being said, “People desire an ultimate experience rather than only a commodity.” It will be easier for you to provide information and material that appeals to your target consumer if you have a deeper understanding of them.

Account-based Marketing has recently gained popularity due to developing technology and a shifting technological and commercial landscape. Now, look deeper at finding your ideal customer with account insights and profiling.

Let’s look at how you can find your ideal customer:

Lay a framework for your Account Data

Today’s companies focus more on business intelligence, big data, and analytics.

Since the dawn of the digital age, marketers have had access to vast troves of information. That may be utilized to aid sales in building more detailed account lists. You may gain more knowledge about which accounts to target by using these three crucial data sources:

Fit Data

While this information might give you a general idea of the target market, it must be combined with other data types to be valid.

Intent Data

Intent data identifies accounts that are actively looking for or interacting with content about your service or goods.

Engagement Data

This data introduces a third tier of insights to determine which accounts to invest resources in immediately, enabling you to take account targeting to a new dimension.

An ABM campaign’s objective may occasionally be as straightforward as paying more attention to best-fit accounts to increase engagement, transaction size, deal pace, and closure rate. For this kind of marketing, it is recommended that an automated Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) workflow be used to identify best-fit businesses.

Ideal Customer Profiles and Predictive Target Account Lists

When you’re looking to find a new client, it’s tempting to go straight to the source: your current client base. But that’s a mistake!

The ideal clients for your business are people who are likely to buy from you, and the best way to figure out who those people are is by building an account-by-account profile of your top customers.

If you’ve ever used any CRM software, then you know how tedious and time-consuming it can be to build these profiles—and what a waste of resources that can be!

With AI, however, we no longer have to spend hours searching through records or working through data analysis algorithms. Our AI can do all of this work for us. We need to feed our AI with enough data and let it do its thing!

A few typical predicted target account lists are shown below:

1. Lists of prioritized best-fit: It targets customers based on recently concluded, high-value transactions that predict future success.

1. Predictive quick-win list: A ranking of the top open chances with more likely than not accounts to close quickly.

Putting your forecasted target account lists into action

Do you know account-based marketers who are competent and successful in using marketing automation tools to implement their predictive target account lists?

Using industry-leading marketing automation software, AI can find the characteristics of your ideal customer and compare them to those in your account list. The initial stage, however, is to identify and prioritize the accounts. When you carefully place certain connections inside each target account using that data, ABM’s true magic may be experienced.

Using Google Adwords and SEO effectively for ABM

With the number of Internet users increasing, everything is shifting in the online world. That’s why every marketing campaign needs to target online customers.

45% of buyers prefer to buy online rather than go to a store. As these statistics are growing, every business wants to capture the online market’s audience.

ABM is one of the most profitable and trending marketing strategies in 2022. As ABM targets a laser-targeted audience, many people think that SEO and PPC campaigns are useless in ABM strategy.

However, recently, marketers have seen increased ROI from SEO and PPC in account-based marketing. As a result, more and more marketers have started using SEO and Google Adwords in their ABM campaigns.

Let’s see how you can use SEO and google Adwords in your ABM campaigns.

How to use SEO for ABM?

SEO can benefit any ABM campaign. Let’s understand how SEO can give you the best results with optimum efforts.

Know the core interests of your audience

With SEO, you can bring targeted traffic to your website, which helps you understand the core interests of your audience. You can track which keyword they are searching for, what are their pain points, and many other things.

Then you can use this data to curate your personalized messages for marketing campaigns.

Identify your target audience

Sometimes it is complicated to assume or create your target audience. SEO opens the doors to your target audience. You can target all decision-makers with the help of a proper SEO strategy.

This helps to create a specific audience that is interested in your services. In ABM, it is very important to know your audience as much as you can. Because if you don’t know your audience, then you can’t make a profitable ABM strategy.

Track the buyer journey of your audience

With a proper SEO strategy, you can closely track the buyer journey of your dream customer. You can track what they are searching for. You can combine ABM and SEO to create and identify your buyer’s persona.

Once you identify your buyer’s persona, it helps a lot in ABM. Because now, you can curate the content your potential buyer is looking for.

Let’s see how Google Adwords can help you in ABM.

How to use Google Adwords for ABM?

Did you know PPC returns are $2 for every $1 spent—a 200% ROI?

Let’s discuss how you can effectively use google AdWords in your ABM campaigns.

Provide actionable and insightful information for ABM

Google Adwords will give you actionable and insightful data about your audience. You can track what they are searching for, how much time they are spending on your website, which device they are using, which pages they are visiting on your website, the headline they clicked, and many other things. You can analyze this data to improve your ABM.

Retarget your potential buyers

Retargeting can increase your sales by 20%. With the help of Google Adwords, you can easily retarget your potential buyers, even with personalized messages.

For example, if you gathered a list of potential buyers who visited your website, then you can retarget them again and again with different messages and convert them into a customer.

Retargeting can greatly improve your ABM campaigns as it helps you stay in front of your potential buyers. It will also help you to expand the list of your potential buyers.

Bring in new leads

Leads are the lifeline of every business. No business can survive without leads. Google Adwords always help to fill your ABM pipeline with new leads. 

It helps you to meet with your new potential customers. It also gives you a chance to engage with leads and build a relationship with the help of quality content.

If someone shows interest in your website, then you can add them to your ABM campaigns and try to convert them into a customer. We can say Google Adwords open a new door for ABM.

How to Create Valuable Content for your ABM Strategy

Account-based marketing(ABM) is the solution to many marketing problems. With ABM, marketers can connect with individuals at the company level and create long-lasting relationships.

Creating valuable content is one of the key components of any successful marketing strategy. ABM requires a different approach to content creation.

Rather than producing a lot of content that is designed to appeal to a general audience, ABM requires laser-focused content on the needs of a specific account. 

Content will inspire your audience to convert and become paying customers.

Let’s discuss how you can create valuable and effective content for ABM’s strategy.

1. Perform Content Audit

A content audit is a process in which an individual or group evaluates the quality of the existing content on a website. The process usually includes researching the overall message, evaluating the site’s messaging, and assessing what topics are covered and how well they are covered.

A content audit is essential for creating a content strategy. A successful content audit will give you data about your content assets that can help you make strategic decisions about what topics to cover. Spot the gaps in your content and make more compelling content for ABM.

2. Do Deep Research

Research helps to identify the right group to focus on for the ABM campaigns. Research is the backbone of any content creation. To generate quality and relevant content, one should conduct thorough research into the topic and audience. With access to online resources and user data, finding the information needed for effective content creation can be more accessible than ever. With proper research, you can curate personalized content for targeted accounts.

3. Make your ABM Content SEO friendly

As a marketer, you know that marketing is all about finding customers. That’s no different in ABM. SEO is critical for account-based marketing because it’s the best way to get in front of potential accounts. With SEO, you can rank for your target keywords and provide helpful content to potential customers. This will help them understand how you can help them and make it easier for them to buy from you. B2B buyers research themselves. Hence they will google, and it’s your chance to get in front of them.

4. Plan content for ABM

Content strategy is an integral part of account-based marketing. Developing a successful content strategy needs to be planned in advance. Content strategy should be executed with the goal of generating prospects and closing deals.

Once you identified what type of content you need, gaps in your content, and the needs of your targeted account. It’s time to make a strategy for creating and delivering content.

5. Build your content interactive

As the attention span of users is getting low day by day, it is essential to make your content interactive. Content should be attention-grabbing and engaging. There are many ways to build interactive ABM content, but here are some examples of what you can do:

•  Use quizzes and surveys to get insights from your customers.
• Create a survey that asks customers about their favorite products or services to find out what they like the most about your company.
•  Create an interactive quiz that asks pain points of your targeted accounts.

6. Repurpose your ABM Content

Suppose your best content doesn’t get enough clicks, then it’s time to repurpose your content. Repurposing content is not just about changing the format of the content and presenting it in a different way. It also involves tailoring and tweaking the content for different audiences. There are many ways to do this, and some examples include. Use data, statistics, or facts from one article to create another piece with a new angle.

• Create a video version of an article with subtitles for people who can’t read fast enough.
• Create an infographic out of one blog post.
• Share an article on social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.

Summary:

In this article we have learned about how to find the ideal customer by using these three crucial data sources: fit data, intent data, and engagement data, we have also discussed how you can effectively use SEO and google AdWords in your ABM campaigns as You can get useful and informative information about your audience from Google Adwords. You can monitor what people search for and how long they stay on your website and SEO can help you to Know the core interests of your audience. and finally, we understand how can you create quality content for ABM strategies.