Enaa Mari
New trends often reveal themselves in the digital marketing world every year. This year is no different! This 2023, Account-Based Marketing has become a hot topic in the B2B world.
Have you noticed that your business is struggling to gain new customers? Then you should explore the power of b2b ppc agencies and Account-Based Marketing. Going for this approach will help you achieve a higher win rate. It can also provide better lifetime customer value and help you gain a more significant deal size.
Account-Based Marketing also delivers a higher Return-on-Investment (ROI) than other marketing strategies. You can increase your business’ revenue by up to 208%.
Now, how does Account-Based Marketing increase your ROI? Do you need marketing agencies for startups to help you out? Read on to further understand the power of account-based marketing.
Why Is ABM Essential for Your Business?
Account-Based Marketing has worked miracles for many businesses to this day. Did you know that about 84% of companies report an improvement in their reputations using ABM strategies?
In addition, 83% have gained increased engagement with their target accounts. So, it’s hard to say you don’t need ABM for your business.
Compared to outbound and inbound marketing strategies, ABM needs personalization and is very targeted. With that, you can close deals much faster since you have already impacted the final decision-makers. This will be due to your lead nurturing efforts and personalized content, accelerating your businesses’ sales processes.
A marketing agency for startups can help you with personalization and how to target the right accounts. With an agency, you can better understand how ABM works and how it can help you as a B2B business.
Aside from that, ABM can also bring your sales and marketing teams together. They will have to work as one to find the right accounts for more productive and efficient planning and strategies. This can optimize your business’s most important resources: time and money.
ABM also makes use of marketing automation tools. They can lessen efforts and maximize personalization with dynamic functions and better visuals. Automation tools can also create eye-catching headlines and great CTAs for your content.
How ABM Changed Businesses
About 61% of companies state that generating reliable and strong leads is their greatest challenge. This leads to companies finding new marketing strategies for better ROI and branding for startups.
A great case study showcasing the power of ABM is what happened to Restaurant Furniture Plus.
Restaurant Furniture Plus sells furniture for restaurants and is entirely dependent on Google for lead generation. However, quality control is not perfect at Google. So the business did not know if a click would be a consumer. Each click could be a small chain restaurant, a single-location business, or a large chain.
Restaurant Furniture Plus only targets small chain restaurants that need their services. In the end, only a third of their clicks were from their targeted customers. Statistically, the company wasted about 67% of its ad spend on features it didn’t want.
Once they employed an ABM strategy, Restaurant Furniture Plus could target their desired target customers. The strategy helped the company minimize its spending and maximize its lead generation.
They also increased their average order size as they lost small orders from single-location restaurants. ABM made the company more efficient, as it no longer needed many transactions to gain more revenue. Currently, Restaurant Furniture Plus is watching its base of repeat revenue grow as many small chains launch new units each year.
Another case study where a business switched to ABM is Snowflake.
Snowflake is a cloud-based data warehouse. The platform aligned their sales and marketing teams to create a more comprehensive audience profile. Snowflake avoided going for a dashboard and instead chose accounts with their sales department’s quantitative data.
The company decided its channels according to where its customers were likely to be and industry verticals. With the help of a startup branding agency, they could create personalized pages with consistent branding. This included creating personalized notes from their SDR and CTAs for their website.
Snowflake also removed silos in their reporting. This allowed employees to be on the same page and quickly find insights the ABM team may have missed. Due to this strategy, investors scrambled for the shares of Snowflake, which had 70% year-over-year revenue growth in fiscal 2023.
So, tell me, which route is better, without or with ABM?
Key Steps to Apply Account-Based Marketing
ABM levels the playing field by planning content that converts. No matter how big or small your company is, you risk a competitor beating you for a big account if you avoid launching your ABM campaign.
If you’re ready to apply ABM to your marketing strategies, here are a few steps you need to know that worked well for new companies that used ABM.
Step One: Identify Your Ideal Target Profile
As you know, ABM is all about targeting specific accounts. And by identifying your ideal target profile, you can easily find which campaigns fit best.
Start by finding the accounts that fit your qualifications. What makes that account a good fit for your company? For instance, searching for accounts with an average contract value above $20k or accounts that have specific keywords in their About section.
How about an account that fits the criteria but might need improvement?
It’s best to avoid accounts with no funding for the last few months or have had massive layoffs in the past few months. After all, you only need a few accounts more likely to buy your services or products.
Step Two: Know What to Put On Your Account List
One thing separates good campaigns from losing ones, and that is how accounts are selected. ABM campaigns that underperform often make these mistakes:
- Getting a wish list from sales (Example: we want to sell to Amazon)
- Listing lost deals from sales
- Building a list with broad firmographic requirements (Example: B2B companies in North America, 80+ people)
This type of setup is doomed. Why? Selling to enterprise companies needs a proper playbook, typically involving marketing and sales. Selling to Amazon could be its own campaign.
There are better ways to avoid involving lost deals in your list since lost deals were lost for a reason. ABM will not be able to get them back for you. Lastly, having a broad target means listing companies that do not know your products and services and might not even need them. Many are likely to ignore your messages.
Try using Cleabit or Leadfeeder to find companies actively engaging with some of your key website pages. This includes the book, demo pages, comparison reports, case studies, and pricing.
Be sure to collect all public information about your target accounts’ strategies and initiatives. Some sources you can search through include roadmaps, press releases, interviews, corporate records, earnings calls, and social media updates.
Step Three: Account Development
Your next step is to distribute your personalized solutions to the target accounts. Try creating an activation program and a multichannel warm-up.
This strategy works well for businesses that want to create awareness in the buying committee of target accounts. This may include content hubs, personalized ads, content collaboration, and social selling and engagement.
Many B2B companies think they can warm-up target accounts with only display ads. However, running display ads shouldn’t be your only tactic. Why?
Firstly, how often do you click on banners that pop up on your screen? If you think your target customers are different, they aren’t.
And secondly, your customers spend most of their time on other platforms that you may not be able to reach. This includes Asana, Google Docs, CRM, and Slack or Teams.
A great way to create awareness among target accounts is through engagement-based outreach. For instance, GumGum used an innovative ABM campaign that helped them land T-Mobile as a client. How?
The marketing team at GumGum scoured the social media page of John Legere, T-Mobile’s CEO. Through their search, they found out that the CEO was a fan of Batman. So they took a creative approach to attract his attention and business by creating a comic book featuring the CEO as the main character, T-Man, modeled after Batman.
With the right approach, you can do the same. You can also create a ton of buzz about your company on social media, attract new prospects, and boost brand awareness like GumGum did to land T-Mobile.
Tips and Tactics for B2B Startups Using ABM
The core idea of ABM is to create an aligned marketing and sales process that essentially builds relationships with targeted and specific sets of accounts.
However, this may be confusing to startups that aren’t working with an account-based marketing agency for startups since there are plenty of factors to consider. This includes account mapping, offers, metrics, and planning.
Here are a few tips and tactics that you can use with your ABM strategy:
1. Retarget to Maintain Your Brand in Front of Accounts
Retargeting is a great tactic to engage target accounts as employees consume online content consistently. A few retargeting tools can be directly applied to ABM programs.
For instance, Demandbase has a targeting and account-based insight feature that uses IP addresses to help identify a company’s target accounts as they scroll through the internet. When these accounts search a site on the web that hosts Demandbase ads, they are given the company’s ads.
Other B2B retargeting services you can use include Retargeter and Bizo.
2. Personalize Account Experience on Your Site
Given the targeted nature of ABM, your campaigns must deliver higher conversion rates. You can do this by personalizing landing pages.
Companies can make account-specific landing pages with custom images, copy, forums, and offers depending on the account that visits the landing page. You can also display the visitor’s name on the landing page. Note that some customers may feel that this is overly intrusive.
3. Find Out What Matters to the Prospects With Social Intelligence
A core goal of ABM is personalizing communication to fit the account’s current goals and challenges. You have to monitor changes and watch the trigger events of the target accounts.
You can try subscribing to public information services like Google Alerts to watch what’s happening at the company level. Another tactic to apply is monitoring social activity.
Unlike press releases, social data is important to the ABM model. Companies must be more agile and revise or redirect messages when new events and information are discovered. If you’re looking for enterprise-class social intelligence tools, try LinkedIn or InsideView.
4. Work With an Account-Based Marketing Agency
As a startup company, finding the best way to implement ABM is challenging due to limited resources. It’s not wrong to ask for help from a marketing agency for startups. These agencies have professionals who are more experienced at ABM than you are.
Aside from ABM, they can also help you best implement SEO, PPC, social media, and B2B marketing strategies. Make sure you find an Account-Based Marketing agency for startups to ensure they understand your needs as a new business.
Here are a few ways an ABM agency can help you:
- Learn when to use ABM
- Create a campaign that fits well with your business
- Design a proper flow for the campaign
- Properly setup and manage your campaigns
Working with a digital marketing agency for startups means that they know what struggles a new company encounters and work around them.
Conclusion
ABM acts as a hidden gem for B2B companies, empowering them to make informed and strategic decisions while streamlining their strategies and campaigns. It offers the remarkable advantage of real-time campaign tracking as if possessing a crystal ball that reveals the success of your marketing efforts.
By implementing a robust B2B ABM strategy, your business name will resonate with your clients, and you can confidently work towards achieving your goals. With ABM, you have the power to unlock unprecedented growth and seize countless opportunities. Embracing this powerful approach enables you to seize countless opportunities and position your company for long-term success in the dynamic B2B landscape.
