What is Account Based Marketing

The Digital Marketing Podcast with Mandar Marathe

What is Account based Marketing (ABM) ? Account-based marketing (ABM) is a highly focused business strategy in which a marketing team treats an individual prospect or customer like its very own market.

The marketing team can create content, events, and entire campaigns dedicated to the people associated with that account, rather than the industry as a whole.

ABM has a high RoI - 97% B2B marketers believe that ABM has a higher RoI whereas 70% marketers identify ABM to be a top-most revenue generation strategy.

How to start Account Based Marketing? Account-based marketing is a joint exercise conducted by sales and marketing teams. Here are the steps to implement ABM:

1. Identify your target market: This includes identifying the

• Industry - Which specific segment do you want to target - healthcare, education, Saas etc.
• Company Size - Small / Mid / Large size company based on the number of employees
• Location - Which region is your target companies based out of. Are you going to target a region, country, city or a locality?
• Annual Revenue - What is the annual revenue of the company. This you get from the company filing statements.
• Likelihood of repeat purchase - Is there a chance that the company will engage with you on multiple fronts (multiple services) or will the company buy your products repeatedly.
• Expected Profit Margin - What do you stand to earn from your engagement with the companies

2. Research Accounts: Here you deep dive into the list of companies that you have identified. For each company on your list, you need to understand their organizational structure - who are the decision-makers & influencers. You can use LinkedIn’s advanced Search feature to find prospects within the target organizations.

3. Create content: Content should speak about pain-points of employees & targeted business. Different content formats could include blogs, infographics, video, eBooks, podcasts, slideshare presentations, checklists and other resources built specifically for decision makers at your target companies.

4. Choose your channels & execute: Once you have identified your target companies and have created content for them, its now time to reach out to the prospects. How should you reach out to the prospective account? It depends on where the decision makers are spending their time online - potential channels include Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Email, Pinterest or a call. You need to send out the same message to the prospect at the account across multiple channels to create an impact.

5. Measure campaign performance: There are some questions that you need to ask yourself / your team.

• Are we growing our list of known individuals within the target account?
• Have there been any changes to the way these accounts are engaging with our brand and its content?
• How much revenue have we generated from these target accounts?

The type of metrics you measure will depend on each stage of the prospect

1. Early stage: Lift in website traffic from target accounts, new names in target accounts, target accounts visiting dedicated account pages, engagement score for set of programs run every month
2. Mid stage: Program success with a target account, call connects, # of meetings with target account, Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) in target account
3. Late stage: # of opportunities in target account, first touch ratio / multi-touch ratio, pipeline in target accounts.