Two steps to an effective account-based marketing campaign

Marketing is an indispensable part of any business person’s life. If a business fails to market their offerings properly, they will miss out on an opportunity to reach out to potential consumers of their goods, losing much-wanted money in the process.

There are a lot of marketing strategies nowadays, and they surely are not created equal. There are strategies that work best only for certain products. There are also those that work only in certain seasons.

One of the most promising strategies is account-based marketing (ABM). Just exactly what is account-based marketing, you ask? When you do ABM, you treat accounts (or companies or groups of people) as valuable markets of one, making them feel that they are specially treated and that the product or service that they are getting is unique only to them.

Because of the amount of customization that an account-based marketing effort requires, it’s going to be a bit costly. So, there really is a need for you or any other business person to be very careful in implementing an account-based marketing strategy. In this article, we discuss the important steps that must be taken in order to ensure the success of an ABM campaign.

Carefully choose the accounts that you target

As already mentioned, ABM involves a lot of personalization, and it can really be very costly. Given this, it’s really important that you have carefully chosen the firms that you come into contact with.

In assessing potential firms, two concepts become important. First is firmographics, which basically refers to the process of getting to know the organizational structure of the firm that you are targeting. Through this, you get to find out who the key people are and the scope of their influence. Of course, it’s ideal that you get into contact with the most influential, and mind you, it’s not always the CEO.

Another concept is technographics, which involves surveying the products currently being used in the firm. Once the existing infrastructure is defined, you will be better able to package your pitches better, highlighting the lapses of the current setup and how they can be addressed by your offerings. This increases your chances of closing a profitable deal.

Identify the appropriate communication channels

Research shows that business people can be open even to unsolicited advice if it has direct impact on their business.

Given this, you can expect the key people within your target account to be fairly receptive to your communication attempts. But just because they are that open doesn’t really mean that you can just use any communication channel available to you. You are selling something, so you should always put the convenience of your targets first.

If you have to go out of your way to set up face-to-face meetings, then by all means do it if it’s what will increase the chances of your offer getting accepted.

Starting an ABM campaign is going to be difficult, especially if you are new to this strategy. But if you prepare well enough, the difficulties that you experience will be transformed into challenges that you can easily overcome.

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from TheMarketingblog http://www.themarketingblog.co.uk/2019/01/two-steps-to-an-effective-account-based-marketing-campaign/