What’s account based marketing?

Account-based marketing basically means to run super-target campaigns on select accounts. Where marketing and sales will work together to create customized experiences for each one. 

Account-based marketing may sound like a buzzword in line with the Crossfit acronym AMRAP, but it’s quickly proved to be way more than that. Just think about it: account-based marketing (ABM) is more or less the practice of going super specific in your campaigns, and creating personal content and experiences for one, or a few, accounts. Which makes absolute sense, as we’ve known for long that personal and customized messages are really the way to go in marketing as well as sales.

In other words, it’s a given that account-based marketing does have a lot going for it. Why we’ve gathered a little list of things you need to know about the area:

• Account-based marketing isn’t a solo sport

Account-based marketing isn’t exactly a solo sail across the Atlantic. Instead, it’s done through a super-tight collaboration – and communication – between sales and marketing. Which is necessary to make sure that everyone’s running in the same direction, and that the content being shared with the accounts remains consistent.

In practice, sales and marketing need to sit down and discuss things like:

• Who will you contact, and what stakeholders need to be addressed with your campaign?
• What content will pique the interest of these accounts and stakeholders?
• How will you go about sharing this content with the accounts?

The answers to these questions will give a nice view of what needs to get done, and will make for a solid foundation for building an ABM campaign. To do this well, you can apply the next point that we’ll go through, and that has to do with data and gathering it.

• Data has everything to do with it

Data plays a large part in ABM (as it does in most things these days), and is as important in each step of the journey. Which means that you need to gather data to see:

1. What accounts you will actually cluster and go after: Finding the right accounts to go after is a big task, and a lot comes down to looking at customer data to understand your customer and their value. Here, you can look at existing accounts as well as high-value prospects who have checked out some of your other marketing material, and find the accounts to go after.
2. What you’ll present for them: What exactly are the chosen accounts after? To find out, you can look at the products they’ve bought in the past (for existing customers), or do research about their industry and the specific pain points there (for prospects). You can also see what marketing material has piqued their interest in the past, do interviews with already existing customers in the same field or talk to your sales reps if they have already been in contact with the prospect.
3. What needs to be adjusted after you’ve presented it: Once you’ve found your accounts, picked the content you should share with them and actually shared said content, it’s time to take stock and see how the content is received. I.e. when the accounts have had time to look at it, you can revisit the content you shared and tweak, add or remove according to their reaction. This does, of course, require some digital tool that lets you track how your accounts interact with your content, but more on that later.
4. What the results are: This is a given, really, but you will need to go through the data and see how your campaigns actually performed. What went well and what didn’t, and what accounts actually made their way through the funnel and made a purchase.

• The way you share your content matters

Remember the question of how you should share this specific content with your accounts? It’s a big one, as the tool you choose will decide how well you can present your content, how easily you can tweak it as you go along and to what level you can brand the experience. Where our own SP_CE Showroom is great way to go about it – either on its own or in combination with, for example, social media. This, as it can give you a seriously converting microsite, letting you:

• Easily design a digital space that is customized for your accounts – with your brand featured at every step of the way.
• Fill it with all the content you want to share and highlight what you want the accounts to see first.
• Send a magic link to your accounts, and that gives them access with a single click.
• See insights on what content they interact with – and quickly change it to perform better.
• Create templates that will help you scale your account based marketing campaigns.

We won’t go on and on about it (more than we have already have), but as for the actual sharing of content – and following up – it’s worth a look.

Do you want to learn more about the SP_CE Showroom, and how it can help kickstart your ABM engine? Contact us for a demo, or check out our Go-to-Market Hub for more resources and material.