Marketing toward the largest crowd isn’t going to cut it. Instead, target specific decision-makers and influencers you want to reach with personalized, customized campaigns.
Account-based marketing, or ABM, is a move away from hunting the largest crowds toward finding the absolute best matches for your business.
Because you’re creating highly customized campaigns for fewer targets, it’s less costly than traditional marketing, and can help you create more loyal customers.
Here’s a boot-strap guide to get you started:
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Step 1: Profile accounts that are a good fit for your business. Depending on the size of the company, you’ll tend to go after different people. If the company is 50 or fewer employees, the decision-maker will be the business owner, and general employees will be influencers. Between 50 and 150 employees means you’ll be going after the C-Suite and project managers, and above 200 means that the C-Suite will be the decision-makers. A good rule of thumb is to start by identifying five decision-makers you want to go after, and then three to four important influencers who might sway their decision.
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Step 2: Create and promote content that converts. Once you’ve decided on the best targets for your messaging, it’s time to create content that moves them to action. To do that, let’s talk about the content funnel:
• The top of the funnel is the initial touch-point that your target interacts with. These can include anything from clicking on a Google ad targeted to them, to reading a mailer that you’ve sent, to answering your first phone call. The goal of this touch-point is to get them to ask for more information.
• The middle of the funnel is where you create follow-up content that addresses their specific pain points. This will typically include email drip campaigns, remarketing techniques, or content that is specifically written/advertised to the target to lure them toward your business.
• The bottom of the funnel is where you attempt to move them to action. This content can include case studies or references. Typically, people read bottom-of-the-funnel materials after already having been intrigued by previous outreach, and they are often the last things they digest before making a decision.
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Step 3: Streamline your campaign outreach. When you’re doing ABM, it can be difficult to keep track of where potential clients are in the marketing funnel, and what content you need to follow up with. Here are a few tools to help streamline the process:
• PersistIQ: This is an HTML-only email platform used for sending highly personalized emails. The platform is designed to aid sales staff in sending personal follow-ups with warmer leads in the funnel.
• CallRail: This is a call-tracking provider used to measure the effectiveness of a campaign. Customers can create temporary numbers to place on an ad or direct mail piece and forward those numbers to their sales department. Callers are then directly tracked through the CallRail dashboard.
• Step 4: Tracking and reporting metrics. A major advantage of ABM is how easily you can track the effectiveness of your outreach in comparison to traditional campaigns, using everything from email link clicks to time spent on your marketing materials. Here are two tools you should be using:
• Google Analytics: This is one of the most important, effective means of tracking where people are going in your sales funnel – and it’s free! Users can collect aggregate data on the success of their digital efforts and use it to help equate a return on investment to their efforts.
• Bitly: This is used to generate trackable links to content promoted via social or other channels. This is a great way to find out if your targets are scouring LinkedIn for your content, or if Twitter is a better vehicle for finding new leads. Use it to know where to push the majority of your content and outreach.
Chris Ciunci is founder and managing partner of TribalVision, which has offices in Warwick, Boston and New York.
