Account Based Marketing plan: 6 key points

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In the post “ Account Based Marketing, what is it? ” we told you the basic principles of this strategy and the countless advantages and benefits it would bring to your business. However, knowing it is obviously not enough. If you are really interested in implementing this strategy, you need a plan and that is precisely what this post is about. In it, we will tell you what your Account Based Marketing Plan should have, the key points.

So… let’s get to it!

1. Identify your target
Finding your target audience is a fundamental part of marketing. Remember that we are dealing with organizations here, not people, so don't confuse this step with developing buyer personas.

Rather, you need to identify your target accounts, and this should be a collaborative effort between marketing and sales, as it will require data from both areas: firmographic data, which is things like industry, company size, location, and annual revenue, as well as strategic factors, such as market influence, repeat purchase likelihood, and expected profit margin.

While market research is a very valuable tool in determining this list, some of it is qualitative – that's the kind of information you can improve by using intuition and experience.

2. Investigate your accounts
Once you determine who your targets are, your goal is to treat those companies as big people at the organizational level. However, it can help to have that detailed information and representation of your ideal business customers.

In turn, being familiar with elements like the company structure and who the cpa email marketing database critical players are can determine how to communicate your product or service to those targets, especially if you know who the decision makers and influencers are. Sometimes, this information may already exist internally; perhaps someone on your team previously researched this target, but didn’t complete the ABM process to achieve it in the right way.

But if you don't have that information on hand yet, it may require some manual research to get it. We've found LinkedIn to be a great way to uncover that data with a fairly simple advanced search.

Let's say someone was trying to find out who works at Amazon in Madrid. Start by opening LinkedIn and performing an advanced people search, as shown below.

LinkedIn-search-option
Once you've customized your search using the option groups, shown above, enter the name of your target in the "Company" field in the bottom left group. If you're trying to find out who plays a certain role within the organization, put it in the "Title" field.

As you browse through the results that appear, you can refine your search using the drop-down menus below.

LinkedIn-advanced-search-option
3. Create your content
Now that you have the names of the key players within each account, you'll want to create new content for them. That content should speak not only to the pain points of those specific employees, but rather to those specific businesses.

Remember again that ABM strategy is less about individual people and more about casting a wide net for new business. For that reason, this content should focus on the individual offers you’d like to make with each specific organization.

With this step, you can begin to see how ABM and Inbound Marketing can work together, as it’s clear that engaging, quality content plays an important role in achieving your account-based goals.

Not sure where to start? Check out this post on how to develop a content strategy .

4. Choose the channels
If you don't use the right channels, no matter how good your content is, it won't be effective. It's important to choose the right channels to deliver it, based on what's most effective for a given organization or function.

This is where it might be helpful to know where specific people within each target live online. The Pew Research Center ’s demographics of social media users does an excellent job of profiling users of five major social media platforms: Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter. That should shed some light on what channels people use within each account and how they consume the content you’re creating for each of them.

5. Run your campaign
At this point, you have your goals, you have worked out the details of their respective compositions, you have created content and selected the channels you will use to promote it. Time to execute! Ready? Well, sort of…

Running your campaign will require some care. You'll need to coordinate your message across different channels; you don't want to send different signals to the same person within a target account.

According to Demandbase , that's a big problem for many B2B marketers: "Unlike consumer marketers who have millions of potential customers, B2B marketers have a limited number of potential buyers."

Perhaps that’s why, according to the same report, 82% of B2B site visitors aren’t even real prospects. So, choose and leverage the right channels to target the right accounts and make sure your messaging isn’t repetitive or conflicting.

6. Measure your results
A surprising number of CMOs struggle to understand the ROI of their marketing efforts. Every campaign needs its results measured correctly, especially with methodologies that are somewhat new.

Ask the right questions when you're measuring the results of an Account Based Marketing campaign. According to experts, these could include:

Are we growing our list of known individuals within the target account?
Have there been any changes in the way these accounts interact with our brand and its content?
How much revenue have we generated from these target accounts?
There are also some tools available to help you evaluate your marketing ROI. If you use Hubspot, this guide for example explains how to measure your campaigns.

Conclusions
When broken down into a few steps, Account Based Marketing seems a little less daunting. In fact, as we said, it's not that different from Inbound Marketing, and it works pretty well with some of the Inbound principles we love so much here at Esmartia.