Many B2B companies who are targeting high-value customers find an ABM strategy serves them better than a broad-reaching approach.
A well-structured strategic plan is vital in supporting a company’s long term business plans but can also help identify metrics to measure the success of your ABM.
Be sure to measure and optimize your ABM marketing campaigns to ensure they are performing well and improving over time. You should see what the results are for each individual campaign as it will be easier to draw conclusions.
Start with your strategy as it sets clear tasks and objectives as well as coordinates employees towards a common goal.
Look at your target accounts
Have you got hundreds of target accounts in a document that hasn’t been updated in a long time?
You should build your target account list and evaluate current customers, leverage named accounts and use the account identification technology.
Identify the channels and tactics
Analyse whether your channels are performing well and consider adding in new ones if they are underperforming.
A multi-channel approach is more likely to be more effective, you could use channels such as:
- Telemarketing outreach
- Outbound email and direct mail
- Paid social advertising
- Retargeting (particularly CRM retargeting)
- Networking events
Empower sales and marketing
ABM efforts can crumble if you aren’t able to deliver measurable results. It’s essential to be able to measure the impact of the campaign to ensure you can identify an RoI as well as giving you the data to enhance it. Marketing automation platforms can deliver metrics and insights at different levels with hardly any effort from behalf of sales and marketing.
Create personalized content
Targeted personalized content is crucial for ABM because it builds trust with your accounts. Personalisation should be part of almost every ABM tactic, and if it’s not possible to customize the message on a personal level it must be written specifically for that account. Good personalization makes your tactics even more effective by encouraging engagement and interest in what you have to say about your products or services.
After you have covered strategy, move on to metrics. Metrics are crucial for B2B companies and the rise of ABM demands new ways of thinking about metrics.
Coverage – How effective is your team building contacts and how complete is your account data?
Keeping an eye on coverage will help you understand data quality and will determine whether your database includes the right contacts. A good way to start is building a spreadsheet of how many contacts you have for each single account to help see where you have gaps and then you can build on this list over time.
Engagement – Do you have the right people spending time looking and interacting with the company? Has engagement gone up over time?
Using a straightforward model like the one below to help demonstrate the impact of your ABM accounts on key business outcomes. The table helps to break down important stats and have a better understanding of acquisition and expansion.
| Average Contract Value | Retention Rate | Sales Cycle Length | |
| Customer accounts | |||
| Prospect accounts | |||
| Non-target accounts |
Awareness– Do your target accounts know what your company really does?
You should look to see if you have had an increase of web visits or interactions over time. If this is relatively low maybe think about changing your content on the website and make landing pages more appealing for your target audience.
Touchpoints – A good indicator of success is whether your ABM is truly reaching out to the right people. Some of your campaigns may be ranking high in engagement but if its not with the right target audience, what’s the point.
A good starting point for this would be to define your target accounts and break them down in grades. For the first grade, you could have the top 5% of your total target accounts, second grade top 20% and so on. Techniques like this aim to hit your specific target accounts. Measuring these touchpoints will help you understand what campaigns are working well – a great stepping stone!
Revenue– Finally, the most important metric for all businesses is money!
In order to track and measure revenue correctly, we need full-funnel account-based attribution. Although revenue is thought of as the bottom of the marketing funnel, everything from the first touch to the last will contribute to revenue generation.
For more information on ABM, please check out our page, or look at our other ABM blogs:
Why isn’t Everyone Using Account Based Marketing (ABM)?
Top 7 Account-Based Marketing Challenges and How to Solve Them
Top 5 facts you need to know about Account-Based Marketing (ABM)