If you’ve been keeping up with our account-based marketing (ABM) 101 series, then you’ve learned all about the basics of ABM, how it works, and how it can help align your sales and marketing teams.
But understanding the underlying principles of ABM is only half of the battle. What situations are best suited for an account-based marketing strategy? How are companies employing ABM to find success?
We’ve compiled some of the most effective account-based marketing strategies below. Learn how ABM can be used to acquire new customers, revive inactive leads in your database, follow up with event-sourced leads, nurture leads to sales-readiness, and more.
- Acquiring New Customers
One of the most common uses for ABM is to acquire new customers. By working with your sales team to create a targeted list of companies you would like to present your marketing messaging to (discussed in greater depth in our previous blog post in this series), you can drive greater engagement among your target accounts — and not just with a single lead, but with all key decision makers in an account.
If your goal is to acquire new customers, consider developing personalized messaging and creative for each potential new customer to increase the effectiveness of your marketing.
- Nurturing Leads
Because of the nature of today’s B2B sales cycle, many of the leads that you’re marketing to aren’t going to be ready to make a purchasing decision. Don’t make the mistake of letting these leads go to waste just because they’re not going to turn into an immediate sale.
Instead, use account-based nurturing to continue to present your marketing message over time via targeted ads, keeping your company top of mind until your leads are ready to reenter the sales cycle.
[Tweet “Not every prospect is ready to buy the second they make contact. Nurture them with #ABM.”]
- Following up after Events
When it comes to events, it can be tricky to make sure you’re following up with all of your hot leads and giving your colder leads the attention they deserve. While your sales team will likely be following up with the most promising leads via phone, less sales-ready leads may get neglected without an appropriate account-based strategy in place.
In order to create awareness and further penetrate the accounts that you spoke to at an event, run account-based advertising campaigns targeted toward these accounts. Not only will this keep your brand in front of your leads after the event, it will also put your messaging in front of decision makers who may not have attended the event at all, but who still have a stake in the final purchasing decision.
If you’re looking for more information about using account-based advertising to boost your event marketing efforts and maximize your investment, check out this blog post.
- Reviving Inactive Leads
At any given time, your database is full of leads who aren’t actively participating in the sales cycle. In fact, these leads may have been “dead” for six months or more. Despite their inactivity, they aren’t necessarily useless. To bring these inactive leads back to life, you can run campaigns targeted toward these unresponsive accounts.
Not only does this remind your leads about your solution, it also allows you to reach additional contacts within each account — contacts that may be more receptive to your messaging and more likely to engage with your brand.
See how Kevy used account-based advertising to wake the dead in this recent blog post.
[Tweet “Did you know that you can breathe new life into dead leads with #ABM?”]
- Expanding within Enterprise Accounts
Selling into enterprise accounts can be tricky, especially when enterprise companies are divided into smaller divisions that operate independently (and often have different points of contact for sales).
If you’ve sold into an enterprise company before, but are hoping to expand to other divisions, you can use ABM’s IP- and cookie-based targeting to present ads to key decision makers and stakeholders within those other divisions. This is a perfect for your account penetration strategies. These ads can be personalized so that they feature the benefits and testimonies that your leads’ coworkers are already seeing from your solution.
Stay tuned for the next post in our account-based marketing 101 series, which will cover how to measure and optimize your ABM campaigns.
