How to Plan an ABM Strategy Step by Step

Do you think account-based marketing might be a good fit for your B2B company’s business but aren’t sure how to design and develop an ABM strategy?

Now that we’ve outlined the key benefits of ABM and explored how ABM and inbound marketing can work together, we’ll help you define an account-based marketing strategy step by step.

1 - Ensure organizational alignment around ABM

Before you begin defining the specific tactics that will make up your account-based marketing strategy, it’s crucial that your internal teams are on the same page regarding ABM.

This will enable your company to create a more consistent, holistic, and therefore more efficient ABM strategy. In practice, this alignment means that professionals—particularly those in marketing and sales—know who will be directly involved in developing the strategy, what resources and budget are needed, and what goals and KPIs to track, among other things.

2 - Build Your ABM Team

Following the previous step, you need to identify who will be directly involved in the account-based marketing strategy—typically professionals from the marketing and sales departments.

These stakeholders will be responsible, on the one hand, for creating content and campaigns that will impact the target accounts and, on the other hand, for commercial interactions with potential customers.

3 - Identify Your Target Accounts

The third step in an ABM strategy involves identifying the high-value accounts that will be the focus of account-based marketing tactics.

Here are some tips for making this selection: search for profiles of your ideal customer on LinkedIn; choose target accounts based on specific industries or geographic location (those that are the best “fit” for your business); draw on past deals that went well and were important to your company, and then look for profiles of similar clients (industry, company size, revenue, etc.); analyze any leads that are already engaged with your company.

4 - Attracting High-Quality Accounts

Once you’ve identified your target accounts, it’s time to start engaging the various stakeholders with decision-making authority or influence over the decision-making process (buying roles) within those accounts.

And here, the key element is personalization. By developing content and resources that are highly tailored to the specific context of the organization you aim to attract, you will increase your business’s visibility and position it as a potential solution to address a specific need of that target account.

This can be achieved through engagement on social media, through targeted campaigns or InMail messages on LinkedIn, by sharing useful content on channels relevant to the target accounts (media outlets, social media, blogs, websites, etc.), by hosting events, by sending personalized communications to existing leads, and through other initiatives.

5 - Build trusting relationships with the various stakeholders

After attracting high-value accounts through your marketing efforts, you now need to build trusting relationships that involve various buying roles. Keep in mind that this engagement phase can take months or even years!

These solid, trusting relationships can be developed through interactions that convey the value of your product or service, through highly personalized content that demonstrates your company’s authority in your industry, and through a range of one-on-one communications and meetings that contribute to that consistency and relevance.

6 - Measuring the Results of the ABM Strategy

Like any other marketing strategy, account-based marketing must also be regularly analyzed so that you can identify what is working well and, above all, what can be improved. This constant monitoring will allow your ABM strategy to become more effective over time.

Some KPIs that can be used to evaluate the success of your strategy include, for example, the number of deals generated, the average time to close a deal, and the percentage of deals closed, among others.

By following the six steps listed above and supporting your strategy with software that allows you to leverage and automate your ABM activities—such as HubSpot—you’ll be able to develop a consistent account-based marketing strategy that enables you to close high-value deals for your company.

Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you’d like YouLead’s help in implementing an ABM strategy.