Inbound Marketing Blog - Youlead

How to Plan an ABM Strategy Step by Step

Written by Sofia Gouveia | 03/08/21 13:25

Do you think account-based marketing might be right for your B2B business but you're not sure how to design and develop an ABM strategy?

After having listed the key benefits of ABM and seen how ABM and Inbound can act in a complementary way, we will help you define an account-based marketing strategy step by step.

1 - Ensure organizational alignment around ABM

Before we start defining the specific tactics that will make up your account-based marketing strategy, it's crucial that internal teams are on the same page when it comes to 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 - marketing and sales professionals - know who will be directly involved in developing the strategy, what resources and budget are required, what objectives and KPIs will be monitored, among others.

2 - Building your ABM team

Following the previous step, it is necessary 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 the creation of contents and campaigns that will impact the target accounts and then, on the other hand, for the commercial interactions with potential customers.

3 - Identify your target accounts

The third step in an ABM strategy is to identify the high-value accounts that will be targeted by account-based marketing tactics.

Some tips for this choice might be: look for profiles of your ideal client on LinkedIn; choose target accounts based on specific industries or geographic location (those that are a better fit for your business); build on past business that has gone well and been important to your company and then look for profiles of similar clients (industry, company size, etc); analyse any leads that are already engaged with your company.

4 - Attracting high quality accounts

Once the target accounts have been identified, it is time to start impacting the different stakeholders with decision-making power (buying roles) within those accounts.

And here the key element is personalization. By developing content and resources that are highly customized to the reality of the organization you want to attract, you will increase the awareness of your business and position it as a possible solution to solve a certain need of that target account.

This can be done through social media engagement, through targeted campaigns or inMail messages on LinkedIn, by communicating useful content on channels relevant to the target accounts (media, social media, blogs, website, etc), by holding events, by sending personalized communications to existing leads, among other actions.

5 - Building relationships of trust with the different stakeholders

Once you have attracted high-value accounts through your marketing actions, you now need to establish relationships of trust that involve different buying roles. In this context, keep in mind that this engagement phase can take months or even years!

These solid, trusting relationships can be developed through interactions that communicate the value of your product/service, through highly personalized content that demonstrates your company's authority in your business area, and through a whole host of 1:1 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 should also be regularly analyzed, so that you can identify what is going 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 can be, for example, the number of deals created, the average time to close a deal, 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 actions, such as HubSpot, you will be able to develop a consistent account-based marketing strategy that allows you to close valuable deals for your company.

If you need YouLead's help carrying out an ABM strategy, do not hesitate and contact us!

 

Content originally posted on August 2021.