ABM Campaigns 101: The Makings Of An Efficient ABM Strategy

Meet Victor. He is a marketer at MNO Corp Limited and is entrusted to generate at least 5 qualified leads, on a quarterly basis, to sell their product and services. To achieve this, he has two options: a) he can either try building an audience base to figure out a campaign to connect with them or b) he can try to connect with existing customer accounts and take the conversation above and beyond lead generation. What would you recommend to Victor? Preferably, b.

Moving in directly to engage your target accounts is called Account Based Marketing (ABM). A HubSpot report suggests that there has been a 15% increase in ABM marketing, compared to 2020. Simply because it is easier to upsell to existing customers. The likelihood of selling to an existing customer vs a new custom is as high as 7:2. 

Source: HubSpot

ABM is rapidly becoming a core business strategy. Not only does it improve customer lifetime value but also delivers a higher ROI than the regular ‘go to market’ approach.  However, much like Victor, your sales and marketing team would also require building an efficient strategy to succeed in ABM. In this blog, we discuss the essentials of building an ABM strategy. 

Identifying the elements of an efficient ABM strategy

ABM is not a new concept in the B2B space. Typically, B2B firms, with longer and complex sales cycles, derive immense value from ABM. It helps them align their marketing activities with account management and sales, inspire potential customers with compelling personalized content, and maximize the ROI from their marketing campaigns. So, a business can witness a higher success rate with the right ABM strategy. 

Source: HubSpot

To build the right ABM strategy, you can adhere to the following process:

1. Cherry-pick the targeted accounts

   The survey also indicates that 56% of marketers strongly believe that personalized content is the key to succeed in ABM, while 43% attribute it to advanced data management. Therefore, you can infer that understanding customer accounts and audience psychology form the foundation of your ABM efforts. 

   The selection of accounts should be strategic and nurtured through highly customized engagement and support. This requires collaborative efforts between the sales and marketing teams. Marketing teams designing the target company personas, on the basis of high value clients who are most likely to convert,  is one of the popular ways of cherry-picking the accounts. This process involves evaluating the shared objectives and values. 

   Some of the primary data points to consider in your account persona include: 

   • Demographics: Industry, number of employees, office locations. 
   • Psychographics: Values, purchase decision patterns.
   • Technographic: Resource and technology utilization. 
   • Life cycle: Stages of development and maturity of target entities.

   With a robust target company persona, your marketing and sales team will be able to identify high-quality, target accounts. Such detailed data points can be easily sourced from your CRM software, or even directly from existing customers via surveys. 

2. Your sales and marketing teams must be riding in the same boat

   ABM is purely a team play. In traditional marketing efforts, the sales team uses the leads generated by the marketing team to try and close the deal. That is the only point of transaction and communication between the teams, after which they go their separate paths. However, this is the exact opposite of how ABM works. It requires an ‘all hands on deck’ approach from both teams. Here are a few things that both the teams should be thoroughly aware of: 

   • The account stakeholder(s). 
   • The type of content required to engage and entice the account stakeholder(s).
   • The target channels for reaching the right stakeholder(s).
   • The support areas for each team.

3. A skilled technician knows their tools

   Teams, data, and tools are the three pillars of a successful ABM strategy. So, choosing the right platforms holds water. ABM platforms are plenty, but their capabilities are limited to merely identification. They cannot deliver personalized messages in real-time on your website like a CMS; the main ingredient of ABM communication. 

   Thus, Drupal+ABM is the key that can unlock the untapped value marketers seek. The amalgamation of ABM platform APIs and Drupal's API-first Architecture is what makes hyper-personalized experiences a reality. It enables an ideal scenario, where Drupal handles content, while the platform manages identification and recommendation. 

   So, when selecting ABM platforms, user-friendly APIs are a must-have. Here is a quick list of Drupal modules and tools that support ABM:

   • Acquia Lift: It is a well packaged Martech solution that empowers marketers to achieve their objectives with minimal dependence. It equips the marketers with just what they need to kick start their campaign. They easily create campaigns with well-defined personalization campaign types, no-code testing and targeting, enhanced scheduling, multi-lingual personalization, and real-time operations and insights.
   • Smart Content Demandbase: It is a targeting and personalization platform meant to deliver a personalized experience to each visitor on the website in real-time.  Some of its key features include, enabling easy coordination among different channels, monitoring and fragmenting the target account audiences, and seamless data integration.
   • Smart Content Module: It is a toolset that enables the personalization of anonymous website visitors in real-time, marketers can utilize the browser conditions, cookies, or third-party APIs to display various content for both anonymous and authenticated users.

4. Keep in mind what you measure

   Measuring and monitoring are the true reflection of performance. There are a few important parameters that you can reflect upon to see if your ABM efforts are headed in the right direction:  

   • Content engagement: Capture the time spent consuming your content, the volume consumed, channels, and attendance at events.
   • Impact and Influence: Capture the outcome of an interaction, deal velocity, the win rate and deal size.  

The Future of ABM

Thanks to technology and its effective tools, building and executing ABM campaigns is definitely far more efficient today. This only adds to the limitless possibilities and concrete results that ABM has to offer to marketers. AI assisted data collection, segregation, and identification can take personalization to the next level. 

The bottom line is that for ABM campaigns to be successful, teamwork and the right tools are essential and non-negotiable. This is where we come in as your technology partner. Over the years, we have been a technology partner for multiple enterprises and have enabled them to adopt ABM utilizing Drupal and Acquia. 

Still on the fence? Talk to us.