Account Based Marketing | What is ABM and How to do it?

Hello there, if you are a B2B business and you don't know what account based marketing is, you are missing out. Now as per the research done by Altera Group, 97% of B2B businesses reported that they had better ROIs when they implemented ABM marketing strategy compared to their traditional marketing strategy. Now even in my experience, I have helped many clients implement ABM marketing strategies which actually generated better results than what they were doing already. So that's why I created this video where I'll tell you what ABM is, what are the benefits of ABM and how to implement account based marketing strategy for your business from scratch. So without any further delay, let's jump into the video. The first thing we discuss is what is ABM. ABM simply is hyper segmenting your key accounts and developing a marketing strategy for those accounts. Now unlike traditional marketing, in account based marketing what you do is you first identify the top 100 or 200 companies which you want as your customers. Now once you have this list, then you develop, you go back and develop a marketing strategy specifically for these accounts. Now let me give you some examples. Let's talk about a company called funnel.io. What they basically do is if you want to connect multiple data sources, let's say from your Facebook ad manager, Google ad manager into a dashboard like Google Data Studio, what you need is you need some kind of connector. What funnel.io does is they provide these connectors. Now based on this product, the ideal customer for funnel is advertising agencies and businesses who have in-house teams to run marketing campaigns. Now if funnel.io has to develop an account based marketing let's say for UAE, what they'll do is they'll create a list of 100 or 200 advertising agencies in UAE and then develop a marketing strategy to convert as many agencies as possible as their customers. Now similarly let's take example of AutoCAD. Now let's say AutoCAD has a software which is used by architects and design engineers. If AutoCAD has to develop an account based marketing in UAE for them, what they'll do is they'll first create a list of let's say 1000 companies, designing and architecture companies and then develop a marketing strategy to convert most of these companies as their customers. Now there are few things you need to remember about account based marketing. It is a marketing strategy and not a tactical campaign execution which we will talk about later in this video and it's suitable for all b2b businesses. The other thing you have to remember about account based marketing is it can be used to generate new business as well as upselling within your existing customers and it brings us to our next point that what are the benefits of account based marketing. The first benefit of account based marketing is you don't have a lot of spillover. What it means is when you run mass audience campaigns, you reach out to people who might not be your prospect clients as well which is actually a fair point because the efficiency of any digital marketing campaign relies on how efficiently you are targeting your audience because you will have to spend less budgets and you can be more aggressive and focused. Now in account based marketing you take that to the next level where you just select certain accounts which you know are your accounts which means that you have less audiences to target which means you can be more aggressive and you will not waste on your marketing budgets showing ads to non-prospect clients or customers. The second benefit I would say is you can have a very personalized messaging because you already know what accounts, what companies and what kind of people you are reaching out to and the third point is once you have a limited audience and you have personalized messaging it can really create a buzz within your target audience because if you reach out to them through multiple channels they will kind of feel that you are everywhere and create a lot of awareness as well as concentration. Now this brings us to our third point which is how do we implement account based marketing. Now there are few steps you need to follow if you want to create your account based marketing strategy from scratch. The first point is identifying the key accounts. Now identifying key accounts can be different for different companies based on your size or lifetime value of your customer because if your ticket size is huge if your product or service is like $100,000 a month or a year then obviously automatically your accounts you want to focus on will be lesser but if your ticket size is low let's say you are a SaaS company where your pricing is somewhere between $100 to $200 or less per month then obviously the number of clients you will have to reach out to will be huge. Now this list can be developed using multiple strategies you can for example in case of funnel they can go to google and search for top 100 agencies in Dubai or UAE and they will get this list or there has to be a strong collaboration between your CRM team or your sales team and marketing team because if you already have existing clients you would kind of know that what kind what is your ideal customer look like and you can have that list and extend that as well or even if you are a new business your sales team would know that what are your ideal clients and customers so they can provide you a list as well and then on top of that there are some companies like lead feeder what you do is you integrate their pixels on your website and they will tell you that if you already have an existing traffic to your website they will tell you that all the people who come to your website which companies are they associated with or which companies do they work for which will help you to kind of create this initial list of 100 200 or 300 clients and it can be up to 1000 clients as well now once you have this list of your dream clients the next step is to divide your audience into personas now in case of funnel when they create a list of 100 or 200 advertising agencies now there are multiple types of people who work for these agencies there can be ceo there can be c-level employees there can be performance marketing executives and managers and some people for accounting now then obviously you will not reach out to people who work in accounting now what kind of reporting suite is acquired by a company the decision maker is obviously let's say chief technology officer head of digital media or it can be head of bi but at the same time these are the decision makers but at the same time there are people who are performance marketing managers performance marketing executives who can be who can act as an influencer to these people to these decision makers now based on this you have to subdivide the people working for the accounts which we identified in the previous step you have to subdivide it in the personas now this is important because each of these personas might have a different pain point for example in terms of autocad one of the persona can be the architects who actually use these platforms or these softwares to develop let's say a blueprint now these architects and the companies who work on these designs on these softwares have to basically work on these designs for one of their clients let's say one of their clients is a builder like mr now once these architects create these designs they send it to mr for approval and mr also uses the software they have certain people in their team who evaluates these designs and approves these designs now their pain points can be different the pain points for architects can be ease of use and the pain points for mr as a client using these designs is integration with their softwares so if you for example have to develop a messaging for architects you can develop something around how easy it is to use what are the additional functionalities you have in this software but for a client like mr you can tell them how easy it is to integrate with their system for the approval process and because they are decision makers they will not acquire your software as autocad but they are the influencers they can demand to this come architecture company that you have to use this particular software to create designs for us so once we know that what accounts and what job titles within those companies we have to target and we have the personas and their pain points then we move to our next step which is create content for these personas now the first thing you have to consider about creating your content is this has to be engaging and personalized for these personas now for example in case of funnel.io if they create a blog post which talks about like what all integrations are available in funnel.io or what kind of apis you can develop to make the data transfer easy so it can be engaging for maybe data scientists or students who are learning about different marketing technologies but if you are targeting decision makers and advertising agency they might have to create a content something like how can funnel.io make agency life easy so this is very important to understand based on the personas that what kind of content you have to create and the second thing is you have to use content to enrich your data sources for example funnel.io can write a blog post that how can funnel.io make life of advertising agencies easy and probably have an ebook which is downloadable so when these people from these agencies want to download this ebook they will obviously have to input their email addresses and funnel.io will capture this email addresses and they can add one more channel which is email marketing in their strategy now once we have our account sorted we have what kind of people we are going to target we have what kind of content we are going to create for these personas then we move to our next step which is execute campaigns now to execute campaigns you can literally use any channel you want let's say social media youtube display advertising email marketing but then you again will be limited with the targeting capabilities of these platforms for example if you do not have any kind of data and you are just starting your account based marketing the only channel that you can use initially is linkedin on linkedin it's very easy to kind of target people who work for certain companies who have a certain job role and then once you have these campaigns running on linkedin you have to generate traffic to your landing page or collect email addresses like the example of ebook we discussed and once you have these email addresses and traffic coming to your landing page you can put your facebook or google pixels on your page to collect remarketing audiences then you can kind of extend your campaigns to other channels where you already know that these are the people who you want to target because your campaign was targeted only to these accounts or these people working for these companies on linkedin which means the traffic that was generated is from these companies and you can retarget them on other channels as well which is either facebook google ads or even email marketing but on the other hand if you have the resources to invest in other platforms as well then there are a lot of companies who even provide you kind of the data or run or you can run campaigns on these platforms like for example marketo or lead feeder they can help you from the scratch to even run google or other campaigns to target people who work for certain companies so with that i hope this video was helpful in any way to help you understand what account based marketing is and where you can start your journey if you want to invest in account based marketing thank you so much i will see you in the next one