Marketing is a powerful arrow in your quiver of business strategy: it drives leads to your sales team, increases awareness about your organization and services, and helps you connect more closely with your prospects. Most, if not all, organizations currently have some form of marketing strategy rolled out–whether it’s a simple email campaign or something more robust, executives tend only to care about one thing: the results of their team’s efforts.
Less focused marketing strategies overlook some valuable techniques that drive revenue; let’s examine the five ways executives can quickly improve their marketing strategy with account based marketing (ABM).
Awareness, Education, and Research
We’ve discussed ABM in depth in the past, so here’s a quick refresher: ABM helps you identify your target audience/persona, create content for that audience, and deliver the content specifically to them instead of your entire prospect universe. Essentially, it narrows your target audience; rather than focus on 1,000 targets, ABM focuses on 100.
Right now, many marketing strategies rely on quantity over quality. In other words, “Let’s hit as many contacts as we can, and those who are interested will come to us.” We call this the wide net approach. While it might work, it’s never consistent, creates large gaps between your successes, and quite honestly, is spammy.
On the other hand, spearfishing, or ABM, will make your organization more successful. This approach is comprised of a few necessary steps:
- Awareness
- Education
- Research
To get started, you need to become aware of the process as a whole. You should have a grasp on expectations, timelines, and implementations. This may require some work upfront, but it will help you better understand the why of your marketing. In addition, having a grasp on your marketing strategy will not only ease your mind, but it will also instill trust between you and your marketing team.
Awareness and education go hand in hand. Understanding the basics of your marketing strategy will help you gain a better foundation, leading to more productive meetings and bigger ideas for more successful marketing initiatives. But before you dive in, you’ll need to educate yourself and your team on your ideal target market, messaging, and KPIs–these are your keys for success.
All of this wouldn’t be complete without research. After finding your target market, finalizing your message, and understanding your end goal, you’ll have an easier time determining your target prospect. Creating ideal buyer profiles, or buyer personas, will help you remain focused on who to research. In this regard, different buyer personas for influencers, decision makers, and executives will make the tedious task of research more illuminating–it will help you produce buyer persona specific content for each profile you have created, leading to a more personalized marketing approach.
Remember, You’re In It for the Long Haul
Let’s remember what marketing is all about: the marketing team is here to funnel warm and hot leads to the sales team. While some of these leads may be new, many of them may already be familiar with your brand.
You see, marketing takes time. Nurturing your leads is almost as important as gathering new ones. Remember, in the ABM approach, you are spearfishing for the right prospects, providing them with proper content when appropriate. This approach will keep your company and your message top of mind for the right prospects.
Examples of relevant content include:
- Email outreach
- Sponsored content
- Social media advertising
- Blogs
- Newsletters
- Webinars
…and so much more!
Testing. 1… 2… 3… Testing
One of the most effective ways to see if your marketing efforts are working is through testing. When testing your marketing efforts, there are a few things to keep in mind:
- Be patient
- Test with variety
- Keep what’s working
Testing takes time… period. When testing the effectiveness of anything, you need to have data to back it up. While making changes off of pure intuition may sometimes work, gut feelings and luck won’t grow your business. On the other hand, if you have evidence to back up your decisions, you’ll be able to make smaller but more significant changes.
That said, we recommend testing only one change at a time. For example, you might test different subject lines for cold email outreach, change your ad’s incentive, or even switch up your newest blog title. This will give you the opportunity to discover which change worked and which didn’t. When you make multiple small changes or one massive change to your message, image, target market, and so on, it is extremely hard to track what worked (or didn’t work) and why.
In addition, you might need to test something more intangible. Picture this: your message is gold, you’ve done your research and identified your market, and you’re targeting the ideal buyer persona, but you’re still not getting the results you’re looking for. In this case, we suggest testing sending times (maybe later in the day is better or weekends would suffice), multichannel campaigns, sponsored content, and other strategies. Keep testing until you see the results you are looking for!
Let’s Not Lose Sight Here
So your campaigns are launched and leads are starting to roll in… that’s wonderful news! But what happens when the number of leads you’re getting start to slow down? Do you give up? No, wait. You have to test! Change your message, right?
Let’s not lose sight of the end goal. Remember: marketing takes time; ABM take time. It’s possible that your messages, target market, call to action, and so on are all great, but there are other factors at work affecting marketing success, including being in the right place at the right time. Furthermore, you should always be working with the marketing team to make sure the initiatives are aligning with your company goals and marketing KPIs.
Be Human
Ultimately, your marketing message needs to be genuine and human. People don’t want to buy from robots–they want to buy from someone they feel truly understands their problems (well, business problems at least).
In that regard, don’t bombard your prospects with a ton of marketing messages or ads, and make sure to spread out your nurture pieces just enough to keep your brand top of mind. Oh, and make sure your message comes from the heart. Your prospects should feel like you care about solving their needs–not that you’re just looking for a chance to make a quick sale.
Final Thoughts
ABM helps executives be on the same page as your marketing team and will help you and your company reach your goals and KPIs. Too often in unfocused marketing efforts, organizations miss out on solid opportunities that come from a narrower prospect universe, thorough research, testing, staying focused on your goals, and personalization. With all of those steps combined, your organization will surely see marketing success.
For more information on the best ways to execute an ABM strategy in your organization, reach out to us today!
Read more blogs.
Take me home!
