what is an account based marketing strategy?

Account based marketing, ABM, is a growth strategy in which marketing and sales work together to create personalised shopping experiences. In other words, what ABM aims to do is to select which companies or customers will not generate a high number of sales in order to focus all the brand's strategic action on those that will make sales grow exponentially. Now we'll tell you much more. Attention!

what is the origin of ABM?

ABM strategies, it is said, began to be applied in the mid 90's when both B2C and B2B companies realised that a more personalised approach was needed in the way brands communicated with the rest of the audience, since depending on the type of customer we are dealing with or the phase of communication we are in, it will be convenient to use some messages or others to "build bridges" between our brand and the public.

However, it was not until 2013 when the term ABM began to gain strength and appear in Google Trends. The rise of this term also coincides with the arrival of the inbound marketing movement, a concept to which it is closely related.

what types of ABM are there?

• ABM by account: ABM by account is a type of marketing that focuses on finding the accounts, companies or people to which you should direct the commercial action. However, before getting down to work with your ABM campaign by account you need to have some resources that allow you to carry out the work you want to do. That is, you need to have a marketing and sales team to help you approach those specific customers, have the necessary tools to segment the accounts to which you want to direct the action and create specific content for each of the customers you want to target. Keep in mind that when we talk about creating specific content we mean creating custom content for each of the brands or customers you want to target, even some that you have not previously worked with. The important thing is to get the message across that you have met them and want them to be customers and that you are really interested in them, so that they will be able to know what you want them to know about you.
  
• ABM by industry: This type of campaign is developed when you also want to create an account-based marketing campaign but more economical. What is done in this case is the same as in ABM by account. However, instead of targeting customers or brands individually or customised, we will do it by sector, which will allow us to cover several brands within the same group. By creating this type of campaign, the information that reaches our brands is less personalised, since we have focused on the sector of that company, not on it individually. Similarly, it is also interesting for the brands that receive this information since it is related to the industry to which they are dedicated .
  
  

ABM phases: How to design a campaign?

Knowing the type of ABM campaigns that can be carried out, it will be easier to start developing one. It is important to follow the required steps to make it as successful as possible. Let's look at each of them in detail:

1. Choose the accounts we want to target: When we are going to start developing our account-based marketing campaign it is normal that we do not know which customers we want to target, so it is essential to make a selection process before starting to develop the strategy: to know which customers we want to target, why and how we are going to reach each one of them .
2. Create a decision "tree": Once we have chosen the customers we want to target and we have personalised our information, it is time to create our tree. This means nothing more than segmenting the information of our campaign and distributing it so that it reaches the customer in a staggered manner and they do not receive all our advertising information at once, which they will not know how to manage .
3. Designing the contact strategy: Depending on the type of client we want to target, some forms of contact will be more effective than others to reach them. In this phase creativity comes into play, as our campaign does not have to reach them only through emails, but we can create work groups on LinkedIn, go to job fairs in the sector we want to target and make ourselves known from there..
4. Getting our first acquisition: Once we have achieved the first acquisition of customers, we create their buyer persona profile in which we collect their data, their preferences... And from here begins the educational process. A marketing process that allows us to make a profile by profile mapping. That is, in ABM we can know exactly which user has opened or not the contents, which one we can insist on more, etc.
5. Start the educational process: This is the last phase of our account-based marketing campaign. At this point, we have already collected the necessary data from our buyer persona and it is time to send our personalised content in a segmented way.