Maybe you have heard of ABM marketing but you don't quite understand the term or know how to put it into practice for your company. This is normal, so let's see what it is, how it works and how we can put it into practice to boost our company. Are you up for it?
what is ABM Marketing?
ABM stands for "account based marketing". It is defined as a growth strategy in which marketing and sales work together to create personalised buying experiences. In other words, what ABM marketing aims to help our brand is a selection process. Yes, 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 strategic action of our brand on those that will make our sales grow exponentially.
In this way, we can focus our marketing strategy on the customers that will really help us to grow in our sales process. Therefore,ABM marketing is a concept closely related to inbound marketing as it focuses on buyer personas to direct all our commercial action .
Without going any further, Wikipedia itself defines ABM marketing as"a strategic marketing method in which an organisation communicates with individual prospects or frequent customers who are its target market". Our target market, therefore, are our leads that could become our future customers if we know how to dedicate a good marketing campaign to them .
- What ABM allows us to do is to make a leap in our marketing and sales strategy. In other words, ABM is nothing more than account-based marketing that aims to help our business go further. If we focus our action strategy on the customers who will bring us the most sales in a personalised way, creating a communication channel and specific messages for them, our strategy will have good results and maintain customer loyalty to our brand.
However, sometimes it is difficult to know where our brand is and, therefore, to know if it is time to apply the ABM strategy to our marketing and sales department. Therefore, it is important to know that account-based marketing is recommended both for companies that do not have customers with too much potential and for companies that have high-value customers. - Companies with low-potential customers: These companies are those that have realised that their traditional marketing strategies are not working (Google campaigns, mass advertising, etc.). That is why the use of ABM is recommended for these brands to discover who are the customers they should impact and devise appropriate strategies to establish relationships and communication with them. Thus, they will stop investing time and resources in all the customers they have, even those who have no interest in buying and will focus on their buyer persona, which will allow them to go further because they will already know what kind of customers they should target and focus their commercial action.
- Companies that have very high-value customers: Just as the ABM technique is applicable to companies that need to know how to identify who their ideal customers are, it is also applicable to companies that have them but are not focusing their commercial strategy on them. It is advisable to do so because having high-value customers will make it easier to retain them in our brand and create quality content and loyalty strategies for them.
how to implement ABM marketing in my company?
However, to develop a good ABM marketing campaign in our company we must follow a series of steps that will facilitate the task. ABM marketing, as we have already mentioned, has the purpose of making us focus our business strategy, so it is important to gradually develop the objectives we want to carry out:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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. Creativity comes into play in this phase, 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..
- 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 a profile by profile mapping. That is, in ABM we can know exactly which user has opened or not the contents, on which one we can insist more, etc.
- Start the educational process: This is the last phase of our account-based marketing campaign. At this point, we have already collected our buyer persona and it is time to send our personalised content in a segmented way so that the client can intuitively process and educate the profile of our lead so that little by little he/she becomes a client who is determined to invest in our brand.
Each of these steps will be fundamental to carry out our ABM marketing in our company. Put them all into practice if you want your sales process to start working and achieve an exponential increase in your company's sales. Courage!
