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Effective ABM tactics to elevate your business in 2024 with. Learn how to target and engage high-value accounts for strategic growth and success.
Imagine focusing on your top-tier accounts from the get-go. Skip wasting time on leads that don't fit your business. Start engaging and delighting your chosen accounts right away. It's all about efficiency.
Account-based marketing (ABM) streamlines the identification of less valuable companies at an early stage, ensuring seamless alignment between marketing and sales. As a result, your team can swiftly delve into the crucial phases of engaging and delighting target audiences.
Effective ABM tactics to elevate your business in 2024 with. Learn how to target and engage high-value accounts for strategic growth and success.
What is account-based marketing?
ABM is a strategic method centered on high-value accounts within a market or business. It aims to craft tailored buying experiences for improved customer acquisition, relationship-building, and business expansion.
With ABM, your business engages and communicates with high-value accounts as distinct markets. In the process, you'll witness increased ROI and enhanced customer loyalty by customizing the buyer's journey and tailoring all communications, content, and campaigns to these specific accounts.
3 Benefits of leveraging ABM tactics
ABM offers numerous advantages that can positively impact various types of businesses. Here are some of these benefits.
1. Keeps marketing and sales teams on the same page
Teamwork and clear communication are crucial to business growth. ABM ensures that your sales and marketing teams have shared goals, stick to budgets, and understand everyone's roles.
This harmony means consistent communication and streamlined content for targeted accounts. So, no matter how long an account has been with your company, team members can quickly take over, ensuring a smooth and enjoyable customer experience.
2. Enhances relevance for high-value accounts
Tailoring everything—from content to communications—for each invested account is crucial in account-based marketing. This personalized approach boosts your relevance among these accounts.
By customizing your content and interactions, you demonstrate how your products directly address their challenges. ABM enables you to position your business as the most suitable and ideal choice for these target accounts.
3. Ensuring uniform customer experiences
It's essential to make your target audiences happy consistently and for a long time. Treat each account as your business's unique market. Achieve this by providing consistent customer experiences.
ABM thrives on sales and marketing alignment, which is crucial for consistency. Keep everyone informed about each account's buyer journey stage. Then, ensure personalized, timely communication, campaigns, tailored product information, and pricing details.
5 ABM tactics companies can use for their business
As B2B marketers seek enhanced marketing approaches, many turn to account-based marketing to complement lead-generation efforts and foster long-term revenue growth. Let's explore some tactics organizations can integrate into their marketing strategy.
1. Embrace a freemium model
Mixpanel, a prominent player in business analytics that serves the computer software industry, confronted a seemingly impossible challenge: transitioning from a traditional, sales-centric marketing approach that primarily targeted major accounts to embracing a freemium, product-led strategy.
The shift introduced a surge in potential target accounts, specifically thousands of burgeoning small startups previously overlooked by Mixpanel. They leveraged Marketo's marketing automation solution to navigate this transformation.
This collaboration enabled a more precise identification and engagement of top-tier accounts, accompanied by the launch of highly personalized ads to encourage sign-ups.
Mixpanel significantly expanded its potential client base from hundreds to thousands of target accounts by implementing an account-based marketing strategy.
The results were remarkable: a striking surge in year-over-year sign-up volume, a boost in Lifetime Value (LTV) sourced from paid channels, and a substantial increase in conversion rates.
This strategic shift not only broadened Mixpanel's reach but also substantially enhanced its vital performance metrics, solidifying the efficacy of its ABM-focused approach.
2. Know your target and take on a personalized approach
GumGum, a contextual intelligence company, aimed to secure T-Mobile as a client. Yet, traditional outreach methods or standard emails didn't cut it to engage the company's CEO, John Legere, known for his active social media presence.
The challenge was to capture Legere's attention in a more personalized and creative way to start a meaningful conversation about potential collaboration.
The marketing team devised a unique approach: they formed a creative group comprising editors, writers, illustrators, and letterers to craft a bespoke comic book titled "T-Man and Gums."
This comic showcased their computer vision tech's capabilities and the potential collaboration with T-Mobile. They sent 100 copies to T-Mobile and its agencies.
The personalized comic book approach paid off swiftly. John Legere noticed the gesture and praised it on Twitter (now X), sparking a conversation.
Within days, they were able to schedule a meeting. Ultimately, this unconventional ABM tactic led to T-Mobile becoming a client, highlighting the potency of personalized and creative strategies in engaging top-tier brands.
3. Customize customer kits and packages
Netflix strategically targeted and segmented accounts sharing similar profiles, tailoring campaigns for segments with matching technology, personas, and challenges.
Their marketing team crafted direct mail, ads, and content streams addressing these collective accounts, customizing content depending on the user’s preferences. This strategy made VPN streaming on the platform seamless.
The company also sent out personalized boxes to a select few accounts. This campaign complemented their other strategies like direct mail, a digital experience, and personalized follow-ups.
Another case in point is what marketers did to reach out to McDonald’s. The brand is a big deal, which makes it challenging for companies to get noticed. The marketers tried contacting the restaurant chain’s top decision-makers by sending them special burger kits.
Inside were personalized receipts for each exec. They used Big Mac ingredients to show off different parts of GumGum's tech, like the patties for data and onions for targeting. There was even an Augmented Reality (AR) tattoo for phones.
Their marketing team spread the word about this campaign on social media with short videos and tagged essential people. Just like with T-Mobile, this personalized approach helped them land a meeting with McDonald's key decision-makers.
4. Adapt digital strategies
Blue Yonder, a digital supply chain and fulfillment solutions provider, first adopted ABM in 2017 to align its marketing efforts with sales and Business Development Representatives (BDRs).
But when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, they had to adapt to the changing landscape significantly, as the lockdowns disrupted their traditional event-based strategies, pushing them toward digital marketing.
Their solution involved a phased ABM approach—starting small and expanding gradually. They concentrated on aligning sales and marketing, emphasizing targeted efforts and shifting toward creative content, AI-powered data, A/B testing, and automation.
They utilized digital ads, direct mail, events, custom designs, and content to engage existing and new accounts.
During the pandemic, Blue Yonder swiftly adjusted its messaging to focus on resilience and empathy, addressing the immediate supply chain requirements. They transformed their annual customer conference into a free, virtual event, attracting over 5,000 global attendees.
Their ABM initiatives resulted in around $10 million attributed to the online ad-generated pipeline in the first year. They refined their strategy by testing buying signals, personalization, and multi-channel orchestration.
5. Start a rewards campaign
ABM aims to reach a specialized audience, closing a deal with them. Easily manage your marketing campaigns with rewards—no developer needed.
Xoxoday Plum, a rewards platform, provides effortless reward workflow automation, diverse rewards from over 100 countries, and personalized redemption experiences to excite your target market.
You can choose between corporate gifting, survey incentives, reviews and ratings, referral programs, loyalty cloud, and consumer promotions.
By utilizing trigger-based workflow automation, you can efficiently link your lead sources, maintain their organization, and guarantee a smooth and rewarding experience for the referrer and referee.
Leverage ABM tactics for your business
ABM is effective regardless of industry, company size, or current marketing approach. Its ongoing evolution promises to simplify marketers' tasks, boost efficiency, and drive greater profitability for organizations globally, both now and in the future.
In that case, there’s no better time to start exploring and applying these tactics than now. Grow your business and engage the people you need to reach with the right ABM strategies.
