Are you having trouble reaching your target audience? Account-based marketing is a B2B marketing strategy that focuses on and targets specific companies and decision-makers in direct contrast to marketing techniques that go for broad market penetration. It is designed to identify your clients that are the best fit for your products and services. It uses highly qualified leads and depends largely on input from both your sales and marketing teams. It can be a very effective marketing approach for growing your business and increasing sales.

Goals Of A Good ABM Marketing Strategy Include:

• Increasing employee satisfaction by working with best-fit clients
• Uniting marketing and sales teams, so they work in harmony and reduce or eliminate internal competition
• Provide quality accounts to showcase in your portfolio
• Providing better-qualified leads to help your teams reach and achieve specific goals
• Increasing client satisfaction and ROI because your leads are highly qualified and the best fit for your products and services
• Increase and improve your brand reputation through better case studies and customer testimonials
• Growing your business through increased conversions due to better-qualified leads

Let’s examine some of the most effective digital and traditional tactics to include in your ABM marketing approach.

Video Marketing

Video Marketing can be used very creatively within an ABM strategy. Personalized videos explaining the company culture and processes or seasonal videos just showing you care can be created and inserted into traditional email marketing pieces to nurture your relationships. Another way to integrate video into your ABM marketing strategy can include things like webinars and workshops only open to the highly qualified leads your teams have identified to continue educating, engaging, and nurturing those relationships. Mobile optimized messages and videos can also be highly effective, particularly if provided directly to your qualified leads and decision-makers. Brand and explainer videos can also be integrated into your website to further highlight the alignment of your brand to your targeted audience's needs and wants.

The neat thing about video is that there are also special platforms specifically designed to integrate video into your ABM strategy:

Smart video players: Smart players are players that contain specific software designed for ABM. Smart players have the ability to detect specific viewers and personalize the video file that plays within the player based on the persona viewing it.

Personal video capture: These are toolsets that allow your sales and account representatives the ability to record and distribute personalized videos through email to your ABM target account contacts. You can also access associated analytics that shows whether the contact was engaged with the video content.

Real-time automated video personalization: You can find platforms that generate personalized video content in real-time that is based on meta-data associated with individual contacts supplied by your CRM system or MAPs. Real-time personalization can combine pictures and content specific to the target contact based on their viewing behaviors.

Providing mobile-optimized videos is another great tool. Smartphones are used more and more as the primary communications tool, and we all know how important video is in terms of mobile devices. But keep your video content short and to the point.  

Programmatic Advertising

Programmatic advertising is a method of automated processes you use to buy digital ad space. Instead of working with a media company to determine which platforms and when to publish your ads, you utilize an intelligent platform such as Adaptive to match your ad's location with the platform and location where your decision makers spend time online. You can control the demographics, time, websites, and other criteria so that the intelligent platform can use the latest valid business data to match your ad to your audience.

LinkedIn InMail

LinkedIn InMail allows your company to send personalized messages to LinkedIn members that match your demographic criteria. It generates a list of people and sends out your message to the recipients when they are online, which improves the open rate to increase your chances of a response. It is more effective than sending a regular email that normally gets deleted before it is ever opened.

Direct Mail

All things that go around come around. Direct mail may seem old and outdated, but it is still an effective marketing tactic. Direct mail puts something tangible in front of your decision-makers. It is still used effectively because it's a rare approach within our digitized marketing world, and that can result in making a greater impact. Sending a personalized mailer in the form of a package, letter, or postcard demonstrates thought and effort and can be more effective in eliciting a response and starting a conversation.

An ABM strategy that is built well and diversified can help your brand cut through online content and "noise." With a mix of more sophisticated targeting methods, ABM can be a very strategic and valuable marketing approach.