Account-based marketing strategy involves delivering personalized marketing messages to customers to engage with them and move them through the buyer’s journey towards a goal. As your customers move through the buyer's journey you can learn more about them, and consequentially fine-tune your personalised marketing efforts to benefit both you and your customer.

Here are five steps on how to get your account-based marketing strategy started!

1. Align Sales and Marketing

Have regular meetings with the sales team in order to set mutual goals and shares ideas and resources.

In B2B marketing, sales and marketing alignment are crucial for any strategy to reach its full potential. Marketing provide sales with leads and sales turn these leads into customers. Sales can provide the marketing team with valuable insights about the customer and the problems that they often encounter. When the marketing team and sales team share the information they know about their customer it provides them both with a huge amount of data to work with.

2. Make Sure Your Data Is Accurate

The better the data you work with, the better the outcome you will achieve. Make sure your data sets are accurate and up to date. This is something that both the marketing and sales teams will greatly rely on throughout the Account-Based Marketing process, so it is important to ensure it is kept updated and organized. Consider using a contact database such as HubSpot CRM to help organize your data, make it easily accessible and keep it up to date.  Accurate data will ensure any marketing automation you put in place goes smoothly.

3. Know Who You Are Targeting

Account-Based Marketing messages need to be personalized and relevant to the target account, and for this reason, it can be difficult to target many companies at the one time. Instead, focus your efforts on fewer companies that are suitable for your service offering.

By focusing on a smaller amount of companies you can enhance your personalisation efforts and refine the message you are delivering. Once you know key characteristics of the target organisation, you can then use this information to create content that will meet its specific needs.

4. Identify Decision Makers and Engage

Depending on the size of the company, there will be more than one decision maker. Try to identify the key people in the company and connect with them. Approach key players such as the CEO, the COO, HR heads and other influential figures that you could build a relationship with.

Consider using a personalized email sequence to make initial contact and follow up with a LinkedIn invite and go from there. It can take 7 to 13+ touchpoints to generate Sales Qualified Leads (SQL).

5. Measure Your Metrics

Identify the metrics that are of relevance to your ABM strategy and the shared goals set by the sales team and the marketing team. These goals can include leads and conversions but also engagement, impressions and brand sentiment. Appraise your efforts and identify what has been successful and what needs to be re-evaluated.  Finally, use your findings to refine your Account-Based Marketing efforts.

Get in touch with the team at GrabSome to discuss ABM goals for your business!