Published 24 February 2022

10 Account-Based Marketing Strategies Useful for Every Marketer in 2022

B2B marketers are embracing account-based marketing (ABM) to navigate the complex digital landscape. ABM enables a focus on high-value accounts, leading to better ROI and lead generation. Positive feedback highlights ABM's effectiveness in retaining and expanding client relationships. Key strategies include customer retention, buyer persona exploration, personalized emails, website customization, social media engagement, valuable content creation, lead-specific offers, sales territory utilization, customized social ads, and personal meetups. Choosing the right ABM strategy can greatly enhance marketing performance.

Introduction

The B2B marketing landscape is changing dramatically. It is getting more complex and personal due to digitalization.

Thus, B2B marketers need to explore account-based marketing channels today more than ever before. ABM approach can help marketers streamline their operations and focus on high-value accounts.

It will give the right direction to your lead generation strategies. ABM helps you focus on the relevant leads, eliminating all irrelevant leads from your funnel.

Many marketers are using ABM today and sharing positive feedback, such as:

80% of marketers said ABM had outperformed their marketing tactics in order of ROI.
84%said ABM helped to retain and expand existing client relationships.
As of 2021, 67% of marketers are already leveraging account-based marketing.

So, if you plan to deploy account-based marketing strategies in your marketing funnel but don’t know where to start? Then, we have mapped out the top 10 ABM strategies that every marketer should know in 2022. So, let’s get started with ABM.

Top 10 Account-based Marketing Strategies in 2022

Account-based marketing helps to target the right account. This further helps to improve ROI and lead generation rates for marketers. But that’s only possible when they follow accurate account-based marketing strategies, such as:

1. Focus on Retaining Customers

Marketing teams are so engrossed in generating and capturing new leads that they pay no attention to their existing customers. And that is a big blunder.

The reason?

It is a 60%-70% probability that your existing customers can buy from you again. In addition, there is a probability that only 5% to 20% of customers will buy in a first attempt. Even in that case, you still have 40% higher chances to sell your products or services to your existing customers.

Since the simple account-based marketing strategy is to target high-value accounts. So, you will find no higher weightage accounts than your old customers.

On the top, you already have data regarding your customer’s needs and pain points. And your customers are already familiar with your brand. So, there is no need for a basic introduction.

You can use emails, content, or personal calls to reach out to your customers and start selling them without any ado. This will speed up the conversion process and reduce marketing costs.

2. Explore Similar Buyer’s Persona

Once you start selling to your existing customers, you might notice a specific pattern among your customers. For example, they might belong to a certain gender, income range, or geographical area.

This will show you what type of people are more likely to buy your products. So, the next account-based marketing strategy is to understand your current customers and then create a similar customer persona.

For example, if your customers come from the Latin American market, you can target this region to find new prospects. You can generate display ads on social media platforms targeting this region.

The simple logic behind this ABM tactic is if higher sales are coming from a particular type of customer, you should exploit it further to generate more leads. It will help you find new prospects faster as you are targeting a small audience base.

3. Personalized Emails

Email marketing and ABM is the match made in heaven. Once you identify your hot accounts, creating personalized email content will become easier for them.

According to a study, the personalized email body has a 29.95% open rate and a 5.03% click-through rate.

Thus, you can create personalized email marketing campaigns based on your customer’s pain points to improve your conversion rate. Here are a few things to consider while drafting personalized emails:

Make your emails visually appealing using custom or pre-made email templates.
Add personal touches to your email’s subject line because unrealistic headlines always end up in the spam folder.
Use your customer data to design and write email content.
Write email content based on the position of a lead in your marketing funnel.
Run A/B tests on emails considering your buyer’s persona.
Monitor your ABM email marketing campaigns performance constantly.

This account-based marketing strategy has been used by many B2B brands worldwide. For instance, Lately is an AI-based content and social media program that has used ABM tactics to create emails with videos.

Source : Lakeonedigital

Lately used one-on-one interaction videos to establish personal connections with subscribers and engage them.

4. Customize Your Website

The most common and unused account-based marketing strategy is website customization. No matter how many personalized or direct emails you send – the customer end journey will complete on your website.

Thus, you should use your customers’ data to customize your website to drive maximum results. From your website layout to content, every aspect should be designed to motivate your visitors to take action.

Here are a few tips that you can use to create a customer-centric website:

Brainstorm different website personalization ideas and implement them. Monitor the impact of every personalized detail and use the one which brings maximum results your way.
Segment your audience into two groups and create separate websites layout for both. Now, monitor both websites’ performance to select the best one.
Constantly monitor your audience’s behavior and interactions on your site. This way, you can make changes in real-time to increase engagement on your website.

To customize your website, you need to use web analytics tools to monitor your audience’s behavior. Many great web analytical tools are available these days, like Google Analytics, MonsterInsights, etc.

5. Engage with Your Audience on Social Media

Social media is everywhere today. As of 2020, over 3.6 billion were available on social media. But it is expected to reach 4.41 billion in 2025.

That means the majority of your customers are present on social media. So, you can leverage social media platforms to gather information and interact with them.

In this account-based marketing strategy, you have to wear a detective hat and hunt down your potential customers on social media. To understand their preferences, you need to observe their comments, posts, followers, and other activities on social media platforms.

Besides this, you can directly message your potential customers to establish a personal relationship with them. According to Forbes, direct messages have a higher response rate of 4.4% compared to 0.12% of emails.

Over time, B2B marketers can develop a strategic plan to interact with their customers on social media. However, some common strategies are:

Comment on your targeted account’s status updates with valuable information.
Share their content or retweet their posts on your social media.
Encourage them to produce content for your products or services.
Follow groups and pages liked by your customers.

6. Valuable Custom Content

Content marketing is another best partner of account-based marketing. You can combine your account-based marketing strategies with your content marketing plan to drive maximum value your way.

Today, people like to search about brands before making a purchase decision. In this, content plays a very vital role in ranking your website on the search engines.

So, you can use your accounts data to generate high-value content to grab potential customers’ attention. You can use different content types to engage your potential customers, such as ebooks, research papers, reports, blogs, and more.

For example, if you sell accounting software, you can produce content that can help people to use and better understand your product. In addition, you should experiment with different content types and styles to understand which method worked the best to grab your actual customers’ attention.

Here you can take HubSpot as an example.

Source : Hubspot

The brand offers a variety of solutions to business and individual users like sales, marketing, CRM, etc. Therefore, they use various content solutions to attract different user groups. They publish relevant blogs on their website, create reports and ebooks.

So, depending upon your targeted audience and their needs, you can produce content that can help them to make fast purchase decisions.

7. Lead-Specific Offers

By now, you have gathered sufficient data on your hot accounts. So, using this valuable data, you should now create lead-specific offers that your potential customers can’t ignore.

However, it is important to understand the mindset and requirements of your targeted accounts before creating an offer. That is because every customer has different needs.

Suppose you sell business automation software to both startups and large enterprises. Here, startup organizations would be more interested in flexible pricing structures that they can adjust according to their budget. On the flip side, enterprises would require instant customer services as they can’t afford a minute delay in their business operations.

So, you should understand your potential customers’ requirements and, based on that, draft personalized offers to attract them.

8. Use Sales Territories

This is a unique account-based marketing strategy that not many companies are using today. In this strategy, you will use individual account data to find a suitable sales representative to convert that account.

The simple logic behind this strategy is that every salesperson is unique. Even in your sales team, every person has different skills and expertise. Some might be good at communication, and others might be at analyzing results.

Therefore, you can select a sales representative based on the skills required to convert a certain lead. This way, you can send the right person to convert a lead, which will increase your lead conversion rate dramatically.

9. Customize Your Social Ads

As of 2020, 83% of marketing experts use social media ads to connect with their potential leads. However, you can take your social media ads one step ahead with account-based marketing.

In this account-based marketing strategy, you can use your customers’ data to create personalized social ads. From the design to content copy, you can customize each aspect of digital ad with your real-time data.

Today, all social media channels and search engines allow you to target specific audiences based on age, demographic location, and other factors. You can understand the ethnic makeup of your audience and retarget via ads.

So, combining your paid marketing ads with ABM, you can dramatically improve your ads’ efficiency.

10. Host Personal Meetups

The final account-based marketing strategy that we would like to discuss is personal meetups. Indeed, inbound marketing revolves around digital dynamics. But, we can’t ignore the fact that personal connection is more effective than digital data.

No matter how much data you collect on your potential leads. You are still dealing with humans, so their preferences can change at any time. You never know what ticks a customer and what does not.

However, you can better gauge their response when you personally meet your potential customers through hand gestures and facial expressions. In addition, you can immediately answer their queries and motivate them to purchase your product.

Thus, you should organize occasional meetups with your existing and potential customers. In many parts of the world, physical meetings are still not allowed. So, you can use webinars to interact with your audience.

However, if physical gatherings are open in your area, leverage them. Host events, fairs, conferences, or small meetup sessions in local cafes to establish a personal connection with your customers.

Let’s Pick Your Account-Based Marketing Strategy!

Account-based marketing is a deeper marketing concept. Many layers are involved in ABM that marketers can exploit to drive maximum results.

You can pair ABM with emails, social media, or digital ads. All you need is reliable data, and you can deploy different account-based marketing strategies in your marketing funnel.

And to obtain reliable data, you need to use different marketing tools like email trackers, CRM, web analytics, and more.

So, you should first choose an ABM strategy and then get a tool to deploy it.

Now, we have already shared the best 10 ABM strategies. Let’s now pick one and boost your marketing performance in 2022.