10 Steps to Launch Your Account Based Marketing Campaign
According to a recent study, 70% of B2B marketers indicated Account Based Marketing (ABM) campaign as part of their marketing campaign wish list. After all, ABM helps target accounts and keeps sales & marketing team closely aligned to drive revenues for their organization.
At Digital Sparx Marketing, we have created a 10 Step ABM Campaign launch infographic that visually guides marketers with new ABM campaign launch. Please feel free to embed this infographic on your website or link to our ABM Video presentation with the links below.
Step 1 – List Out Your Accounts
Collaborate with your sales team and list out all the accounts (companies) you want to target. If just starting out, we suggest you start a small pilot with five (5) accounts and build from there. Ideally, during this pilot you want to target companies in the same vertical so you are not adding more variables to your pilot test program.
Step 2 – Contacts Under Each Account
Create your Audience Profile and list out all the target segments like GEO targets, Industry, Company Size/Revenues, Job Titles and so. Now, your job is to pull out contacts from each company that you want to target. Let’s say you are targeting 5 companies with 5 different job titles with 25 stakeholders within each company then you are looking at a total pool of 625 contacts!
Step 3 – Target Your Audience
Target stakeholders across Influencers/Researchers, Approvers and Decision maker personas. Do not take a top down approach but instead target stakeholders with a variety of job titles. Remember, B2B decisions are typically made by stakeholders across a variety of job titles so target accordingly!
Step 4 – Source Contact Data
Make sure you have their basic contact data but also mailing address and social data as this help you target across channels. Use your internal Sales CRM’s like Salesforce, Prosperworks, Pipedrive for contact data but you can also use external data providers like DiscoverOrg, Zoominfo, PureB2B and others.
Step 5 – Map Content for Different Personas
Hopefully you have created different stakeholder personas targeting researchers, approvers and decision makers. Now, your goal is to create content that resonates with that targeted personas. For example: webinars or other long form content is great for researchers/influencers while a one or two pager quick points pdf sheet is more for approvers and decision makers.
Step 6 – Create Email & Digital Workflow
Now, create an email automation cadence for each targeted personas hitting them with the right content at the right time. Create nurture flows either at an account level or at persona level or ideally both. Remember you want to create close to 7-8 touch points over a 45-60 day period.
Step 7 – Create Personalized Creative Assets
The reason ABM campaigns perform better is the amount of personalization that results in laser focused targeting. This should also extend to your creative assets where you can customize creatives for each account and also for each stakeholder within that account. Imagine, showing a headshot of one of the targeted personas inside one of your banners while that creative is served up dynamically!
Step 8 – Sync Marketing Activities with Target Accounts
The goal here is to sync your marketing activities that match the digital footprint of your stakeholder within your target account with a high dose of personalization. Again pick your activities based on your resources – some successful campaigns include Linkedin Ads, Facebook ads, Retargeting campaigns, Email and so on.
Step 9 – Create Lead Scoring Mechanism & Track Activity
If you can’t measure it then you can’t improve it and no where this statement rings truer than with your ABM campaigns. As a starting step, each of your stakeholders activities within each account should be measured and a lead scoring synced up with your automation platform.
Step 10 – Launch Your ABM Campaign
Marketers love the rush that comes with launching campaigns. This should be seem like the easy part but the real fun begins after you launch. Now, do a weekly check-up with your sales team and ensure everyone is in alignment so there is a course correction each week without having to wait for the campaign to run its course.
