Account-based marketing is the process of targeting certain accounts based on where they currently are in the sales cycle. It is a process that allows you to reach out with relevant content and offers that are tailored to individual companies. When it comes to generating revenue for your b2b company, an account-based marketing strategy can be one of the most powerful tools in your box. Here’s what you can do to build and successfully implement an account-based marketing strategy for your business.
Assess Readiness
An account-based marketing strategy can be very useful for driving growth and engagement. However, it is not always the best choice for every business. Before you implement an account-based marketing campaign, it’s important to first start by considering all the different organizational factors that might affect it. This could include the size of your customer base, different sales cycles, and the types of products or services that you offer. Considering all these factors will help you determine if the account-based marketing approach is going to work well alongside the strategies you currently use at your company.
Set Goals
Break down your revenue targets into percentages of closed and won based on metrics such as leads taken versus produced that can be updated each month. This will allow you to come up with specific, measurable targets that you can continuously track your progress against and pivot when needed.
Define Roles and Responsibilities
To reduce confusion among teams and employees when implementing an account-based marketing strategy, create a document that can be used as a general overview of all account-based marketing processes and responsibilities. You can then share this with all teams that it is relevant to, including sales, marketing, and customer service employees.
Sitewide Content and SEO Audit
The next step is to ensure that your content is going to provide effective support to your account-based marketing strategy. To do this, you should conduct a content audit to take a detailed look at all the content that you have. This will help you get a clearer idea of the current state of your content, along with determining what type of content performs best for your target audience and which are contributing to meeting sales and marketing goals. It will also help you determine where there are any major content gaps on your site. For each content, you’ll want to gather SEO data including search engine rankings, traffic, conversions, bounce rate, and other key performance indicators.
Optimize Account-Based Marketing Content for SEO
Despite being so targeted, SEO is a crucial channel for any account-based marketing strategy. With B2B buyers relying on their own research more and more these days, you can definitely expect them to be performing Google searches for your company, reviews, products, and your competitors before they have a conversation with your sales team. Because of this, you should put effort in to appear as high as possible in search engine rankings, while being the best solution that your prospects find while researching, with marketing and content that is tailored to them and what they are looking for. The key to getting this process right is to ensure that your content is optimized for the right keywords; high rankings and lots of traffic is only going to be effective if it’s coming from the right search terms.
Tailor Content to Your Target Audience
After conducting research for your account-based marketing strategy, you will have gotten some detailed insights into your target accounts. Use everything that you know about your target accounts to come up with content that is highly relevant and personalized. Use any information that you might have such as location, business size, and industry, along with considering the preferred content channels of your target audience. Create content specifically for each segment that you are targeting.
Integrating Design
For content to be effective, it should be very engaging. The design of your content is one of the most crucial factors when it comes to improving engagement with your audience. To work as effectively as possible, the best content needs to be eye-catching and draw your reader down the page continually. When it comes to design, you need to think bigger than just fonts and colors. How you design your content can address pain points, inspire certain emotions, and convince your visitors to follow calls to action. While the words themselves can be effective, good design will help them do a lot more.
Interactive Content
When putting together your account-based marketing content, it’s important to remember that buyers today have short attention spans. Because of this, your content needs to get to the point without delay. One of the best ways to do this is to give your visitors something to do with interactive content, rather than simply giving them something to read or watch. Interactive content is not only more engaging as it’s more fun compared to simply reading something, but it can also often be much more useful. Interactive tools can be used to guide your visitors to content that is highly personalized and one of the most compelling aspects of your strategy. Along with this, it is also more likely to drive further traffic, shares, and links to your site.
Build Relationships and Trust
No matter the main factors that are involved with your account-based marketing strategy, every strategy has the same goal of building a trusting relationship with members of your target audience so that eventually they become paying customers. Some of the tactics that you can implement in your account-based marketing strategy such as personalized and tailored content will help to work towards this goal; demonstrating that you know a lot about your prospects and what they need will help you gain their trust. Some types of content are better for building trust than others; providing information that makes it easier for site visitors to find what they are looking for, and using real people in your content, will help you build the level of trust you need for your marketing strategy to be effective.
Launching an account-based marketing strategy not only requires some changes in your sales and marketing teams, but you’ll also need to consider how your content and SEO strategies play a part.