What Is Account-Based Marketing (ABM)?

Account-based marketing is a B2B marketing strategy that focuses on the ultimate goal of targeting high-value accounts and converting them into customers. 

ABM, combined with technical tools, helps firms boost their marketing ROI, increase their attributed revenues, increase leads and conversions, and align sales and marketing goals. 

Generally, a dynamic ABM campaign comes with many requirements, including multichannel assets, a well-mapped account list, a great call-to-action, and an effective follow-up strategy. Yet, many teams overlook a crucial element which is no other than a clean data infrastructure. In fact, a lack of clear understanding of how your contacts will live in your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system means that your ABM campaign will not be successful, confusing your sales personnel. 

Tips for Creating an Abm Campaign in Salesforce 

In order to benefit from this strategy, running ABM campaigns requires organizations to create a detailed, integrated plan of action that targets the correct accounts. This guide will provide you with detailed tips on creating a well-integrated ABM campaign in Salesforce.

Create an Ideal Customer Profile

Before creating the ABM strategy, you need to gather as much information as possible about your target demographic. You can start by creating your ideal customer profile for the types of accounts that you wish to target and follow it from there. Essentially, a thought-out account-based marketing campaign begins with a curated list of your target accounts. 

For starters, try to figure out the attributes that make up your ICP by locating them in Salesforce. Now, there's a chance that you may find specific data points that need custom fields. If that's the case, you’ll need to add such fields. What's more, creating a field to label your accounts by target tier means it's way easier to sort and prioritize companies later on.

As an advice, try to integrate your CRM with your data provided to control the field mapping on your account records within the software's interface. That said, in this case, your company requires manual list imports, you should ensure that the spreadsheet columns are correctly aligned and labeled to match your Salesforce fields. 

This spreadsheet must include a section for customers, prospects, partners, or a combination of the three. This list is then shared with the marketing leadership and operations team, making smarter decisions using the data. 

Traditionally, B2B firms create sections in the ABM audience list based on industry, verticals, buying intent, geographical locations, tiers (such as priority levels), and more.

Once the audience list is finalized, your teams can conduct further research to understand the gap in the market and find ways to pacify customers' needs. With this information, you can curate a message or a program that best appeals to your target demographic. 

Choose the right campaign

"How is your ABM campaign performing?" could be the most important question you have to consider when looking to identify your ideal customer profile. Thankfully, by working upfront on your Salesforce campaigns, you can answer any ROI questions. At the same time, organizing your Salesforce campaigns helps you attribute your Salesforce Account-Based Marketing endeavors. 

After gathering the maximum amount of information on your ideal customer profile, the next step is to think about the type of account-based campaign you can use in Salesforce. While you do have the option to start from scratch, it is much easier to tailor your existing campaign to meet the demands of your created accounts list. 

For instance, your teams can brainstorm ideas to change existing demand generation, content creation, social media marketing, customer engagement, and digital marketing strategies. When you pool in talents to tailor these campaigns, you take a holistic marketing approach.

Yet, if you want to start from scratch, you can run the following types of account-based marketing campaigns:

· One-to-one key accounts campaigns

The one-to-one key accounts campaign approach requires immense attention. Therefore, this technique works best for businesses targeting a single high-value account. If you want to deliver a wholly exclusive and personalized experience to your target customers, choosing this approach would be ideal.

To make this work, you need to capture your target's attention. For example, you can organize and host an event to solve your customer's problems. Additionally, said event can include presentations related to the prospect's industry or geographical areas that aim to convert. 

· Tactical segment campaigns

Unlike one-to-one key accounts campaigns, the tactical segmenting techniques can help you reach out to hundreds of high-value accounts in a specific location or category. 

For instance, if your target audience includes restaurants in New Jersey, you can comprehensively plan an event that caters to them. It can consist of some of the most popular dishes from Jersey. It can extend invitations to the region’s top restaurants (your target audience). 

Similar to the one-to-one key accounts campaign, the tactical segmented ABM strategy can also feature a detailed presentation that discusses the problems faced by the target audience and the solutions your business provides.

· Demand Generation Campaigns

If you want to expand your reach to a much wider audience, the demand generation ABM campaign would be ideal. This strategy can target a market of a few thousand high-value accounts. Moreover, the demand generation campaigns typically target small businesses in specific industries, such as healthcare and business, among others. 

Align the goals of your sales and marketing teams

For the ABM strategy to work, you need to combine the efforts of your sales and marketing teams. Besides devising the objectives for the account-based marketing campaigns, your teams need to figure out the marketing segments. For instance, your sales and marketing managers must agree on the target accounts utilized in the campaigns. The departments must also work together to formulate goals and measurement strategies to track progress. 

Once the fundamentals of the ABM campaigns are established, the marketing team can back up the sales teams by creating tailored messaging strategies to meet campaign goals. This may include the follow-up guidance and template uses. 

Similarly, the sales team would be required to reciprocate the marketing teams' support that connects with the prospective audience. The marketing department would also gather feedback to assess the successful campaign factors for the audience and those elements that fail to reach the campaign objectives. Input can subsequently be used to make changes to the programs and refine strategies for better results.

Moreover, organizing your sales, service, and marketing teams to work together effectively is a process that starts with breaking down the silos created from working with tools and data set to achieve different goals. In reality, effective ABM relies on open communication between teams, ensuring everyone is united around which customer profiles to target, which channels to use, and which metrics and analytics to track.

As expected, AI makes everything easier for internal teams. The insight provided by AI enables marketing teams to identify the best leads. At the same time, it transforms lead management from a linear to a cyclical event. For instance, if a lead refuses to convert, it returns to the marketing team for additional nurturing. And by employing the additional insights, marketing can create custom content needed to take them closer to closing the deal. 

Reporting Outcomes From Every Channel 

Setting your reporting up for success is easy if you ensure that prospecting activities are synchronized to a dedicated Salesforce campaign and tagged with the appropriate campaign type. 

Additionally, you can review opportunities from campaign members while tracking campaign touches in your pipeline. On top of that, by integrating your marketing into Salesforce, you can track offline touches, too, and see how great (or not) your marketing impact is. 

Account-based marketing generates a high ROI because your business can directly engage and target specific high-value accounts by taking a proactive approach. However, you need to create a campaign using the proper channels to get optimal results. 

• The following channels and activities are traditionally used in ABM campaigns: 
• Direct calls & SMS, personalized interaction
• Email marketing campaigns & Direct mails
• Social media marketing & Search engine ad campaigns
• Video creation
• Websites & Blog articles
• In-person, Virtual or hybrid events
• Infographics, eBooks, and Whitepapers
  

Once the account marketing channels are selected, you can create targeted content to which the audience is most likely to respond.

Track your progress

As account-based marketing is an integrated approach, tracking the progress of your campaign may prove to be complicated. For this reason, your sales and marketing teams need to create a solid plan for measuring and tracking the progress of each initiative taken in the campaign. 

You can create a different tracking and measurement plan for each type of program that you're running. For instance, if your campaign involves e-books, you can track the program's progress by checking the total number of downloads. 

Using this information, your marketing teams can communicate results to refine the strategies to reach and convert a larger audience segment. Salesforce funnels created with Dashboards and Reports can show the advancements in the stages of your ABM campaigns.

Artificial Intelligence in Account-Based Marketing Campaigns 

A single AI-powered platform offers a great, unified account view, enabling you to take an account-centric approach to customer engagement. Using a marketing automation platform like Pardot, you can create tailored messages targeting your identified accounts and deliver them in the right channel. 

Likewise, by extending Pardot with Advertising Studio, you can synchronize targeted messaging into renowned B2B advertising channels, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, among others. 

New Salesforce Account-Based Marketing Innovations Apply AI to Identify Customers Most Likely to Purchase

Salesforce’s Einstein's AI (Key Account Identification) surfaces the accounts with the highest likelihood for purchase. What it does exactly is that it helps you identify ideal customer profiles for your account-based marketing efforts. Einstein's AI creates a scoring model based on your previous data and insights, providing you with a tiered ranking for individual leads accounts. Except for this, engagement metrics and account attributes are included as insights, too, helping B2B businesses achieve their goals. 

That being said, there are a few things to consider before implementing it. For starters, account tiers and insights don't work with personal accounts, so keep that in mind. Also, the Einstein Key Account component shows up to four key factors at a time, and field-level security is set to visible by default, meaning users can add the field to their preferred view list. In every case, Einstein AI is beneficial to marketing efforts, and you would do well to consider this AI solution. 

The bottom line

Although account-based marketing has been around for some time, it is now more relevant than ever. B2B businesses can make the most of this approach, as they can target brands that can maximize their ROI. ABM is the most effective strategy that helps you define customer relationships. The method also has significantly higher closing rates, making it ideal for converting high-priority clients. 

If you want to create a successful ABM strategy, take the time to research your audience, combine the efforts of your sales and marketing teams, pick the right approach and channels, and track the progress of your campaigns. Taking these initiatives can help you close deals with high-value accounts and ensure the long-term success of your organization.

In the end, a culture of data-driven decision-making is needed in contemporary marketing, as it helps you personalize your marketing campaigns. It also offers staggering levels of effective insight to sales, service, and marketing teams. 

Using AI and analytics to measure a business or potential lead helps B2B companies learn which channels and approaches have the highest conversion rates. This way, they can predict which ones will have the most significant impact on future marketing campaigns. Therefore, the days of guesses are gone, as modern businesses can finally pinpoint which types of campaigns have the greatest customer lifetime value.