Account-based marketing (ABM) is a common sense approach to marketing that prioritizes and customizes your marketing efforts on the most promising potential customers.

An ABM strategy concentrates your efforts on high-value targets. The overall process can take longer and is clearly more complex. The results speak for themselves. On an ITSMA survey, 87% of B2B marketers reported that ABM delivered better results than any other tactics.

Here are five approaches to ABM that can be more effective than generic campaigns.

Tier Your Account List To Prioritize Efforts

Effective ABM identifies the most promising contacts in your database or key personnel at target organizations. You should evaluate attributes of ideal customers and then look for those attributes on your target list.

Next, categorize or rank attributes based on their value and other factors, such as revenue potential or likelihood to be more profitable. The resulting list should be revisited and updated regularly as well as targeted on social media, email, or other channels with tailored messaging.

Create Custom Compelling Content

Create compelling content based on the attributes and likely pain points depending on the type of businesses. Rather than a broad pitch, the tailored content should be used in medium appropriate for the industry to reach your targets.

Use Personalized Ads

Traditional re-targeting allows advertisers to present potential customers with ads after visiting a website and capturing their IP addresses with a cookie. Capitalizing on the data in your customer relationship management (CRM) or marketing automation tool should allow you to serve ads that pull in company name, job title or other personalized information. An ABM retargeting approach would take this further and segment ads based on roles or sales stage.

Fortify Relationships With Cross Selling

Small Business Trends reported that the typical U.S. firm loses 15% of its customers annually. Additionally, they indicated that the probability of selling to current customers is 60-70%, whereas the probability for new prospects is only 5-20%.

ABM efforts should target current customers too, both for retention and reselling. Keeping in contact strengthens your relationship with customers who are most likely to bring in revenue and drive growth for the business.

Host Events For Target Accounts

Hosting events may seem old school, or even a thing of the past. However, meeting someone face-to-face, even through a digital space, can speed up a sale. With a curated list of target invitees and a fun idea – you are able to present your solutions while making meaningful connections.

If your target list is geographically dispersed, try webinars with established thought leaders to pique their interest. Caution: make sure the presentation adds value and is informative versus a sales pitch.

With pressure to drive revenue growth, marketers are often impatient. Establishing an ABM campaign requires more personalization and time than implementing traditional marketing. Accordingly, it can cost more in time and money to implement before delivering results. However, ABM does focus efforts on areas most likely to drive revenue.

Contact DemandWorks Media to learn more about implementing ABM for your business.