Account-Based Marketing: The Key to B2B Success

The rise of digital content on the internet has changed the B2B buying process dramatically. In turn, this shift has required B2B marketers to change the way they think about their websites, content, and digital advertising. As we all know, marketers have more responsibility than ever before, because so much of the buying process takes place online.

What makes it even more complex is that the business buying process involves a team of buyers that research, evaluate, and compare a vendor’s products and services before a decision is made. This buying committee is also a crucial factor in driving the longer sales cycles common in B2B. In order to effectively reach all of the purchasing decision-makers and influencers at a specific company, focus efforts at the account level allows business marketers to get in front of the right audience — known as Account-based marketing.

What is Account-Based Marketing?

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a strategy that involves engaging large, named customers at a deeper level to pursuing new, high-value accounts that share similar size, industry or geographical characteristics with existing top-tier customers.

Focusing on accounts results in higher-quality leads delivered to sales while also reaching more prospects on the buying team. Sales win rates, marketing efficiencies and company revenues improve dramatically.

In this eBook, you’ll learn the basic principles of an account-based marketing strategy, how to build a target account list and how your current marketing tactics fit into a broader account based marketing strategy.

Defining the Ideal Customer

The first step to implementing an account-based marketing strategy is to build your target account list — the logos you want as a customer. At first you might think you have no idea who your future customers are. After all, you’re a marketer, not a fortuneteller. The truth is, when it comes to customers in B2B, you actually can make a pretty accurate guess about what to expect.

Your future customers look a great deal like your current customers. So to build your target account list, you need to do an inventory of existing accounts. Parse out the attributes that are most commonly shared by all of your highest-value

Engage large, named customers at a deeper level & pursue new, high-value accounts that share similar size, industry or geographical characteristics with existing top-tier customers

customers, and you’ll start to get a clear picture of the types of companies you should be targeting.

The types of attributes you should be looking for include industry, company size, annual revenue, location and number of employees. You can also start to consider other criteria: for example, if you’re a technology company, are most of your customers early adopters? If so, you should focus your efforts on marketing to similar companies.

Building Your List

Once you know what sort of accounts you’re looking for, you need to build a list of companies that fit the profile. That requires doing research across various channels where you can learn more about companies and assess their profiles. You can find this information via:

• Social Media, i.e Facebook and LinkedIn

• Live events, such as user conferences

• Articles and online references

• Customer lists for competitors and like-minded companies

• Competitors of your current customers

The list you generate will likely be very similar to — or even mirror — the “dream” accounts your sales team is going after. That means more qualified leads for you

Look for: Industry, Company Size, Annual Revenue, Location & Number of Employees

— and a much happier sales force. Adding these accounts and ensuring they line up with the core company attributes you used to define your list effectively creates a process where marketing and sales align on the same accounts, and there’s a cohesive effort to drive revenue.

Step 1: Measure Your Baseline

Once you’ve generated your target list, you might guess that your next step would be go market the heck out of them. That’s coming soon — but before you get started — you want to measure your baseline. Getting in-depth visibility to the traffic on your corporate website is the first step.

That way, you’ll get a sense of how your current marketing efforts are working to engage your target accounts. This different than simply measuring how individuals engage on your site. Namely, it truly provides insight into the ways that marketing efforts directly link to conversions and sales.

So what should you be measuring? How effective are your outbound and demand gen campaigns? What types of leads are you pulling in? Who’s coming to your

website? What content do they consume? What are your conversion and bounce rates?

You might even adjust and optimize your target account list based on your existing website traffic. And, you have the actual information to support making any changes to the list.

Step 2: Attract Them to Your Website

Once you have that baseline measurement, you’re ready to start to begin outreach to your target list. You’re likely already doing persona-based marketing, so you’re familiar with idea of tailoring your demand gen and outbound marketing to a particular group. The target account approach is similar, but enables you reach multiple people at a company.

In the B2B sales process, there are almost always multiple people involved in a final purchase decision. Your main contact may be a marketing director, but several more individuals will be involved at the time of a final sale. When you take an account approach, you have the opportunity to target an entire company, which means a greater likelihood that you’ll reach more of the decision makers, or stakeholders, who will influence the purchase.

You can reach out to them with the usual methods you use for outbound marketing:

• Targeted display ads

• Email marketing campaigns/Marketing Automation

• Live events

• Social media

• SEO/SEM

Step 3: Engage Your Target Accounts

You know you need engaging, targeted content on your website to start a conversation with your potential buyers. When you’re doing account-based marketing, your site content should speak directly to the companies you’ve

identified as target accounts. Before you can create and deliver the right content, you need to segment your accounts.

If you’re segmenting your customers based on size or industry, your content should speak to the needs and interests of companies in those categories.

Segmenting by Attributes

In this way, you provide a more engaging experience through targeted content. Each visitor is able to envision how your solution or product is valuable to his or her company. Furthermore, because you’re targeting entire accounts, your content is being seen by the multiple people at each company involved in a sale and are all engaging with your content. That means when the account finally converts, you’re delivering highly educated, warm leads. They already have an understanding of what your product would mean for their business at a holistic level.

Examples of targeted content include:

• Industry-specific case studies

• Local events

• Relevant products and solutions

Segmenting by Account Status

Another way to segment the companies visiting your website is by account status — or where they are in the funnel. Account-based marketing is valuable at the top of the funnel, but it also comes into play during the lead nurture process.

You can integrate web analytics with your marketing automation system and CRM tools to get valuable information about where a company is in the decision-making process. The key difference is that you’re delivering content based on an account score — not an individual score. That means that if a new stakeholder from late stage prospect comes to visit your website, you can recognize the account and deliver appropriate content — such as a solution sheet or ROI calculators, rather than an infographic meant for a top of the funnel account.

For example, visitors from a company that is just learning about your company might want to see an infographic, while a late stage prospect is probably most interested in solution sheets and ROI calculators. Once a company becomes a customer, they may be interested in best practices or new product announcements.

Step 4: Measure Again

Once you’ve gone through the process of marketing to specific accounts and engaging them through your targeted content, you’ll want to measure all your efforts — and of course, mostly importantly, your conversion rates. Your website is the focal point of your analytics. What’s your traffic make up? How do targets accounts engage with your content? When do they convert?

Your account-based marketing can be visualized as a continuous circle — so as you go through the various stages, your measurement will impact decisions — including iterations and tweaks to both your outbound efforts and content. It’s a constant cycle of improvement.

Account-Based Marketing in Practice

Think of account-based marketing as a filter or lens that can enhance your current activities all the way through the customer lifecycle. With an account view, you can optimize your marketing activities and drive more revenue.

Net New Lead Generation

Account-based marketing is a critical tactic when it comes to acquiring leads. Typically when we think about lead gen, it’s about generating as much quantity as possible. With account-based marketing, you can focus on acquiring new leads who are likely to buy from you. The first step here is to connect with the sales and align on the most valuable accounts. Then, based on your target account list, segment your accounts and refine marketing activities to ensure they reach specific audiences.

For example, Docusign used account-based marketing to create a website that delivers targeted, relevant content to all new visitors. They are able to change their call to actions and their messaging so that it’s meaningful to each specific account that visits the website. This allowed them to give T-Mobile a very different experience than Wells Fargo when they showed up to the website. By delivering a unique and personalized message for all website visitors, Docusign was increased

Brocade found that through personalizing their homepage, they were able to increase page views by 46%, file downloads by 86% and time on site by 26%

their page views from their target accounts by 300%, and lead to a 22% pipeline growth in their top six industries.

Lead Nurturing

Once a lead has entered your pipeline, you want to deliver a nurture campaign that resonates with your prospective buyers. The segments you created during the lead gen phase are even more important during the nurturing phase. At this point, it’s critical to engage accounts using messages that are meaningful and relevant. Based on the account’s stage of the buying cycle, you can deliver messages that are appropriate for that particularly company and help to move it through the pipe.

Brocade used account-based marketing to optimize their website for their one of their key segments: healthcare. They found that through personalizing their homepage, they were able to increase page views by 46%, file downloads by 86% and time on site by 26%. They also decreased their bounce rate by 53%.

Customer Upsell and Renewal

Account-based marketing is also a powerful tool when it comes to building stronger relationships with your current customers. These are accounts you’re already familiar with, but to keep them engaged, you need a

300% By delivering a unique & personalized message for all website visitors, Docusign increased their page views from their target accounts by 300%

continuous cadence of marketing content that’s specifically directed at them. This means keep close track of where your customers are in the lifecycle. Are they new customers? Coming up for renewal? Enjoying success and ready for upsell?

Based on this information, you can personalize messages and content for your customers just as you do for prospects, which helps to build better customer engagement and a more meaningful relationship.

Key Takeaways

When you implement an account-based strategy, you add a focus to your current marketing strategy that will benefit your marketing organization in three key ways:

• Precise, holistic Measurement: Measuring by accounts/segments allows marketing to be an active owner of the revenue chain.

• Targeted Content: Marketers can provide a more engaged experience through content, helping to educate multiple stakeholders at an organization. This means that leads that come through to sales are often closing to buying.

• Highly-Qualified MQL — SALs: When you hand off leads to sales, prospects know exactly what they want and they understand your solution. Furthermore, you route and score more effectively based on full-account measurement.

Account-based marketing may at first seem different than your current approach. It does require a different philosophy and some legwork up front, but ultimately it’s a strategy that integrates with your current marketing efforts and programs, with the added benefit of reaching more stakeholders and actively pursuing accounts that are most likely to buy. What this ultimately means is that marketing is able to take even greater ownership of lead generation and directly tie efforts to revenue.

Mathew Sweezey, Marketing Evangelist for Salesforce.com

Mathew is the head of thought leadership for B2B marketing at Salesforce.com Company. A

consummate writer, he authors a column for Clickz.com on marketing automation, has been

featured in publications such as Marketing Automation Times, DemandGen Report, Marketing

Sherpa, ZDNet, and is the author of Marketing Automation for Dummeis (Published by Wiley

February 2014). As a speaker Mathew speaks more than 50 times per year around the world at

events such as Conversion Conference, Dreamforce, SugarCon, and to companies including

Microsoft, Investec, NetJets, and Resturants.com, to name a few.

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