Account Based Marketing Tactics: How to Gain Audience Insights
ABM allows companies with a complex target audience to connect with their most valued prospects through personalized campaigns – as a one-size-fits-all approach often fails to deliver results. Account based marketing tactics are the building blocks of this approach, and they play an important role in successful ABM campaigns.
In this post, we explore:
- The challenges ABM practitioners face
- What typical ABM content looks like and how it’s measured
- A better way of understanding ABM content performance
Let’s dig in!
What is ABM?
Account Based Marketing (ABM) is a strategic approach where businesses focus their marketing efforts on a select group of high-value accounts or clients by tailoring messages and tactics to meet the specific needs and preferences of each account.
The origins of ABM can be traced back to the 1990s with the publication of “The One to One Future” by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers. This marked the initial shift towards a more personalized marketing approach. A decade later, ITSMA coined the term “Account-Based Marketing” and commenced research and training, propelling this strategy to the forefront of B2B marketing.
Presently, a notable 66% of marketers have incorporated ABM into their practices, and more than 25% are actively planning to integrate ABM programs into their marketing strategies for the upcoming year.
What makes a great ABM campaign?
The goal with most ABM campaigns is to increase sales revenue quickly and efficiently; In Demand Spring’s State of ABM report, 74% of marketers surveyed mentioned generating new business as their main goal for account based marketing, while 54% identified increasing revenue as their primary objective.
According to research by Gartner, personalized web or email content – perceived as helpful – increases the likelihood that the customer will make a high-quality purchase by 9%, and 56% of marketers agree that personalized content is key to ABM’s success.
These numbers tell two things. A great ABM campaign:
- Requires extensive research/audience insights – to be personalized
- Generates real business results and ROI
What does an ABM campaign with audience insights look like?
GumGum – a contextual intelligence platform – closed the enterprise B2B company, T-Mobile, by demonstrating a deep understanding of their target customer. For GumGum, account based marketing meant identifying and resonating with one key stakeholder at a highly targeted account.
That was John Legere – the former CEO of T-Mobile:
(Source)
John is a well-known Batman enthusiast, which GumGum used to their advantage by commissioning a custom comic book with him as T-Man – the protagonist dressed in Batman-inspired attire.
(Source)
This unique account-based marketing tactic got GumGum a contract with T-Mobile, and a significant amount of social media exposure.
What does a digital ABM experience typically look like?
Consistently, businesses have extensively depended on Account-Based Marketing (ABM) to customize campaigns according to their customers’ preferences.
However, the outcomes have been varied (According to the 2021 State of ABM report); Pierre Custeau from MRP highlights that 75% of B2B buyers characterize their buying journey as highly intricate or demanding, while two-thirds express their dissatisfaction with the process.
Despite the visible success and results from implementing ABM strategies, research from MRP’s State of ABM report shows that many companies are still finding it difficult to develop target account personas (31%) and also to identify the accounts that are most likely to purchase (31%).
The digital ABM experience typically consists of highly personalized landing pages and content – which only a few users might see. 1-1 or 1-few ABM strategies may only have a total audience size of 20-30 people. This means your content needs to be spot-on to work!
56% of marketers who responded to a recent Forrester study strongly agreed that personalized content is key to a successful ABM strategy.
What are the challenges with measuring ABM content?
In DemandSpring’s report, 33% of marketers surveyed tracked engagement metrics to determine the success of their ABM efforts – but numbers alone can’t tell you everything.
39% of respondents mentioned facing difficulties when delivering a personalized experience, while an additional 34% encountered problems when selecting the right content assets.
Having access to real-time insights increases your chances of reaching out to an account that’s ready to buy – even when the customer isn’t a lead – according to a recent study by InsideSales.
Using on-site analytics and metrics will never give you statistical insight as there is never enough volume. These metrics are interesting indicators, but don’t enable much in terms of informed decisions – you need qualitative insight to make better decisions.
How to collect user insights for ABM
It’s hard to create content for buyers when you don’t know what their preferences are – and even harder to identify accounts that are most likely to purchase soon. Metrics also, cannot tell you everything – you need to understand the context behind the numbers.
Now that we’ve explored some challenges with digital ABM, it’s time to introduce a solution to address these challenges: Rockee.
Rockee is designed to help you know who your readers are, and how to create better ABM content they’ll love.
With Rockee, you can use custom questions to find out:
Content relevance: Is the content relevant to customer pain points?
Customer journey: What stage of the journey are they on? E.g. are they just researching, or deep into vendor comparison?
Content Perception: What did prospects think of content and feedback?
Feedback from a high-value prospect can change your ABM approach overnight!
After collecting audience feedback, you may find the challenges in that account are different from what you researched – but now you have the insight from ABM prospects to adjust accordingly and take the guesswork out of low-volume analytics data.
Using Rockee feedback for informed decision-making will save both time and money for your marketing and sales teams, as well as increase their productivity.
How to get setup
Use feedback landing pages when sharing content via email i.e. sales outreach emails – where you can ask ‘Was our content helpful’ and link to a feedback landing page. You can also use the chat style widget if directing users to ungated content on a landing page.
Here’s how to set it:
Step 1:
If new to Rockee, start with the free forever plan by signing up.
Go to the left sidebar and select “Setup.”
From the Setup page, click “Add Widget.”
Name your widget (e.g., “ABM Prospect Category 1”) and click “Add Widget.”
Step 2:
On the customization page:
Customize the questions by clicking the edit icon.
Click “Continue” to proceed.
Step 3: Create a feedback landing page
At this stage, you’ve already set up your custom collection widget. All you need to do is copy and paste the code.
You can then embed a CTA – asking users for feedback – in your email outreach and gated content assets. You can direct users to this page for feedback.
Equally, you can go through the same process as above and spin up an on-site collection widget if you’re directing your ABM prospects to specific web-pages or content to consume.
Step 4: Measure and analyze ABM content performance
From your dashboard, you can analyze your content’s impact through ratings and feedback – and gain insights on ways to improve content.
ABM marketing tactics (FAQs)
What are account-based marketing tactics?
Account based marketing (ABM) tactics are strategies and techniques used by a business to target and engage specific high-value leads known as accounts. ABM tactics are aimed at building personalized and focused marketing campaigns with individual target accounts.
How do you measure ABM content performance?
To measure ABM content performance, collect feedback and ratings from target accounts, analyze content engagement, and also the number of leads generated
