st practices for B2B ABM marketers //

B2B marketers employ account-based Marketing (ABM) strategies in order to reach the right decision makers within potential organizations. When these strategies are backed up with the right data, they can give marketers a competitive advantage.

Leadership starts with awareness

In their ABM strategy, the first thing you should consider is their brand presence.

Megan Creighton, head digital strategy at The Ricciardi Group (a boutique B2B marketing agency), said that this is a crucial step because it allows you to establish a level of awareness in your market. She spoke at The MarTech Conference. People need to know you and be part of the conversation to ensure that your downstream programs can thrive.

Your brand must be well-known among the top prospects of your business and key contacts in those companies. Your ideal customer should be able to identify you when you are engaging them.

Creighton stated, “In order for your message be received well, I believe that the person receiving it must feel that you are a credible person to convey that message in order to make them buy.” “So, being able bolster your market position is what will make your thought leadership resonate. It’s what will make the person receiving it feel more comfortable with your brand and want to start the buying journey with you.

The top of the marketing funnel should have brand awareness. This should then flow into deeper engagements, nurturing audiences, and ultimately driving sales.

Creighton stated, “Once we raise brand awareness and have that baseline awareness, then it is possible to target hyper-targeted advertising from there which is the fun part.”

Marketing campaigns: Gathering intelligence

Engagements with existing customers and key prospects at lower levels yield valuable data that can be used to drive meaningful interactions. Brand awareness campaigns can provide valuable insight for B2B companies.

The message must resonate with prospects to get the best out of every engagement. Marketers should make sure to use the data that they have in order to create messages that resonate.

Deeper: How AI and machine learning can be used to personalize and optimize campaigns

Creighton stated that accounts are composed of people who make the decisions and have preferences about how they want to [be] reached.”

You should examine data to determine which channels have been most successful in reaching customers in a market you are trying to enter.

To create a personal touch, content that is facing accounts in this area should also reflect awareness of the market. This is true for both website content and social media messages as well as emails and personal communications.

Key prospects can also be identified by market research. B2B companies should look into content syndication programs. These surveys can be customized with questions to provide insight when prospects interact with the content.

Creighton stated, “Identify someone in that particular geography who was actively researching and showing high intent for a brand’s solution.”

Prioritizing data insights

Once your brand is past the awareness phase, and you have some market insights, it’s time for account prioritization and to learn more about their businesses.

Creighton stated, “Now that we have identified that accounts are also expressing intent, we understand that they may be more inclined to give us more information.”

This stage is crucial because it provides important data such as pain points and specific products or capabilities that prospects are looking for.

It is possible to prioritize your market research more deeply. Sales for products or services that are related to your business could be increasing. You can identify the prospects that are most interested in the products and help your business prioritize them.

To create relevant content for your nurture campaigns, it is important to prioritize the data from customer interactions and surveys. This prioritized data can be used by marketers to segment their audience.

You can make your marketing strategy data-driven and implement ABM strategies that are personalized and active on the correct channels in an increasingly digitally cluttered environment.

MarTech first published the post 3 Best Practices for B2B ABM Marketers.