Take Your Inbound Marketing Strategy to the Next Level by Implementing Account Based Marketing (ABM)

“Every growth story starts with the same fundamental elements of inbound marketing: creating great content, building a publishing strategy, optimizing search presence to enable discovery of your brand, and generating leads,” according to Ryan Batter, ABM Product Marketer at HubSpot.

You can reuse content and use the same channels for ABM that you already built with inbound. ABM often means taking that foundational content and personalizing it at a deeper level.

Both inbound marketing and ABM focus on delivering a great buying experience throughout the entire customer-based cycle.

Let's Talk About Inbound Marketing

If you have made it this far, you are probably already familiar with Inbound Marketing. Inbound is the only marketing methodology that, by investing the same resources each month, lets you achieve a growing flow of visits, qualified demand generation, sales opportunities, and sales. 

This is achieved by creating specific content combined with the use of different marketing automation tools, which makes it possible to carry out prospect nurturing strategies, content personalization, lead filtering and qualification, etc.

All of this lets you build a demand generation machine that works automatically from the first time a user visits your website until they become a customer.

You may be interested in: 👉🏽 Free Inbound Marketing Course 👨🏻‍💻

Let's Talk About Account Based Marketing

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a highly personalized and focused B2B marketing strategy that centers on creating personalized experiences for accounts.

Unlike traditional strategies, ABM is aimed at small groups of accounts that are valuable to the organization and that have very similar buying processes and patterns.  

The businesses that are typically ideal for applying ABM strategies are those that sell high-value products or services to other businesses, such as B2B companies.

Since it is a strategy focused on the accounts that are relevant to the company, the goal is to generate a very specific value proposition for them. 

From there, you need to develop content, since it is a key part of any ABM strategy.

How to Start Implementing an Account Based Marketing Strategy

On average, an ABM strategy takes between 8 and 12 months to mature. Messages must be fully personalized and focused on the value proposition. 

ABM by Account

There are two ways to get started. We can begin with accounts we already have some kind of contact with, or even an ongoing negotiation; in this case, an ABM strategy can help close the sale.

ABM by Industry

The second way is to start from a list of companies you have no contact with at all. In this case, the goal of the ABM strategy will be to catch their attention, get them to notice your company, and make a first contact.

To get started, it is essential to identify the accounts the company considers key accounts. Here are some questions that will help you prioritize your key accounts to launch the ABM strategy:

Guiding Questions to Identify Priority Accounts to Start an Account Based Marketing Strategy:

• What annual revenue could a deal with this account represent?
• Have we had any kind of outreach with that company, or do we have any contact in the CRM associated with the target company?
• Does it have any open deals?
• What stage is the negotiation in?
• Has this account gone more than 60 days without any recorded activity?

When prioritizing accounts, you choose the companies you will focus your efforts on, so I recommend keeping in mind that these should be companies where a deal could represent significant revenue for your organization, combined with those where you are most likely to close a sale.

I think it is important to highlight that for an Account Based Marketing strategy to work, a complementary effort from the sales team is essential, since they will be the ones carrying out specific sales follow-up actions once contact has been made with the key account.

See also: 🎯 What is account based marketing?

Tactics an ABM Strategy Can Include Based on the Account's Goal:

This is a list of actionable tactics you can apply depending on the goal with each account; that is, not every tactic will necessarily be used with every account.

• MKT automations
• Sales sequences
• Email MKT
• Landing Pages
• Lead magnets (Downloadables, webinars, etc.)
• Smart Content on the Website
• Blog Posts
• Case studies
• Social media posts

Build Your Winning Combo. Inbound + Account Based Marketing

Both ABM and Inbound are based on designing and generating content aimed at a buyer persona with specific acquisition goals. An Inbound Marketing team is a team that will also be ready to create and implement an ABM strategy.

Subscribe to our newsletter and stay tuned for the second part of this post, in which I will share, step by step, how to implement an Account Based Marketing strategy.