Using Account-Based Marketing (ABM) to Win B2B Clients as a Startup

Using different ABM marketing tactics can help a new company gain more B2B clients and grow in the long run. Read to find out how!

Account-based marketing, or ABM, is a great marketing approach for anyone who is supposed to get into selling their startup to a B2B market. Here’s how to maneuver an ABM campaign to help your startup win more clientele.

1. Identify High-Value Target Accounts

Many account-based marketing campaigns won’t be successful without proper research and identification of high-value target accounts at the heart of it. That’s why if you start adopting ABM into your startup marketing efforts, then it would be remiss if you didn’t do some target audience research first.

Your target accounts’ psychographics and demographics are just a few things you should be looking into about them. Your team should then decide what criteria you’d be looking for in a target account so that you can narrow them down.

2. Deepen Understanding of Target Accounts

Once you’ve narrowed down your target accounts, it’s time to get to know them even better. Since ABM focuses on a more intimate view and understanding of your target accounts, taking the time to learn more about them can help.

With a better understanding of the target accounts, you’ll have an easier time in the negotiations and when you have to get direct contact and conversations with your target accounts.

3. Personalize Messaging and Content

For B2B marketing, personalization is critical. It’s also much easier to do this for B2B than B2C, so it’s best to take advantage of this.

Make sure that you personalize the messaging you project to your target audience and the content you give them. Since it feels more relevant to them, your clients will feel closer to your messaging and may trust your brand more since you relay messages that fit their issues the most.

4. Engage Key Stakeholders

Just projecting messaging one-sidedly is not going to be enough. You also need to interact and sync up with your key stakeholders at some point. Otherwise, you’re missing out on a stronger connection with them.

It differs per industry. However, there will be opportunities to network during several events, so ensure your presence.

5. Implement Multi-Channel Marketing

Your target audience might be predominantly in one channel, but that doesn’t mean you should discount creating a presence in other media. You might find yourself unearthing a considerable chunk of a new target audience segment in these different channels.

You can repurpose the content you made from other channels and tweak it better to suit the different channels of your multi-channel marketing campaign.

6. Leverage Personalized Outreach

Your content shouldn’t be the only thing you personalize. Your outreach approach also should be. That’s why you should be trying to connect your marketing and sales teams to have a better and more personalized outreach.

Doing your research beforehand will help bolster your outreach approach, so take the time to do your research.

7. Collaborate with Sales

As mentioned earlier, you should always ensure that your sales team and marketing team aren’t two islands separate from one another. Make sure that they have clear and crisp communication with one another.

The information marketing gives sales will benefit sales during their tasks and vice versa.

8. Measure and Optimize Campaigns

Once you launch your marketing campaigns, you must measure and optimize your ABM campaigns. Knowing which ones have worked on your clients and which approaches were a miss is crucial. It would help if you didn’t forget to think of the key performance indicators (KPIs) that measure success in your ABM campaigns.

9. Provide Exceptional Customer Experience

Part of creating a personalized experience for your B2B clients is to ensure that your customer service is on point. That doesn’t just include when your clients need customer service if they encounter a problem. You should also provide their onboarding experience with your products or services is helpful and on point.

10. Expand and Scale

Starting with an ABM from scratch, you should start small. As you finish launching that campaign and find success, you should learn from there and expand and scale using the information you got from there.

Launching a large-scale ABM campaign from the start can be a considerable risk and a costly mistake. So, learn from your smaller-scale campaigns before you launch larger ones.

Conclusion

These approaches are all helpful in launching an ABM campaign if you ever want to transition your startup to better cater to a B2B audience. It’s more personal and requires more work, but in the end, it will make for a more efficient way to get in touch with your customer base. That’s why it will be a worthwhile experience, even though it may be challenging initially.

Andi Croft is a freelance writer whose main interests are topics related to business, technology, and travel. This is brought about by her passion about going around the world, meeting people from all walks of life, and bringing along with her the latest tech to enhance her adventures.