A B2B company that offers real solutions to their target audience may just need an opportunity to get their foot in the door. Account Based Marketing (ABM) can help them to do just that. In this blog, we share a few tips on how to nurture, convert and refine your lead generation efforts.
ABM is a highly personal approach. It involves targeting key decision makers within a company, researching their career path and building a creative pitch focused on their unique problems and how you can solve them.
That can be a double-edged sword, though, especially if you approach a prospect totally unprepared. You could come on too strong, be regarded as too forward and face rejection as a result. An ABM campaign shouldn’t be viewed as all-or-nothing. We’ve seen people throw everything but the kitchen sink at potential leads in their first introductions, so keen are they to build a working relationship.
Coming on strongly isn’t the most advisable approach to any ABM campaign (or any inbound campaign in general, really). The best solution is to take your research about the company and its decision makers, and build creative content around the problems they face, and your proposed solutions as a B2B provider.
Failing to research your leads at all could also lead to you being instantly discarded, earning you a reputation throughout your industry as being something of a chancer.
Nevertheless, the potential rewards of a successful ABM campaign are enormous. Depending on your definition of growth and success, a good ABM campaign could be the growth catalyst you need to move onto the next level, or it could be the positive boost you need to align yourself with clients more on your wavelength.
How you collect and measure your analytical data can go a long way towards nurturing and converting leads in creative ways. Here are three tips…
Measure targeted ad engagement: An important part of reaching out to the most relevant decision makers is creating content and targeting it through social and search biddable media, based on an individual’s position, salary, company location and other factors.
It’s therefore essential to constantly monitor data, including clicks and conversions, in order to assess the impact of the creative. If the impact is lower than expected, more research needs to be done, or it needs to be targeted to a slightly different audience.
Practice consistency when nurturing: If you’re approaching a potential B2B partner you want to work with on LinkedIn or another channel, but you have a lengthy sales pipeline they have to navigate, it’s key that everybody in your sales and marketing departments shares a consistent narrative. If a prospect starts to get different messages than the one initially pitched to them, and they interact with scores of people who may make them feel less valued, they may feel inclined to walk away.
Report regularly and measure returns: A massive 92% of B2B marketers across the globe say ABM is “extremely” or “very” important to their overall marketing efforts. according to SiriusDecisions, despite it being a tough strategy to get right.
It’s tough because no one decision maker is the same. They do have a particular industry and a career ladder in common though. Regularly reporting and evaluating the ROI of your ABM campaign can help you to see the direction it’s heading in, evaluate how effective your research has been and better align your content for future prospects.
Reporting is something that the HubSpot platform does extremely well. From page views to email opens, call to action clicks and form submissions, the right marketing automation platform can track all these interactions and produce overall performance statistics, such as click through rates, submission rates and bounce rates.