Blog, Account-Based Marketing (ABM), Digital Marketing, Lead Enrichment

Account-Based Marketing Strategies: 8 Tactics to Improve Performance

best abm tactics
How do successful sales and marketing teams make important connections with large clients and land massive accounts? One tried-and-true strategy is account-based marketing (ABM).

Are you ready to take your B2B marketing game to the next level? Look no further than account-based marketing (ABM) tactics. ABM tactics are a highly targeted approach that allows you to engage with key decision-makers at your target accounts and drive revenue.

With the advancements in marketing technology leveling the playing field, you can leverage ABM tactics to not only hit your monthly numbers but exceed them. In this article, we’ll show you 8 proven strategies to improve the performance of your ABM tactics campaigns and start seeing real results. So, let’s get started!

#1 Create alignment across key departments

Creating alignment across key departments is a vital ABM tactic. It helps ensure the success of your account-based marketing strategy. In order to effectively execute an ABM strategy, it’s essential to have a framework in place that brings together sales and marketing alignment. But to truly rise to excellence, you need to connect the dots across your entire organization, not just sales and marketing.

For example, if your company sells multiple SaaS solutions, the alignment shouldn’t stop at just sales and marketing. It’s a good idea to involve product managers, R&D teams, business development, and other departments that work closely with the solutions you are selling. These departments can provide valuable information that can support your campaigns, such as insight into underutilized features that would actually solve a common customer pain point you are building a campaign around.

This is crucial among ABM best practices but is often overlooked. When you create cross-departmental alignment, you build a strong foundation for your ABM tactics and strategies. This way, you can be sure that all the departments are aligned with the campaign’s goals and objectives, and that you have all the necessary information and resources to make your ABM tactics more effective. This cross-departmental alignment allows you to create a more holistic and targeted approach, which in turn can lead to better results.

ABM Tactics - Creating Alignment Across Key Departments

Creating alignment across key departments also allows you to share key account insights and intelligence between departments. This can help you identify and target key accounts that are most likely to convert, prioritize accounts based on their potential revenue, and develop effective ABM tactics that will drive results. By sharing this information across departments, you can ensure that everyone is working towards the same goal and that your ABM tactics are aligned with your overall business strategy.

In addition, having alignment across key departments also allows you to streamline your ABM efforts and avoid duplication of work. When everyone is working together towards the same goal, you can avoid situations where different departments are working on the same account without knowing it. This can lead to wasted time and resources, and can negatively impact the effectiveness of your ABM tactics. By creating alignment across key departments, you can ensure that everyone is working together to achieve your ABM goals and that your efforts are being used in the most effective way possible.

By bringing together sales and marketing alignment, and looping in product managers, R&D teams, business development, and other departments that work closely with the solutions you are selling, you can build a strong foundation for your ABM tactics and strategies.

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#2 Use lookalike modeling to identify new leads to focus on

An effective one among the 8 key ABM tactics is to leverage your existing account data to find similar companies that could be ideal clients. This strategy, known as lookalike modeling, allows you to identify new leads that are similar to your existing successful accounts. By focusing your account-based marketing strategies on these new leads, you can increase your chances of success and drive more revenue for your business.

For this ABM tactic to be effective, it’s essential to start with clean, accurate, and updated data. Using a third-party AI-driven data platform, such as DealSignal’s Contact Discovery tool, can help you verify contact accuracy on demand and receive enriched contact attributes. This will ensure that your team has access to accurate, up-to-date information on decision-makers that you’ve identified as viable leads. With the right data, you can effectively target the right decision-makers at the right companies and achieve better results with your ABM tactics.

Another benefit of using lookalike modeling as part of your ABM tactics is that it allows you to scale your efforts and reach more potential clients without having to start from scratch. By identifying new leads that are similar to your existing successful accounts, you can quickly and efficiently expand your pipeline without having to spend as much time and resources on lead generation. Additionally, by focusing your ABM tactics on these new leads, you can increase the ROI of your marketing efforts and see better results.

By focusing your ABM tactics on these new leads as generated through the lookalike-modeling-funnel, you can increase your chances of success, drive more revenue for your business, and scale your efforts without having to start from scratch. With the right data and the right approach, you can effectively target the right decision-makers at the right companies and achieve better results with your ABM tactics.

Account Based Marketing Strategies Should Include Highly Personalized Messaging

#3 Create highly-personalized messaging

Whether it’s emails or ads, marketing content is more effective when it’s personal. When messaging is fine-tuned to the recipient, you’re more likely to see higher KPIs like open rate, click-through rate, and more. But, in order to personalize messaging, you need fresh, accurate data to work with. For example, you may choose to segment email lists based on what the recipient’s role is at their company, what stage they are in the buyer journey, or even a combination of data points.

The obstacle that most marketers and salespeople face is the accuracy of the data in their CRM. Research suggests that only 30 to 50% of your data is accurate. As important as data hygiene is, it’s a task that gets pushed to the back burner because of pressing deadlines and priorities. And let’s face it – data hygiene isn’t exactly thrilling work. This is where AI-driven technology can help teams like yourself, saving you tons of manual work hours. DealSignal can ensure 97%+ accuracy, compared to the high end of the industry average of 60 – 70%.

DealSignal’s Lead Enrichment tool provides you with a full view of identified contacts and accounts so you can personalize your outreach. With data that spans dozens of attributes, you can develop content that speaks directly to personal goals and pain points and invites meaningful conversation. Create email campaigns that can generate a high open and click-through rate by customizing your approach based on known data (which can be enhanced with our ABM Effectiveness tool). Maximize your ad spend by developing ad campaigns targeted specifically for small micro-segmented audiences for enhanced ROI.

Effective ABM with DealSignal - More Coverage, Engagement and Conversions

#4 Refine your ABM tactics with smart marketing automation

ABM tactics can rely on automation to free up your time and keep you on track with timely messaging and campaigns built around real-time data. You can leverage automation tools to help run targeted email and social marketing campaigns based on trigger events or event sign-ups. You can also invest in automation tools that help you discover new, hot leads based on intent.

If you’re new to the term “intent-based leads,” these are customers who are actively shopping for a product or solution like yours who are demonstrating strong intent to buy. Data platforms like DealSignal can find buyers who are demonstrating interest, or “intent signals,” that you want to keep tabs on. Some examples of intent signals could be a shopper comparing similar vendors on a review website or someone clicking on ads with keyword terms relevant to your business. Getting your hands on a list of intent-based leads is an excellent way to strike while the iron is hot and reach out to people who are actively in the market for your services.

With Intent-Based Leads, you can create an automated cadence to help you continually identify and prioritize hot, in-market accounts and update existing leads. You can set up daily, weekly, or monthly cadences that find you new accounts with intent or update existing accounts with intent.

ABM Tactics Rely on Automation Freeing Your Time
„ABM tactics can rely on automation to free up your time and keep you on track with timely messaging and campaigns built around real-time data.“

#5 Customize the experience for each account

Whether you’ve already nailed down personalized messaging or want to personalize at a greater capacity in tandem with ABM tactics #3, you may want to consider customizing the total experience for each account. This goes beyond targeted emails or ads — it involves the total user experience.

For example, you may consider building microsites that speak directly to specific audiences. Or, you may create a resource center on your website that is categorized by vertical industry categories or other account-specific categories. With this strategy, your team is looking for ways to personalize the entire customer experience from end to end.

With the help of a third-party data platform, you can gain insight into critical account firmographics like company size, industry, revenue, location, and more. Account Discovery and Enrichment allow you to get a full picture of each account with precise targeting filters, core firmographic data, and even intent scores. With this information at your disposal, you can better target companies that are currently in active buying cycles and build a more personalized, targeted, and effective ABM program.

And after prioritizing and targeting these accounts, you can dig deeper and reach the decision makers within those accounts with B2B Contact Discovery—because at the end of the day, you sell to people, not faceless accounts.

Customizing the Total Experience for Each Account is What is All About.
„You may want to consider customizing the total experience for each account. This goes beyond targeted emails or ads — it involves the total user experience.“

#6 Leverage MarTech tools to identify optimal accounts to prioritize

Once you’ve built the correct framework for your ABM program, you can let technology handle the rest for you. Many marketers struggle with not having enough verified accounts to speak to. This can lead to an overload of existing leads, inundating them with too much information and souring the budding relationship.

An AI-powered B2B data platform designed for ABM, such as DealSignal, can help you discover ideal buyers and prioritize the accounts you should be targeting. This is made possible with Account Discovery and Enrichment, which allows you to discover the ideal buying committee that meets the targeting criteria you choose, such as company size, industry, keywords, technologies, and more. You can even target accounts based on the intent topics that you choose.

By also getting access to critical account firmographics and intent scores, you’ll be well-prepared when reaching out to buying teams. Leveraging Account Discovery and Enrichment to identify the top accounts actively in the market for your solution will give you a much-needed edge over your competitors.

Prioritizing customers most ready to make a buy doesn‘t have to be a hassle. An AI-powered B2B Data Platform makes it easy.
Prioritizing customers most ready to make a buy doesn‘t have to be a hassle. An AI-powered B2B Data Platform makes it easy.

#7 Send prioritized accounts creative gifts and/or direct mailers

The days of corporate gifting and direct mailers are far from over. Corporate gifting/direct mailer platforms, such as Sendoso, are rising in popularity. And while these platforms do an excellent job, it’s up to you to provide the right mailing addresses. Corporate gifts are great for building important relationships, but in order to properly and efficiently execute this strategy, you must first start with accurate contact data.

It’s critical that you begin with fresh, verified data. It’s not uncommon for businesses to have multiple addresses – one for billing, mailing, or even for multiple office locations. If you want to build a connection and send a gift, it’s critical that you have an accurate and verified mailing address. Otherwise, your well-thought-out gifting strategy could end up costing you instead of helping you.

Additionally, with Inbound Lead Enrichment, you can create even more impact by using additional contact attribute fields to select personalized gifts. The more data you have on a given contact or account, the more insight you have into preferences. Inbound Lead Enrichment can provide fresh, accurate, and verified data on 100+ attributes so you can better select a corporate gift for specific people in a specific organization, and stand out from the herd.

Corporate Gifts are Great for Building Important Relationships - ABM Tactics
Corporate gifts are an excellent ABM tactic for building important relationships. But to efficiently execute this strategy, you must need accurate contact data.

#8 Track ABM performance

Tracking the performance of the ABM strategy is crucial for refining and optimizing your approach. Initially, starting with ABM might involve some trial and error. Utilizing A/B testing is great for identifying which messages resonate with your target audience and which don’t. If a particular approach is yielding positive results, it should be double downed. Conversely, if something isn’t working, it might have to be switched out. The marketing department, through interactions with prospects, can provide valuable insights into which ABM tactics are the most effective.

To gauge the effectiveness of the account-based strategy, it’s essential to track various metrics:

  • Cost of customer acquisition (CAC);
  • Cost per lead;
  • Expected monthly recurring revenue (MRR) and return on investment (ROI);
  • Buying patterns of target account holders and
  • Content engagement metrics, such as click-through rate and read rate, from creation to closure.

Regularly testing ABM campaigns, monitoring their performance, and analyzing account-based B2B marketing metrics for any fluctuations are vital practices. Additionally, assess both individual campaign results and the overarching trends of your ABM efforts to continually refine and enhance your strategy.

Accelerate your ABM program success with DealSignal

Are you ready to take your ABM tactics to the next level? DealSignal provides you with the tools and automation you need to supercharge the ABM framework you’ve created.

  • ABM Effectiveness delivers the comprehensive data needed to drive ABM engagement.
  • Account Discovery and Enrichment allow you to precisely target and prioritize accounts so you can take a stronger, multi-channel approach to your ABM tactics.
  • Contact Discovery so you can directly reach the most relevant decision-makers within the accounts you’re targeting.
  • Intent-Based Leads help you prioritize your hottest accounts and improve revenues.
  • Inbound Lead Enrichment enriches your contact list for more personalized outreach and verified mailing information needed to send gifts and direct mailers.

When you have the latest AI-powered technology and data tools at your fingertips, attracting big accounts becomes not just a possibility, but a probability.

Request a demo today and find out how you could leverage ABM tactics to land the clients capable of launching your company to new heights.

DealSignal

Boost your ABM Effectiveness – with DealSignal

Get superior engagement from your ABM program with complete and accurate data!
Request a demo now and see how DealSignal can fuel your revenue engine!

Learn more about the best ABM tactics for your B2B business

Peter Garza

Peter Garza is the CMO Advisor for DealSignal.

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