By | Categories Blog | Featured | October 11, 2018

Targeted marketing can be a powerful tool, gaining new clients and keeping your current ones intrigued. We’ve all heard the age-old advice that says, “If they’ve bought from you before, they’re likely to buy from you again,” so you should keep your current and past clients at the top of your mailing list and keep them interested in your products and services. 

As useful and accurate as that advice may be, it’s only the beginning of your email marketing campaigns. You must acknowledge the possibility that your current and past clients may not continue to purchase from you. Grow your business and prepare for the future by continuously searching for new prospects, gaining new leads, and building up your clientele. One of the best methods of identifying new leads is to enter account-based marketing (ABM) lists. 

What is ABM and Why Should You Use It? 

Rather than marketing to the masses and treating each customer the same, account-based marketing strategically targets clients based on their individual needs. It personalizes marketing messages and techniques to each customer or customer segment to gain more interest and higher ROI. By targeting your efforts to specific accounts, you also have the advantage of choosing the customers that you really want to sell to, meaning that you’re likely to spend more time and effort personalizing your sales techniques for each of these companies. 

Highly-targeted marketing tasks that are required to build an ABM framework include more than sending emails and calling potential clients. It involves an investment of time to take a hard look at your organization and evaluate what your goals are and who you want to purchase from you. It means updating your website to ensure that your message is clear and relevant to those companies that you want to sell to and creating ads that are targeted and specific to the goals of your clients rather than generically applicable to a thousand different companies. It means personalizing marketing emails so they’re specific and relevant to your targeted clients. 

Three Steps to Build an ABM List That Works 

Once you’ve evaluated your organization and have a thorough understanding of who you want to purchase from you, it’s time to begin building your account-based marketing lists. These are lists of companies and clients (accounts) that you are specifically targeting. 

Step 1 

Begin by identifying ten prospects that you would truly love to work with. These should be companies that you honestly believe will benefit from your products or services -that you know you can do an amazing job for. Targeting companies this way helps ensure that you’re working with valuable clients and that you’ll maximize your time and efforts to win them over and keep them interested. 

So, how do you go about finding clients you want to target? You need to develop a strong strategy and analyze each prospect. Search within all the resources at your disposal and analyze the potential client as much as you can. Search social media and LinkedIn, run a competitor analysis, take a look at their core values and compare them to yours. Spend some time to really analyze and get to know them. 

Step 2 

Find the contact information for each prospect that you’ve identified. Check listings, make phone calls, and review their website. Identify the names of key players within the organization and find their phone numbers or emails and their areas of expertise. Research these people and familiarize yourself with them. When you finally begin to make contact, you should know who you’re addressing and what you can say to initiate a response. 

Step 3 

Send highly targeted messages to the prospects from your new account-based marketing list. Think about why you chose these companies. Why did you want to work with them? Who are they? What are their goals and obstacles and exactly what can you do to address their specific needs? Use this information to your advantage by editing your message so it’s applicable to the person who will be reading it. 

Think about the kind of contact that you’ll be making. If you’re sending emails, ensure that you have the right strategy in place to create effective business emails. Spend some time getting the wording right, keeping in mind that they’re busy people without much time to read through their emails. If you are making phone calls, remember to listen, decode their tone of voice, and be ready to edit your message if the situation calls for it.

We are expert strategists with the skills and abilities to perform in-depth industry and competitive analyses, assist in the creation and promotion of brand identity and inbound marketing and marketing automation services. The Bash Foo content marketing team constructs campaigns, develops content, and hosts and design high-quality websites. Our professionals are more than equipped to assist with your ABM implementation, from updating your website to helping you build your ABM list and create a strategy that will benefit both you and your new prospects. Contact us today to find out how we can help you succeed.

Sources:

Smart Insights: How to build an account-based marketing (ABM) target list

American Marketing Association: Ditch the Traditional Funnel: ABM Proves Marketing ROI

American Marketing Association: Best vs. Next Practices: Account-Based Marketing