Table of Contents
Account based marketing tactics will help you stay in front of existing customers. A marketers challenge often resides in not just marketing to potential customers, but also continuously staying in front of your current customer-set.
The goal of this discussion will be to break down:
- Why account based marketing tactics matter
- Forums that you can use to market to your current accounts
- How to get started
Why Account Based Marketing Tactics Matter
Marketing overall is often perceived as a department that’s meant to generate leads, establish a brand, and assist sales in bringing new customers to your business. Account based marketing tactics are often overlooked with the primary focus being on driving new business and brand awareness.
If you’re experiencing this challenge, then you’re not alone. According to HubSpot, 30% of marketing teams aren’t using account based marketing tactics.
Ultimately, account based marketing should complement your existing marketing efforts that attempt to reach new customers.
Account Based Marketing Channels to Leverage
Because all businesses’ have different target audiences, a channel that works for one business may not work for another. It’s important to understand which marketing channels are most popular for your audience.
One of the ways this can be done is via keyword research and competitor analysis.
By understanding what your top competitors do well, you’ll have a much better understanding as to how they’re gaining customers.
Here are a few distribution channels to get you thinking.
Direct Sales Rep Outreach
The most popular channel of selling (up until inbound marketing has taken dominance) has predominantly been direct outreach from a sales representative at your company.
This outreach includes frequent touchpoints from the sales rep (with some assistance from marketing) that ensures customers don’t forget about you.
The touchpoints should be valuable to your customer and should either inform, entertain, or build relationships.
These can be done via an array of communication methods such as email, phone, social media, or direct mail, but be sure to stick to the goal (inform, entertain, build relationships).
When marketing and sales work together, direct sales outreach can go a long way in your account based marketing efforts.
Let’s dive a bit further into the three primary goals that all of your touchpoints should have at least one of.
Inform
A direct outreach that informs your customer on some industry news, upcoming product launches, or changes that you’re seeing in the vertical you serve can be of great value to a customer.
This lets your customer know that you haven’t forgotten about them and you’re informed when it comes to doing your job.
Entertain
This is a tricky one because you don’t want to be a pest, but ultimately people like a good laugh (especially throughout the work day).
A quick direct message on LinkedIn or an email with a meme that circulated throughout the industry can go a long way in staying in front of a customer.
Build Relationships
Building relationships stems from a combination of the first two steps, in addition to putting in some extra effort.
Make sure that you have information like the customer’s birthday, favorite sports team, and alma mater in your CRM so that you constantly have things to reference or talk to them about.
Don’t be afraid to shoot them an email and just ask how they’re doing either, they’ll appreciate that you’re not just trying to sell them on something (hint: working with marketing is crucial here as much of this can be done via marketing automation).
Social Media
Realtors have sold homes from house tours on YouTube, relationships can be established with C-Level executives that are active on Twitter, people have gotten job offers from their ability to brand on Instagram, the list goes on.
When leveraged correctly, social media is a great way to connect with your audience. This can be to inform them on new offerings, end of year discounts, product updates, or just a ‘Happy Holidays’ message.
Social media allows you to communicate with an audience, for FREE.
According to IDG, 84% of C-Level and VP buyers are influenced by social media when it comes to purchasing.
There are many more social media channels, but let’s dive into 3 core social platforms that the business world uses.
YouTube
Videos have become much more popular in recent years as a source of information consumption. Companies are able to showcase their knowledge, skillset, product, and overall brand via videos with YouTube being the primary video distribution channel.
Hint: Don’t forget to use your keyword and competitor analysis findings here to optimize for search engines.
LinkedIn is arguably the most popular social media channel in the business world. 97% of marketers are using LinkedIn for their content marketing strategies, according to IronPaper. Due to the competitiveness to gain visibility, it’s important to ensure that the content you’re posting on LinkedIn is valuable to your target readers.
As of October 2021, LinkedIn has over 77 Million active users in the United States alone, according to Statista.
With so many users to engage with, there’s surely the potential to engage with a community that is looking for exactly what your business offers.
One of the main features rolled out in 2021 is called Spaces where users can find, you guessed it, spaces that discuss their interests.
With a massive number of users combined with new features tailored to better serve those users, we anticipate Twitter will continue to be a popular social channel in the B2B world.
Email Marketing
Because email marketing has become such a popular marketing channel, it’s become more difficult to compete for attention. However when leveraging creativity and targeting the right audience, you can stand out from the crowd to make sure your content gets seen.
Segment Your List
Your contacts should be segmented by prior campaigns that you’ve run. For example, if you have a list of contacts that exclusively bought X product or service, you’ll be able to better serve them content as it relates to a real experience they’ve had with you.
Luckily, email marketing platforms like Mailchimp, HubSpot, or AutoPilotHQ allow you to easily segment contacts.
Set Automation
A major value-add of email marketing platforms is that they allow you to trigger emails based on:
- Time: set time in the future that you want email to go out
- User action: clicked link on your website, downloaded whitepaper, visited a page, etc.
- Manual: sends email when you manually tell it to
This will save you time and give a clear framework of when your emails will go out to accounts. From there, track the results and enhance where needed.
For more tips, here’s how to write a marketing email that gets opened, and read.
Events (In-person or Virtual)
The acceleration of the remote workforce has created a path for not just in-person events, but virtual events as well.
There are a couple of different ways to effectively market to existing accounts while you’re at events.
Offer free/discounted tickets
Before their next purchase, offer them a ticket or discount code to use that will further entice them to attend an event. Once at the event, you can continue to showcase your value-add and build trust.
Giveaways
Usually within a marketing budget, there’s some dollars allocated for giveaways. People like cool swag like coffee mugs and the latest technology such as bluetooth headphones.
Although serious customers won’t come to your event just for the giveaway, it gives them an additional incentive to attend.
How to Get Started with Account Based Marketing
You’ve gone through the distribution and outreach tactics at your disposal, now let’s actually start executing on staying in front of your accounts.
Establish where your customers are
We don’t mean just physically, we mean where they spend their time.
Are they sitting in front of email all day?
Are they frequent LinkedIn and twitter users?
Are they typically at an industry event once per year?
Once you know where customers spend their time (at their desk, in person events, or both), you’ll be able to determine the best ways to reach them.
Map out your efforts
You know where your customers are, now map out on paper exactly how you’ll reach those customers with objective goals.
Being objective is something that you can measure. Here are some examples:
- Send out 4 marketing emails per month
- Identify 2 email responses per day
- Call 30 customers per week
- Interact with customers on social media at least 4 times over the current quarter
All of these examples, when tracked appropriately, will allow you to determine if your account based marketing tactics are working, what about them is working, and what needs to be enhanced over time.
Deploy your strategy
Once your efforts are mapped out on paper and you have clear goals that you’ll look back and track over time, it’s time to begin executing. Remember, your strategy doesn’t have to be perfect as it’s something that’s going to continually evolve.
Set your schedule, block some time off on your calendar, and put your efforts into motion.
Account based marketing tactic hack: automate as much of your efforts as possible.
By using the power of automation, you can frontload the work by scheduling emails, setting calendar invites, sending out texts, and posting on social media while you focus your efforts on growing your business.
Measure Results and Enhance
Having systems in place such as clean reporting allows you to have data insights that tell a story.
Luckily the tools that you’re using should be able to easily export data such as:
- How many emails were sent, opened, responded to, clicked, etc.
- How much traction your social media engagement gained via impressions and engagement
- The number of website visitors that downloaded a whitepaper or filled out a contact form
If you’re attending in-person events with customers, it’s a bit more manual to track but the value of human interaction in an era where everything else is online shouldn’t be understated.
Be sure to let us know how you’re implementing account based marketing tactics or if you need help getting started.
Gary McConnell Co-founded Rubicom Digital in 2019 with a goal of providing digital marketing consulting services in the B2B space.
Gary continues to serve as the Marketing Director of a Data Center-focused IT Provider, VirtuIT Systems.