If your business has decided to invest in account-based marketing, the next step is to launch a campaign. Today, we’ll go over the five steps you’ll need to take to create a successful strategy.

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a B2B strategy that will help you land the big deals. It is a growth strategy in which marketing and sales collaborate to create a personalized shopping experience for the key customers you value the most.

Although there are differences and similarities between inbound marketing and account-based marketing, there is no reason to choose one over the other. They complement each other, and both strategies are about attracting and engaging people to satisfy the customers. An ABM strategy ensures that you land big deals and your company also gets other benefits in the form of better collaboration in the organization and faster sales. If you are unsure that this strategy is for you, you can easily find out if you should invest in ABM.

Read our article Account-Based Marketing vs Inbound Marketing to decide on the marketing method you need.

Five steps to success with the account-based marketing campaign

Here we present the five important steps required to create a successful ABM campaign.

1. Create a working group

Collaboration between sales and marketing is an important aspect of an account-based marketing plan, and you may need to rethink how sales and marketing are organized. If they refuse to cooperate, your ABM approach will fail. At least one employee from sales and marketing should be included in the working group. If you decide to expand the working group, begin by hiring more salespeople, as one marketing person can support up to 10 salespeople.

2.  Identify your target accounts

You can utilize a variety of tactics and working methods to figure out which consumers are target accounts. For instance, you can examine website visitors to discover which valuable critical consumers interact with your site. You can also look over your current transactions to see which ones you’d like to continue working with. However, developing your ICP (ideal customer profile) is a prerequisite in account-based marketing.

Remember: It’s critical that your sales and marketing departments agree on which target accounts you should concentrate your efforts on. You must also decide which KPIs should be used to evaluate, optimize and measure the campaign.

3. Build your account plans

It’s critical at this point for sales to collaborate closely with the market. Account plans for multiple accounts don’t have to be drastically diverse, but they shouldn’t be similar. They don’t have to be extensive or complicated, as long as they respond to these two key questions:

• Who makes up the media buying staff at your company?
• What kind of content should you create for folks on the media buying team?

However, you must first determine who they are and what type of content they require, as each member of the media buying team has unique requirements. Review if you can recycle existing content and tailor it to the target audience – for example by growth-hacking your blog archive.

Below are additional examples of content you could produce to reach your key customers:

• Tailor-made websites with messages that are adapted to each person in the purchasing team.
• Invite to or sponsor an event.
• Create a report or evaluation of your chosen target account to be able to show how your company can help improve its metrics.

4.  Attract target accounts

You may already have contacts with your target accounts as a result of your previous inbound marketing initiatives. Otherwise, you should figure out where your target accounts are and make sure you have a strong presence there. You may also need to participate in forums where people are looking for the services that your firm provides. Conferences, review sites, advertising, sponsored social media, and industry influencers are just a few examples of strategies to acquire customers. Meanwhile, it’s a good idea to be familiar with the following metrics:

• Your target accounts’ page views and unique visits
• The number of contacts established with your target accounts (conversion rate).
• Conversion costs on average (ACC)

If these metrics do not go up while you are contacting your selected target accounts, you should change your strategy.

Remember: The reason why ACC should also increase is that account-based marketing requires a larger budget per account. This is because your target accounts are larger and thus will provide greater returns

5. Engage the purchasing team

Now it’s time to start engaging your media buying team with your chosen organizations. And remember, this is not just a sales process. On the contrary, the market should be involved in creating awareness or producing content. Everyone must work together to drive sales forward and the incoming data must be analyzed so that you can optimize your strategy.

But you’re not done yet! Once the working group has landed the deal, the job begins to make the customers so happy that they want to be your future ambassadors. They should of course want to renew the contract with you and buy even more of your products or services. Creating an account-based marketing campaign is just the beginning of a long and successful relationship between you and your target accounts.