Jonas van de Poel
For many startups and SMBs, successfully setting up account-based marketing strategies can feel like a pipe dream. Startups still struggling to find product-market fit wouldn’t dream of being able to identify and map out their ideal customer profile (ICP) clearly enough. At the same time, small and midsize businesses often lack the resources to invest in elaborate multitouch-point content marketing strategies.
Smaller businesses and startups usually don’t employ full-fledged marketing teams either, and their sales reps are strapped for time anyway. To them, account-based marketing (ABM) is something reserved for corporations that employ enterprise marketing teams and can fling about big marketing budgets.
This couldn’t be further from the truth, and both startups and SMBs can, and should, invest in ABM strategies. With a handful of smart growth tactics and clever tools, ABM strategies don’t have to break the bank to be successful.
There are, however, a few distinctive characteristics your business should probably have before investing in ABM:
- Larger than average deal sizes or customer value make ABM much more worthwhile. If you’re working with a long tail business model, this probably isn’t for you.
- Businesses with long sales cycles are equally well suited to ABM strategies. The longer the sales cycle, the more important it is to cater to key accounts with personalized content and outreach across multiple channels and at multiple touch points.
- Complex buying committees are also susceptible to being marketed to in a hyperpersonalized way. Spray-and-pray marketing won’t do you any good here.
- ABM strategies work best when sales, marketing and service are fully aligned. Has your organization bought into the idea of RevOps? Good, ABM might be the way to go.
In short, the points above sketches what might be described as the higher segment of B2B companies. Startups and SMBs that conform to these characteristics would do well to consider the growth tactics we outline below.
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What is ABM? How about ABS? And what’s this ABX business?!
Before we get down to the hands-on approaches and actionable tips for getting started with ABM, let’s look at some definitions to get a clearer picture of what we’re talking about.
Account-based marketing
Account-based marketing is a business strategy, sometimes also referred to as key account marketing, where businesses focus marketing resources on specific targets (key accounts) in a market.
This is like flipping a traditional inbound marketing funnel upside down. Instead of generating leads, segmenting, activating and then selling to them, ABM takes the opposite approach. You identify specific key accounts, build relationships with these targets, and then sell to your network.
This also means producing highly relevant, highly personalized marketing content for all types of decision-makers along all points of the customer journey.
Account-based sales (ABS)
Account-based selling is a B2B sales model that takes a similar approach and focuses on selling to the same key accounts. Patience is the name of the game here. Instead of trying to get that demo scheduled as quickly as possible, your sales reps will be investing in relationships.
This highly personalized and strategic process builds upon the tailored marketing content we mentioned. Sales and marketing alignment is key to successful execution of account-based sales strategies.
Your marketing and sales teams will benefit from defining and reporting on shared goals and even KPIs.
Account-based experience (ABX)
Account-based revenue generation will work best when you’ve got companywide buy-in from not just sales and marketing departments, but your customer success team too. This helps serve your key accounts a personalized experience during a holistic buying journey that continues post-purchase.
Post-purchase dissonance isn’t just about impulse buying in B2C and e-commerce. It’s equally relevant, maybe even more so, to high-ticket purchases and long buying journeys. By adding your customer success team to the mix of your account-based strategies, your company can create an entire account-based experience strategy.
Account-based experience approaches to B2B customer journeys are defined by absolute customer-centricity. It makes sense that after putting all this effort into acquiring a customer, you should spend equal attention on retaining these key accounts.
Growth marketing tactics are all about hypothesis-testing, fast-shipping, short sprints and quick, successive iterations. This might sound like going completely against the long-term investments of ABM strategies, but bear with us as we walk you through the steps of getting started as soon as today.
Start by laser-cutting out your ICP
Identify the key accounts you will be approaching based on your ICP. The basics include looking at the industry they operate in, the number of employees they have, the technology they use and the type of customers they serve, among other traits.
You may already have a sample customer in your customer base — one of those customers you’d love to have 20 more of. Take a long hard look at this sample customer and note the characteristics you’d like to see in your target accounts.
What would an ideal customer profile like this look like? If you’d use a descriptive format to outline your ICP, it might be something like:
Our ideal client delivers business services in the logistics industry in the Netherlands and employs between 200 and 500 employees. They use an outdated CRM.
Pro tip for a true ABX approach: Document all these characteristics in a spreadsheet and ask your team to supplement this information. Actively involve your sales and customer success teams in this process. They know the ins and outs of your current customers like no one else.
Use a prospecting platform to turn ICP into target accounts
There are many ways to take your model customer and find lookalike accounts. The clunkiest of these is using a manual approach. By scrounging LinkedIn and using its advanced search features, for instance, you can get quite far.
You could also use other public databases — like your local chamber of commerce’s public data — to identify target accounts based on your ICP’s characteristics.
Luckily, there are also a bunch of prospecting platforms out there to take care of the heavy lifting for you, such as Cognism, Vainu, Leadkite.co. These sales intelligence tools use algorithmic searches to automate your prospecting efforts.
Map your customer journey to marketing content
Proper account-based approaches rely on pinpointing high-opportunity prospects, but to make the most out of those prospects we need to hyperpersonalize the content catered to these people.
First map out your customer journey and the personas in the buying committee you’re targeting (decision influencers, key decision-makers, etc.). Make sure to note which stages of the funnel these contacts move through. If you’re targeting several verticals, segment these as well.
This allows you to figure out which type of top of the funnel/middle of the funnel/bottom of the funnel content you need, per persona and per vertical. Prioritize producing this content and you’ve built yourself a minimum viable account-based content marketing strategy.
Every cold outbound email that sales sends out, every LinkedIn DM they send to decision influencers and every targeted advertising campaign’s content magnet will benefit from being supported by this content marketing framework.
Invest in community and collaborative content creation
Account-based approaches thrive when you amend your mindset and focus on long-term investments and relationship building. One way to do this is by creating a (sense of) community. This builds on two of Cialdini’s principles of persuasion: Unity and reciprocity.
You can inspire unity by letting your key accounts “join the group” as well as “be part of the few.” In essence, this is about giving people value without asking for anything in return. This ties into the principle of reciprocity, which states that people feel obliged to return favors they have previously been given.
Starting an exclusive Slack community or Facebook group, inviting your key accounts and using these communities to provide exclusive value is a perfect play for account-based marketing approaches.
Similarly, you can provide value, inspire unity and trigger reciprocity by involving your key accounts in collaborative content production. This can be as simple and low barrier as creating roundup posts with expert insights delivered by your prospects. Send out a Typeform or Google Forms survey with a few questions and work this into a top-notch piece of content.
Not only does this create buy-in from your prospects, you’re also likely to see them share the content with their own networks. People love being seen as experts. This desire for recognition will support your content distribution efforts.
Use smart tools to automate tasks
We already mentioned Typeform and Google Forms as examples of smart tools you can use to support your account-based marketing campaigns. Some of our other favorites include software like Mailshake, Expandi, Phantombuster and Hunter.
You can use such tools to set up and automate email marketing campaigns, automate sending LinkedIn connection requests and DMs, scrape LinkedIn company employee lists and find publicly available email addresses based on people’s names and company domains.
The more time you save by automating what would take hours to do manually, the easier it’ll be for you to get started with account-based marketing without breaking the bank. We strongly suggest startups and SMBs adopt this growth mindset early on.
Hyperpersonalize everything you do
Considering that a large deal value account is worth enough to go the extra mile when it comes to investing time and resources, spray-and-pray tactics are a no-go in account-based marketing.
Instead of enrolling all your key accounts in the same generic email sequence, record a short Loom video where you browse a prospect’s website instead. Show that you made the effort, did your research and are ready to go above and beyond to find out all about their challenges and pains.
Hyperpersonalization is essential if you want to impress your target audience. Find a balance between the things you can automate and what needs to be done manually. Test your workflows before going live. Nothing screams account-based marketing failure as much as a [first_name] tag in the opening line of your cold outreach emails.
But relationship management is about more than just pronouncing your prospects’ names correctly in a recorded video or knowing about their most recent press release.
One of our clients, a Dutch IT and Cloud Migration agency, recently sent out small gifts to a highly targeted list of key accounts. After generating this list of prospects, they sent out laptop webcam covers, the packaging of which included a QR code leading to a landing page for their latest proposition: A service for setting up a modern workplace environment that focuses partly on being more safe and more compliant than alternatives.
How’s that for a low-barrier way to impress your potential ideal customers?
Support with laser-focused advertising
For startups and SMBs, advertising budgets can be a tricky subject of conversation. These companies usually don’t have the resources to run ads at scale. Nor should they, as the leads and customers generated through performance marketing tend to be less sticky than average and can lead to high churn rates in the long run.
However, account-based marketing strategies work best when you have complex buying journeys. This means you want to engage your prospects at as many relevant touch points as possible.
It’s a good idea to run highly targeted ad campaigns to only those contacts at your target accounts who you’re also reaching in other ways, i.e., through cold email outreach, LinkedIn DMs, or, if you’re really playing your ABM cards right, OOH billboard advertising.
A lot of this is about increasing brand awareness and staying top of mind with your prospects. At the same time, if you have the right marketing content in place, using targeted ads to show valuable content to the right people at the right time can contribute greatly to your overall ABM campaigns.
Don’t forget to re-target!
Guiding your prospects down the right path during their buying journey is how you end up closing deals. Re-targeting website visitors with ads and appropriate content is crucial to this strategy. These people have shown some form of interest in you and your business. Don’t lose that momentum, and make sure they won’t forget about your brand.
At the same time, re-target prospects who show signs of self-declared intent — like content downloads and visits to specific pages on your website — in more personalized ways as well. If you’re using a marketing automation tool like Hubspot, it’s easy to identify signs of interest or high intent by specific prospects.
Monitor those signs closely, and make sure to pick up the phone when the time is right, or send out another manual email. That one personalized gesture could just be the deciding factor that convinces the key decision-maker at your target account.
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