ABM has transformed the B2B sales landscape by turning companies’ attention away from ‘spray and pray’ tactics to a more targeted approach toward high-value accounts. But the cornerstone of ABM success is a critical element that always seems to fly under the radar of a lot of people’s ABM playbook: account engagement. But without participation that is active and meaningful, even the most stunningly designed ABM strategies go flat.
In this blog, I’ll help you understand the basics of ABM account engagement, why it’s important, and how you can maximize it with the help of tools and real-world examples. By the time you’re finished, you’ll have everything you need make your ABM efforts a well-oiled, engagement-driven machine.
The Cornerstone of Account-Based Marketing and Account Engagement
What is Account-Based Marketing?
ABM is a very focused form of B2B marketing, in which marketing and sales teams work together to target, customize, and interact with individual high-value accounts. ABM is totally different from the broad-reaching approach of old – instead of casting a wide net, ABM zeroes right in on the accounts most likely to bring in the big bucks.
Defining Account Engagement
Account engagement is the metric that quantifies meaningful interactions with targeted accounts in your account-based marketing strategy. This includes the activity such as communicating at an account level, personalized touchpoints and the number of webinars, meetings or touchpoints.
Where ABM focuses on accounts, account engagement makes sure the targets stand up and take notice. Without involvement, ABM is merely broadcasting without the assurance of reception.
Why Account Engagement Is Crucial to ABM Success
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Fosters Relationship Building: With ABM, the big idea is to forge deeper relationships with your target accounts. By engaging them you will gain trust and rapport, showing them that you are a partner not simply a vendor.
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Optimizes Your Conversion Rates: It’s likely that your customers will make buying decisions more quickly – and make better choices – when they feel recognized and understood.
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Increases ROI: Customers who are engaged are more likely to purchase from you and become loyal customers, resulting in your marketing investment stretching further.
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Generates Actionable Insights: By monitoring engagement, you see what’s actually working, and which accounts are most likely to convert.
Tactics to Increase Account Engagement
Personalized Content Creation
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Personalize Buyer-Specific Messaging: Personalize the content to target the challenges, priorities, and industry-specific challenges of target accounts.
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Develop Account-Specific Campaigns: Leverage knowledge of specific accounts to create super personalized content like case studies, whitepapers or personal videos that address their pain points head on.
Pro Tip: Utilize a platform such as HubSpot or Market to segment accounts to help you automate personalization at scale.
Multi-Channel Communication
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Social Media Outreach: Social media don’t stop at Facebook – platforms like LinkedIn are B2B marketer gold. Employ them for account-based ad targeting, direct messaging and thought leadership content distribution.
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Email Personalization: Leverage account data to craft emails that cater directly to your audience’s desires and interests.
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Events and Webinars: Custom make these to feature solutions that are interesting for specific accounts and engage stakeholders 1:1.
Leveraging Data and Analytics
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Behavioral Data: Follow account behaviors and how they interact with your content, website, and social media. Are people clicking on your emails? Attending your webinars? Downloading resources?
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Intent Data: Leverage signals on intent to discover accounts that are actively looking for solutions that you provide. MarTech tools like Bombora or Demandbase can illuminate these possibilities.
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Predictive Analytics: Machine learning is able to scan through previous engagement data to discern which accounts have a higher likelihood of conversion.
Evaluating the Success of Account Engagement Initiatives
Engagement Metrics
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Engagement Metrics (downloads of whitepapers, time on your site)
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Rate of Reply (to emails and social networking notes)
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Webinar or Event attendance RSVPs
Conversion Metrics
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Meeting Installations (from outreaching)
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Pipeline Velocity (how fast an account moves through the funnel)
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Revenue Earned (from accounts with activity)
You can track these in real-time for the most insights using a modern CRM such as Salesforce or a platform like Demandbase.
Instruments and Skills to Engage Accounts for Success
Technology is a Big Factor in Creating Account Engagement
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Marketing Automation: Customizing and keeping track of your outreach is easy with HubSpot, Pardot or Marketo.
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Engagement Platforms: The likes of Outreach or SalesLoft support sales and marketing in being able to drive effective engagement with target accounts.
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Data Insights: Bombora and 6sense for intent data — to see who is most interested in accounts.
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Content Personalization: Tools like PathFactory and Uberflip personalize content experiences for your target accounts.
Case Studies – See ABM Account Engagement in Action at These Organizations
Adobe’s ABM Success Story
Adobe uses intent data and personalized account experiences to effectively reach enterprise customers. Their #1 value prop was around saving time and I knew that I could help them do that with custom content hubs built for each of their accounts, but instead it was their words that were much more effective (they doubled their converts, tripled their engagement rates and cut sales cycles in half).
Snowflake’s Journey to Demand Gen Dominance
Snowflake, the cloud-based data services provider, moved to multi-channel engagement of accounts. Aligning their sales and marketing teams helped them to increase cross-channel engagement by 50% and to get more SQL conversions than ever before.
The Trend Toward Conversational Marketing for Drift
Drift and its AI-powered chatbots that were customized to visitor behavior helped to increase ABM account engagement through conversational marketing. Engagement in target accounts increased by 25% within the first quarter of launch.
These examples demonstrate that engaged targeting strategies can drive massive gains in attention and business results.
Account Engagement is About Long-term ABM Success
If account-based marketing is the engine that powers your business, account engagement is the gasoline. By copying approaches modeled by businesses such as Drift, leveraging insights from companies like Bombora, and incorporating a personalization and omnichannel strategy, your ABM can be an unstoppable force.
Begin creating meaningful and deeper engagement with your key accounts, today! Discover how you can use Outwrite to ensure all of your campaign messages sound perfect and will connect with your audience. Get up and running with our free tools to make your ABM program a success!
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