How SaaS Companies Can Take Advantage of Account-Based Marketing
If done right, account-based marketing (ABM) can generate demand.
For SaaS companies, a strong ABM strategy is crucial to growth. An excellent ABM campaign will integrate both inbound and outbound driven marketing strategies and work seamlessly with any demand generation processes.
In this post, we’ll walk you through some of the essential components of a SaaS ABM strategy. Doing so allows you to generate more demand than ever before.
But first, let’s walk you through the basics:
What is an Account-based Marketing strategy?
In a nutshell, ABM is a focused growth strategy wherein you integrate marketing and sales to develop highly personalized buying experiences. This B2B outreach tactic will allow you to enter new markets and even engage your prospects in upcoming product releases or events.
At Integrate UK, we always tell clients that to execute it successfully involves a lot of preparation and coordination between various departments and perfectly timed execution.
You might waste six months of an ineffective campaign with very little insight into what went wrong by failing to concentrate on these areas.
Now, let’s walk you through the seven innovative ways how SaaS can take advantage of account-based marketing:
1. Build your ideal customer profile (ICP)
When it comes to ABM, you have to be conscious of who you target. This kind of marketing mainly involves who you reach out to. It would be best to choose companies that you feel will benefit your products and services the most and will turn out as top-tier customers when they convert.
One of the most important things you need to do when designing an effective ABM campaign is know who you need to target. However, when it comes to B2B SaaS companies trying to please everyone, you wind up pleasing no one. You’re sending out generic messaging that doesn’t speak with a group of people.
2. Select the right account
Similarly, when starting your account selection journey, follow these steps:
Validate your account list. One of the first essential steps is choosing and validating your account list no matter who you’re targeting.
When it comes to the account selection, keep everyone involved. It will give you a clear picture of your ICP and the tier of your accounts. This will often involve your sales, marketing, and customer service teams.
Accounts can act as moving targets. Your ABM target list needs to be dynamic as you promote and demote accounts that are based on the latest data.
3. Research and plan on the best way to reach them
The next stage is to research and learn about decision-makers in your target companies who can switch to your product or service.
It also helps you know where your target demographic spends time on the internet. It allows you to focus on your marketing energy where you can reach them, in particular.
While you might get other great clients, this method mainly focuses on providing the client with precisely what they want or need.
4. Create relevant content
The content that engages B2B buyers is personalized and relevant content. The more personalized and relevant the content is, the more likely that a customer will engage with it.
When it comes to creating highly effective ABM tactics, highly personalized content is essential. If you’re a B2B marketer, one of the most important approaches is to develop content that fits a particular industry. In the same way, you can also create content fit for specific roles or accounts.
Review your existing content and consider how case studies, blog posts, and e-books can all be relevant to your target demographic. Categorize it by stage if you want to get the entire picture of your existing content in your sales funnels. You’ll know what kind of content you want to create based on the buyer’s place in the funnel.
5. Personalize your campaign
Like we said before, ABM revolves around personalization. What makes ABM stand out from other marketing strategies is the level of the personalization involved. You can also use data insights to inform personalization.
Your CRM, first and third-party data sources, and engagement insights are essential to developing a highly personalized messaging strategy.
6. Distribute content to the right person
Similarly, it’s also vital for the content in your ABM campaign to reach the right people. That way, you can nurture a relationship with them.
One of the best ways to get your content to the right people is via email. You can utilize email for you to send highly relevant content. The good news is that email isn’t just for marketers- sales reps can also use it. Even cold emails can still work.
7. Measure ABM performance
ABM campaigns aren’t different from other marketing campaigns when it comes to metrics and performance. The metrics you’re choosing to track will depend on your objective.
The insights that you get from this data make communication relevant and reliable. The data that you gather here will also keep the communication personalized. In the same way, it also allows you to have informed decisions on the people that you’re targeting.
Over to You
The SaaS industry is booming. A lot of software categories are growing more and more competitive. You shouldn’t be wasting your time, energy, and resources on building generic marketing campaigns.
With ABM, less is more. Therefore, when you execute an account-based approach, salespeople and software marketers will feel more confident that they’re focused only on companies with the highest value. Doing so allows you to use your resources efficiently. It also provides you with a way where you can unite both your sales and marketing teams to generate revenue for you.
The best part of all of this is that you don’t need costly tools or software to get started. With a little bit of time, patience, and trial and error, you’ll acquire more leads and generate more revenue in the long run.
