📈Engaging with strategic accounts
Mar 23, 2022 1:43 pm
ABM 101.
1. Upload accounts to LinkedIn or Rollworks.
2. Run display ads.
3. Track engagement.
4. Reach out.
Results?
Low reply rates. Huge ad budget. And a miserable ROI.
ABM 2.0.
1. Create demand and awareness via proactive thought leadership.
2. Launch 1-few partnership webinars and market research with niche associations or communities
3. Create personalized content hubs for buyer's enablement and further nurturing
4. Drive engagement with strategic accounts via creative outreach and contextual ads
Results?
7-figures pipeline. +50% reply rate. And a high ROI.
Hi , aside from ICP and marketing & sales alignment, one of the most common reasons why ABM programs fail is a lousy warm-up and engagement strategy.
To break this down, we will share the insights of Nick Bennett, Vladimir Blagojevic, and Andrei Zinkevich on how to engage with your strategic accounts.
Here’s what you’ll learn:
- Company-centric marketing Vs Client-centric marketing
- ABM warm-up
- How to drive engagement?
Before we dive in, here are some remote positions from our job board that might pique your interest or that of someone around you.
TRENCHES JOB BOARD
TYK IS HIRING A HEAD OF BRAND EXPERIENCE
This role should make Tyk famous. How?
- By creating creative and compelling brand messaging, campaigns, events, and activities all-year-round;
- By ensuring Tyk is seen as a thought leader in core spaces
- Develop supportive and strategic relationships with tech influencers, national/international broadsheet media titles, relevant industry bodies (CNCF, OAS, GraphQL Foundation, etc), analysts (Gartner, Forrester, etc)
Learn more about this role and apply here.
INTEGRATE IS HIRING A Sr. GROWTH MARKETING MANAGER
Your mission?
- Humanize all things marketing (and have fun while you’re doing it).
- Lead and operationalize Integrate’s category-leading Precision Demand Marketing (PDM) approach.
- Orchestrate connected buying experiences by segment (solution, persona, industry, etc.) for some of the world’s leading brands including Adobe, Red Hat, Slack, and VMware.
Learn more about this role and apply here.
Now let's get to the meat of the matter.
Company-centric marketing Vs Client-centric marketing
Customer-centric marketing is all about prioritizing your customers' needs and interests over any other factor, using a blend of intuition, common sense, and solid data about their behavior.
Here’s how you can leverage client-centric marketing in your company.
Tip 1: Give your customers an incredible experience
Marketers are usually eager to improve conversion rates from one step of the funnel to another, but what about the bigger picture?
At some point, you need to do a bit of introspection to see if customers are happy with you, and if you're providing a good experience at each stage of the sales funnel (from awareness to purchase returns).
Tip 2: See the world from your customer's point of view
If you ever want to build long-term trust and loyalty, you need to learn to put yourself in the shoes of your customers.
As marketers, we can be blinded by our own knowledge and vast experience of our industry. After all, this is what we do.
But sometimes it's important to take a step back and use our customers' feedback to help us understand how our target market is living and experiencing our brand.
Tip 3: Do not annoy your customers
Sounds obvious, right? And yet... it's not uncommon to come across creepy marketing tactics that drive people crazy.
A tight focus on leads and ignoring everything else usually results in marketing tactics that almost nobody likes. These tactics will only damage the integrity of your brand and leave you with more detractors than promoters -which is detrimental to your long-term success!
ABM warm-up
Creating engagement triggers is the first step of your ABM program. In order to achieve this, you should connect and engage with the buying committee because the truth is people buy from people they know, like, and trust.
Next up, awareness and nurturing content. At this stage, not only do you create demand for your services but you also establish yourself as a trusted advisor and an expert in your field. As a result, you will have more organic reach.
How to drive engagement?
Personalized connections - If you ever want to stand out and establish relationships with strategic accounts, you need to highly personalize your connections. You can opt for a voice message or a personalized video, that’s up to you. But whatever you choose to do, make sure it is appealing and tailored to the contact you’re reaching out to.
Value-added comments: In most cases, you don't even need to produce content. You could simply engage with your strategic accounts and add value to their posts by commenting.
You can ask smart questions underneath the comment section or use your expertise to give more insights and more value to the post.
1:Few niche webinars: these types of webinars help you speak directly with smaller groups of targeted accounts, figure out their pain points, and then personalize your content to meet their needs.
If you’re interested in launching those kinds of webinars, the first and most important step would be to find people from your target audience. Find and partner up with industry influencers, niche associations or communities, and people your audience value and respect.
Upcoming community events
Below is the list of the scheduled events. CLICK on the events you are interested in to save your spot. You're very welcome to join the conversations, ask your questions live, or share your experience.
Full-Funnel Summit (29th -31st March)
Your full-funnel B2B marketing summit is just next week!
You can attend and learn from the best B2B marketers for free.
Best Shares From Trenches Community
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- How to pivot from lead gen to demand gen?
- 5 steps to create thought leadership in your industry: (and turn it into revenue)
Questions from fellow Trenchers
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See you in Trenches 😉
Adechina D. Odjo,
Content Editor @Trenches