
ABM is the latest craze rolling through the digital marketing landscape over the past year. You can’t escape it no matter how hard you try. So, is this the best kept secret you should be adding to your channel mix? Or is it a targeting strategy that you should roll out across your existing?
ABM or Account Based Marketing is a business marketing strategy that concentrates resources on a set of target accounts (or companies) within a market. Mostly used in B2B marketing, the strategy focuses on a list of ideal prospects either sorted into industry niche or another persona. Once that list is formulated, messaging is customized based on specific pain points and how the product is a must have.
You’ve probably heard about brands like Terminus, Demandbase, 6sense, Rollworks or the hundreds of other tech platforms that will bundle ABM up and sell visibility to your selected list. We have gone through demos, discovery sessions, and prospect journey with almost all the above and were underwhelmed to be completely honest.
Pros:
Cons:
After a lot of time spent on calls and negotiating contracts, we decided to go a different direction in building out an ABM strategy on our own. And here’s how to do it across your existing channels.
1Match your ABM list within LinkedIn: this is the sure-fire way to ensure you reach these companies on the outset. This will be the channel to scale visibility because we’re 100% sure the ads will reach the ABM list. Note: DO NOT engage the audience expansion
2Build a traffic focused campaign to prioritize click traffic to your website so your target persona within those matched companies will be clicking and getting collected into an audience
3Set up specific UTMs for this ABM campaign – build audiences based on the UTMs on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google Analytics
4 Customize your messaging to start first touch on LinkedIn – As specific to company’s industry or niche pain point as possible
5Build Retargeting campaigns on Facebook and Google Ads, possibly some Youtube. Messaging should acknowledge they’ve seen your brand before, “Still considering…”, “Still experiencing X pain point?” etc.
With this above strategy you will be able to start a cycle of reaching the users where they are cross promotionally and then averaging down your cost per engagement until you make an ask of the user. After a few weeks of seeing your ads, education, videos, and content on different channels, you can design a specific InMail or Conversation ad that gets directly to the point of asking for a demo, call or free trial type lead.