Ever seen in movies how a skilled professional sniper precisely aims at their target and hits them with a bullet at the exact designated spot on their body? In marketing, one can come close to this kind of accuracy by using social media for account based marketing. With that overstated point, let us first understand a bit more about ABM.
For the uninitiated B2B marketer, account-based marketing (ABM) is a highly personalised marketing approach that focuses on targeting and engaging specific accounts or prospects – the ones most likely to cut the deal for your business. Supplementing the efforts of ABM with social media can further sharpen this strategy by opening ways to target specific audiences, interact with them on a personal scale, build trust and credibility with them and finally, present your product or service to them. This strategy is highly applaudable for the B2B business as it proves to be super-effective in converting prospects and also retaining them over a long period of time. In this article, we will explore how you can use social media to support your ABM strategy and achieve your goals.
What makes ABM different?
TV ads, hoardings, newspaper ads and radio broadcasts, all have one thing in common – they are all mass communications. This means, they are not targeted to a specific crowd and have a limited scope to decide their viewers. Account based marketing is quite the opposite of that – you are in control of everything. So is the power of social media tools – you get tremendous control and can get down to minute details while deciding your target audience. When you combine them both, you almost have the accuracy of a sniper!
Account Based Marketing delivers 97% ROI, as compared to the other forms of marketing.
So how do you make the best of both? Here are 5 tactics you should consider to boost your ABM strategy.
- Identify your ideal customers – Your target accounts or companies should be precisely identified and defined. And if you need a path to begin with, you may first consider the top layer of your existing clients. Find out what’s making them return to your company and why they still do business with you. These could be the USPs you’re not even aware of! As you research, you may find out the commonalities between all these people based on industries, demographics, revenues, technologies, and their company sizes. This gives you a reference template to find out more such similar companies. Now, an effective social media tool that you can use here is LinkedIn. Use it to filter industries, discover profiles, and learn more about your customers. Once you know who you are selling to, the rest of the tactics become a whole lot easier: crafting sales messages, writing relevant content, or reaching out on other platforms.
- Earn their trust by establishing empathetic communication – Take the efforts of building a relationship with your LinkedIn Contact instead of bombing them with your business idea a few minutes into your connection. Stay active on your prospects’ profiles, engage conversations as much as possible, re-share their content, validate their thoughts and even respond to their stories if you may. The idea is to foster enough communication before you offer anything.
Building an empathetic relationship takes some time but it’s an honest and long-lasting one. Create value to your customers before you expect them to do the same for you.
- Put relevant social media content that relates to your customer’s pain areas – Account Based Marketing works because it is personal, specific, and targeted in approach. Based on your research, publish social media content that exclusively addresses your target accounts’ pain points. You can use Social Listening tools such as Social Sprout or Hubspot to understand what your customers are talking about or struggling with. Then you can use SEO tools like SEMRush to discover the exact questions they’re asking on social media. Now, create a lead magnet that provides a solution to their problems.
- Social media marketing works best when paid – While you continue on the side with your organic efforts, make sure you also utilise the paid aspect of social media marketing. Social media platforms like Facebook are fantastic tools that allow you to run targeted ads with measurable results. On Facebook, ad targeting is based on three different types of target audience: Core audiences targeted on demographics, behaviors, and location; Custom audiences for people who have already interacted with your business in the past; and Lookalike audiences, who are people similar to your best customers but who may not know about your business yet. Plus, Facebook even allows you to integrate chatbots or messenger ads to take the purchase journey into their inbox.
- Get Personal – Account Based Marketing is all about getting personal. Treat each prospect as an individual; using the touch points of their unique story, unique pain points, and unique goals.
To continuously improve your social media ABM approach, it’s crucial to monitor performance through key metrics. In the current times, using social media strategy in combination with ABM will unlock huge opportunities to connect with ideal prospects.
