Successful account-based marketing (ABM) programs engage multiple stakeholders who serve varied roles on your target account’s buying committee.
The personalized nature of the content you’re serving to different contacts, typically based on their behavior, means your outreach can get complicated before you even launch a campaign.
ABM focuses on engaging contacts at your target accounts across all stages of the buyer’s journey. As a result, the path toward engagement may look different from your traditional lead gen campaigns through the marketing funnel.
Enter marketing workflows.
What are marketing workflows?
Account-based marketing workflows help you (and your team) visualize marketing touchpoints and opportunities for engagement throughout the ABM campaign.
Since personalization is a pillar of ABM, you will quickly realize that not all contacts at your target accounts can or should be engaged in the same way.
Understanding the personas and buying committee members at your target accounts is critical to guiding you to the appropriate workflows to engage them.
3 ABM workflows to maximize engagement
Here are three workflows to engage contacts depending on the goals of your ABM campaign:
1. Initiate engagement with target personas. If your organization is new to ABM, you will likely need to establish an initial relationship with various personas at your target accounts. You may have a relationship with a few people at the account, but not all.
Start with an outreach campaign to initiate engagement with the full buying committee at your target accounts.
The key here is that once you initiate engagement, don’t hand the contact off to a sales rep for aggressive follow-up. You should continue to serve them the educational content that piqued their interest in the first place. Remember, engagement is the name of the game.
2. Delight, decide, and delay (the ask). In an ideal world, after you initiate engagement with a contact (see Workflow #1 above) they would seamlessly move into a workflow to deliver not only educational content but a delightful customer experience.
The key to this workflow is delivering a personalized experience that enables your potential client to imagine what it is like to be a valued customer. Once again, drawing out the engagement before popping the big question is crucial.
3. Nurture languishing leads. These are the heartbreakers in your CRM. For whatever reason, after an initial engagement with these leads, your brand never really connected with the contact again.
An ABM campaign is your chance to show up something fierce for those you’ve been neglecting, or possibly hitting over the head with emails they’ve stopped opening.
Test, optimize, and repeat
Charting the right ABM workflow takes time.
Demonstrating that you understand your potential client’s pain points at every touchpoint is how organizations transform engagement into valuable long-term relationships – ultimately, the end goal of any ABM program.
To realize those outcomes, test the content you’re delivering and how often, optimize for what’s resonating, then repeat.
Questions?
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