By Chris Rack, Chief Revenue Officer, PureB2B

The banking and finance world is fast-paced, and if you’re not willing to adapt, your organization will suffer. Sounds depressing, right? That’s why optimizing your marketing through an Account-Based strategy is not only important for your own internal ROI, but it’s key to the growth and development for your entire institution. ABM isn’t so much a product or solution you can buy into, it’s more of an ideal that you as a marketing leader must follow. After looking at the basics of what ABM can do, you can see how it can take on a lot of different meanings, yet, at the end of the day, the value still stands – prioritizing your marketing and sales alignment.

Priority Account Identification

The first and most important step to a successful ABM strategy is to look at who your perfect buyer would be. There are myriad ways to approach account prioritization, but first and foremost, we need to identify what the accounts should look like. What revenue, employee size, employee composition (job titles), does your target account have? While it would be great to have everyone buy your solutions all the time, narrowing your approach to key accounts that have specific “looks” to them will help you tackle this daunting process.

Questions to ask include:

• What ideal companies/investors would you want to buy your services? Why?
• What companies/investors are poised to gain the most value from what you offer? (Create a list of those and define attributes for them.)

Sales Alignment

One thing that is greatly overlooked when creating a target account list is how that list will align with the sales team. At the end of the day (besides your customers) your sales staff will benefit, so it’s important to make sure your ABM strategy runs parallel to the sales strategy. If ABM was ever meant to be just one thing, it was meant to be the ultimate sales enablement tool. Your ABM strategy can empower your sales team, and transparency is the perfect place to start. Letting the sales team know what priority accounts they’ll be seeing leads from can help the sales leaders with strategy and projections.

Questions to ask include:

• What do your sales leaders think of your top account definition?
• What challenges are the sales team facing with their day to day work? (Think of how you can map that to your ABM strategy.)

The Investment Journey

Now that we’ve set up the top accounts, defined what they look like, and aligned them with sales processes, the next step is putting your strategy into action. Remember, your ABM marketing strategy should be different from your other marketing nurtures. Knowing that each account has its own set of needs and struggles, look at your top account definition – what trends do you see? Creating a timeline of how you can convey those needs and struggles specific to the list of targeted accounts, is crucial. The goal here is to customize your marketing strategy, yet staying broad enough to speak to a group, instead of an individual. Your buyers know what they need, all you have to do is hold their hands while you walk them across the line.

Questions to ask include:

• What does your buyer’s journey look like? What do you want them to feel, think about, and research? (Think about how you can enable them to search for a solution.)
• What story are you telling with your outreach? (Taking your buyers down a path of overcoming challenges can keep them engaged for longer periods of time.)

Retargeting

In order to utilize your target account list to its entirety and make the most of your strategy, it’s now helpful to figure out a way you can loop in a retargeting approach. SEO, Social, and Display are all great places to start with this. Looking at these channels, they all have one thing in common – pulling the buyer in. We’ve already figured out how to push out marketing to the priority accounts, but now it’s vital to pull them into your website. The end goal is to get your prospects to raise their hands and say “yes, I want to talk to you now” right? Most of these channels come with spending money, however, it’s possible to set things up on your own as well. A good step with this process is to figure out what your bottom of funnel offerings are. Those will be your most engaging options to pull your targeted prospects into your website. With a little bit of research and data analytics, retargeting can be extremely beneficial.

Questions to ask include:

• What is your down funnel content or offering? Is this up to par with what your competitors are doing?
• Come up with realistic expectations for these channels. Ads and SEO are highly competitive spaces and can cost a lot of money if relied upon too much. What are two or three goals for this outlet?

Researching Competitors

We all know it’s essential to be continuously researching what your competitors are doing, however, leveraging this data in your ABM can help you stand out amongst the noise. While it’s impossible to know in detail what their strategies looks like, you can find out a great deal about what they do by simply searching them on Google. What comes up with a Google search? When you go to their website, what marketing materials are they focused on? Analyzing this will help you speak more clearly with your target accounts on what advantages you have. You’ll also be able to creatively approach how to stand out against your competitors. This all comes with time and planning, so taking this in strides is highly recommended. Don’t go for a complete overhaul, but maybe focus on one or two things you can implement to help give you the advantage.

Questions to ask include:

• Who are your top three competitors? How are your solutions better than theirs?
• How does this fit into your buyers’ journey?

Qualify, Disqualify, Repeat

ABM, if nothing else, is a method of trial and error. So, it goes without saying, your strategy should be somewhat malleable; able to fit changes and priorities as they come along. Don’t rely on what worked once in the past, if it’s not working now, don’t be afraid to change it.