Successful B2B marketing comes from insight: knowing as much as you can about who it is you are marketing to. Account based marketing, or ABM, is to do with targeting. It is about narrowing down your leads and focusing on very specific accounts you want to reach out to.
To do this, you must know what your targets’ needs are, what pains they are suffering. In short, your marketing activity must become much more specific.
“Each account you target is, essentially, like its own market, where you tailor a strategy for it specifically,” explains Nigel Cliffe, Principal Consultant at Value Exchange.
Here Nigel talks about how LinkedIn has the potential to revolutionise account based marketing.
From Marketing to Account Based Management
“Imagine a Russian dolls type scenario. What you should be aiming to do is work your way through the outer shells, to the inner layers, the individuals who your marketing will resonate strongly with.”
“Engaging with customers or clients on a personal level helps boost retention rates, and also nurtures the sort of contacts who can provide new business referrals”
“The key to this is the depth of the connections you develop,” Nigel stresses. “It must go beyond attracting at some initial stage, even if you’ve personalised your approach. To win business is one thing, but to retain it is another.”
This account based management means staying ahead of the issues that impact on customers, and learning to proactively engage.
“This methodology goes beyond how you make your approach, and looks at crucial aspects of relationship-building and strengthening,” suggests Nigel. “This is the management aspect of it: systematically engaging with your customers so they feel your focus is fully on them.”
Levering LinkedIn
“The message must be right for the channel and for the customer using that channel,” says Nigel. “Moreover, the level of detail can be very sophisticated when it comes to this kind of engagement, which is where LinkedIn is so valuable.”
“People have different, individual roles within businesses and organisations. These roles will, to a large extent, determine how your business then relates to them. LinkedIn profiles provide a means to engage with individuals, and to see how their roles fit in.”
“For a detailed level of engagement, LinkedIn fits because it is both business-based and social. You can connect with people on a personal level, but within a business context”
“Look at individual responses within the bigger picture and make sure these inform your metrics. LinkedIn provides the means to go deeper, and in so doing, build relationships that last. This is how you retain your customers and use them to refer you to fresh business.”
Creating this kind of success with customers has lasting value, providing the essential building blocks for a robust marketing strategy.
Using the latest, sophisticated CRM tools integrated with your engagement activity through LinkedIn, you can take an almost forensic approach to managing your marketing, with the results to show for it.
“We are long past the days of mass marketing on a social platform”
“The future is nurture and engagement,” concludes Nigel. “Combined with the right strategy and approach, LinkedIn provides the ideal location for your account based marketing pipeline.”
If you want to improve your nurture, engagement and generation of opportunities using LinkedIn:
- Call Value Exchange on 0333 323 8275
- Discover more about Value Exchange’s LinkedIn workshops
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