5 Steps to Create an Account-Based Marketing plan for Business Recovery

A crisis like COVID-19 takes everyone by surprise. Suddenly as a business leader or marketer, you’re forced to rethink your original marketing strategy and have to make highly strategic decisions as to where every cent of your budget is spent. It’s a juxtaposition: you need to control spending while still being effective with your eye on growth.

One of our values at Respect Studio is focus: we focus on executing a few things with greater expertise for marketing efficiency. There’s nothing more suitable for the post-COVID world than account-based marketing (#ABM).

It is one of the few approaches that allows you to be hyper focused on building and nurturing long-term relationships while growing Lifetime Value (LTV) of each current and prospective client. Shifting your focus to ABM practice should enable you to build more meaningful and personalized B2B communication, instead of wasting a ton of budget on customer acquisition. During a crisis, you should focus your resources on converting leads who are here to stay, rather than one-time deals.

Creating anything new can be a challenge. We want you to succeed so here’s a mix of the best of core ABM principles according to Hubspot and Wordstream for you to get started in 5 easy steps:

Step 1: Secure Organizational ABM Alignment

Get all your internal stakeholders on board with the various factors related to your account-based marketing strategy. In doing so, it’ll be easier for your business to create consistent experiences for accounts and make sure your strategy is as efficient and streamlined as possible.

Step 2: Build Your ABM Team

VPs of Marketing and Sales will likely be leaders in the discussion regarding how you’ll build your ABM team. They, along with managers on their respective teams, will need to identify a minimum of one marketer and one sales rep who will be completely dedicated to the accounts you work with. These people will create and publish content personalized for accounts, as well as, work to manage and close business deals with each account’s buying committee.

3. Define Your Strategic Accounts

Marketers are used to defining personas, but account-based marketing isn’t about distinguishing between “Chatty Cathy” and “Enterprise Eric.” Rather ABM is about marketing to a whole organization rather than an individual.

For instance, define the industry, company size, location, annual revenue, upsell opportunity, profit margin, etc. for each account that can yield your business the highest long-term profits. Those are the types of accounts you want to go after. Yes, get as detailed as the name of the organizations you want to become your clients.

4. Create Personalized Content & Messaging

Now it’s time to put your investigational knowledge to use with content that speaks directly to these stakeholders and organizations. You should understand these stakeholders’ specific pain points and needs, appealing to how you can solve problems with your messaging and imagery, all designed specifically for them.

Check out our complete guide to help you on creating an effective B2B messaging strategy.

5. Decide on the Best Channels for your Marketing Strategy

Your research and content will be useless if you’re not promoting your campaigns and creative in the right places.

You need to understand where your prospects spend their time online, and what their state of mind is when they’re on social platforms. Be sure to go beyond the conventional B2B marketing mix of Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Some of your prospects might be looking for answers on Quora, some of your prospects might even use Reddit.

The point is that you need to be present and active on every platform your prospects are using to search.

There you have it! A 5-step plan to get your ABM plan started to get maximum efficiency from your post-crisis marketing budget.

To learn more about building your post crisis recovery plan, check out Part 1 of our 3-Part Series on post-crisis recovery here: “Everything you need to know to help your business recover from Covid-19”.