3 Building Blocks of Personalization in Account Based Marketing (ABM)

At the heart of Account Based Marketing is all about personalization. It enhances efficiency and effectiveness by ensuring that your target accounts receive the right message, at the right time, from the right person(s). To create personalized content for your sales and marketing campaigns, you must collect various data.

Today's marketers are continuously seeking to adapt, remain data-driven, and learn the most cutting-edge technologies - and the most successful ones. Account-based marketing may help you achieve all three of these goals.

If you're a marketer wondering what structural elements you'll need to implement personalized account-based marketing in your business and aren't sure where to start, here's a quick guide on what you need to know.

Carefully Identify Your Market and Persona

The first step of building your personalized account-based marketing campaign is identifying who you're trying to reach and then building a persona that represents this group of people. Analyze your current customer base to figure out how you can improve it. Which accounts have been your most reliable and valuable over time, and what factors make them so lucrative for you? Examine the patterns to see what's going on.

Once you've identified your customer base, you can begin to identify new accounts that might be likely to work with you. These are the potential targets for your account-based marketing strategy. Also, it will help you create buyer personas for your product or service, which will allow you to customize the strategy of your marketing campaign.

Segmentation & Stratification

Once you have your target accounts identified, you'll need to build a plan to reach out to them. Segmenting your list of target accounts means dividing them by where they are in their journey to finding and choosing a product or service like yours.

Here's an example of how segmentation might work:

A B2B Financial Services firm is trying to reach its target accounts, which they've identified as large corporations that have revenue between $100 million and $500 million. However, each corporation is segmented based on whether it's in the awareness, evaluation, or decision stage of choosing a financial services partner.

This is stratification: Using segmentation to further divide your target accounts into smaller groups based on more specific identifying factors. In this example, corporations in the decision stage might be divided into different industries or company size brackets depending on what they're looking for from a financial services firm.

Personalized Content Based on Intent

Once you've identified your buyer personas, you can begin to create personalized content for them based on their stage in the journey. For instance, while an executive at a large corporation might receive relevant blog posts and industry research via email about the company's financial needs, an employee who is actively looking for ways to improve their financial situation might receive targeted messages about new financial products or company perks like an Employee Stock Purchase Plan.

To build personalized content, you need to know your target accounts' intent for using your product or service. With account-based marketing, this might be best represented by whether the account has already purchased from you, is considering it now, or has decided not to move forward.

The intent of a first-time visitor is generally not to make a final purchase on the spot, especially if you're targeting the business-to-business market. As a result, instead of looking for ways to change their interactions to match their probable aim, you should seek methods to personalize them. Hence, creating a custom trigger-based email communication plan with ABM is an excellent alternative. A truly tailored approach that is fully personalized based on each account's activity and interactions may help you make your marketing material much more relevant.

Conclusion

Marketing automation and dynamic content creation might be the future of account-based marketing, but those tools aren't very efficient without first knowing who you're trying to reach. Though it takes a lot of work upfront, segmentation and stratification give your account-based marketing strategy some real muscle that will help you reach your target accounts more effectively.