The first lesson a B2B SaaS (Software as a Service) marketer learns about account-based marketing tactics is that you cannot possibly target each customer in your niche. If you do that, you are putting a huge risk of attracting no one! This is the hard truth of account-based marketing strategy. The only workaround to this situation is by being specific about the target audience you are trying to lure into buying your product. Doing that can take your B2B brand a step further in account-based marketing and attract specific businesses and contacts that can prove to be gold dust for your B2B SaaS business.
When the ABM (Account Based Marketing) tactic works wonderfully well for a B2B SaaS organization, it can help achieve the following results:
What stops B2B SaaS organizations from deploying account-based marketing strategies in their marketing funnel? The answer is quite simple. They do not know where to start. If that is what you are struggling with, here is a piece of good news for you. In the forthcoming sections of this blog, we have mapped ten effective account-based marketing tactics that every B2B SaaS marketer should be aware of.
So, without further ado, let us get started with the account-based marketing tactics that B2B SaaS marketers should apply in 2022.
Develop and execute targeted marketing for key accounts
The best source of increasing your sales is by focusing on your existing customers. If your existing customers keep subscribing back, it can increase your profits between 25 to 95%. The possibility of converting a new lead to a sale is between five percent and 20 percent. While for the current customer, it goes to 60 to 70 percent. Isn’t that a wonderful piece of a statistic?
The first thing you need to do as a B2B SaaS marketer is identifying the specific business you want to target. Once you arrive at that data, the next step is to curate content around that target audience and help them get the maximum out of the product. You can do this by highlighting new features added to the product, providing upgrade notifications, and providing exclusive discounts by using targeted ads. Next is to nurture your relationship with the top customers by partnering with them for webinars, case studies, and conference presentations.
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Opt for the right mix of channels
Once you have ascertained the accounts and target profiles and started producing appropriate content, the next step is to deliver them through the correct channel. This will require the right mix of platforms to reach out to them. This will require both inbound and outbound marketing channels. You can use both conventional and non-conventional methods to attract their attention. Utilize phone, email, and internet advertising to run multi-campaigns. Then distribute your material across media that the target audience finds interesting. It will also pay if you can sponsor and target industry-specific events inviting your target audience to expand your reach.
As smartphones have become a norm amongst people, everyone is on social media nowadays. This allows the B2B SaaS marketers to accumulate information and interact with their target audience over social media.
While using this account-based marketing strategy, you need to find your potential customers on social media. You can do this by understanding their preferences by reading their comments, posts, followers, and other activities on social media. You can even send messages to your potential customers directly to establish a personal relationship.
Here are some of the common strategies to interact with your target audience on social media:
- Comment on your targeted person’s status updates on their accounts with valuable information about your product
- Share their content or retweet their posts on social media
- Encourage them to produce content for your products or services
- Follow groups and pages that your customers like
Personalize the experience of your target audience on your website
The ultimate objective of account-based marketing is to get high conversion rates for the company. You can achieve this by personalizing your landing page by creating account-specific landing pages depicting custom copy, images, offers, and forms. This can be contingent upon the person or account visiting the landing page. You can use personalization tactics by depicting the visitor’s name on the landing page. But be very careful as many prospects find this idea very intrusive.
Have a separate video customer testimonial section on your website
You can customize video customer testimonials so that the content feels relevant to your targeted account. Start by creating cornerstone testimonials that can be used as a common case for the product and can be shared broadly. Next, devise targeted video customer stories specific to a target segment.
It isn’t easy to spend a lot of money on high-production videos for customer testimonials. In such a case, I suggest you ask your customers to record their video testimonials and share them with you. Create a library of these video testimonials which your sales team can showcase as a part of an account-based marketing tactic to the prospective customers.
Once you have lured the potential customer to your site, what if they do not stick around and leave in a quick time? Do not worry; such customers need a bit of nurturing. This can be done by sending a combination of remarketing ads across the internet and paid social advertising to prospects in the top tier of your database.
Retargeting is great as it provides cost-effective ways to reach prospects. With the help of Facebook’s top-quality segmentation abilities, you can place ads on the News Feeds of the target audience. Just like follow-up emails, retargeting enables you to remain on the top of the mind of your target audience after the exchange of information.
Share gifts with your prospects
Since most of the account-based marketing tactics happen online, you can control tracking and finding interesting details about the prospects. But if you can make your presence felt offline, there can be nothing like it. The reason being, it can make you stand out from the competitors and set a good impression in the prospects’ minds.
Branded items like pens or notebooks are quite common. You need to give something that puts you in the good books of your prospects. One way to do that is by giving something that helps the customers identify your B2B brand and helps you connect with your prospects better.
Here is one of the best account-based marketing examples. Influitive, a company that assists businesses to ascertain and better connect with their best customers, gave away piñata review packages for their ABM targets. The piñatas contained positive reviews the company was able to get from third-party websites on top of candy. This ensured a 36% response rate, one of the best returns for any of their marketing tactics.
Personalize your communication in every viable way
When the prospects receive messages from bots, they can be a bit let down. While some prospects might still turn into customers, treating your prospects so lightly is not good. Try to ignore the scripted messages and concentrate on developing relationships. The best thing to do is curate an exclusive message that seems customized without extra effort.
Inviting target customers at in-person events
Today digital mediums have opened up business opportunities. But, still, there is nothing better than meeting someone in person. One of the best account-based marketing tactics is to meet target customers at in-person events. This can mean that you hold a meeting with prospects in your city or have a dinner with the ABM contacts where you can discuss things. It can even be a big industry conference where you invite ABM contacts.
Optimize and measure the success of your account-based marketing tactics
Before starting the account-based marketing tactics, you might have established some objectives. It is now time to compare where you have reached your objectives. This will help you stock the current scenario and what steps need to be taken in the near future.
Compare the results and ascertain whether your prospects react as per your anticipation. This can be done by checking the number of qualified leads you receive. Then check whether your sales team can convert the qualified leads into sales.
With the help of this activity, you will be able to ascertain the loopholes and then work again to achieve the desired results if you cannot achieve them the first time.
Concluding Thoughts
These are some effective account-based marketing tactics that every B2B SaaS marketer should know. Some of the account-based marketing tactics mentioned above need additional resources for every contact on your list. This can be extremely challenging, especially when you have a limited budget and require as many leads as possible. However, if the prospects you have on your list are highly valuable, these account-based marketing strategies can help you achieve excellent quality leads that can lead to more revenue for your B2B SaaS business.
Dattatraya Shetty is an IT Professional with 2 Decades of experience in areas of Product Development, Implementation & Service Delivery Management. As the Head of Implementations and SOC Compliance in Smartkarrot he is on a mission to provide relishing customer experience.
Published May 11, 2022, Updated February 28, 2023