When you take an account-based marketing (ABM) approach, you’re looking at each individual target account as its own highly specialized marketing opportunity.
This might seem like a daunting task and it is for many organizations, which is why they count on us at SimplyDIRECT to support their ABM campaign with one of our research-based surveys.
We’ve broken down our process into five key steps.
Step 1. Choose your target audience
This is the critical first step that will lay the foundation for your entire ABM campaign. If you don’t get this right then you won’t have a successful campaign. You need to decide who your target audience is. You can provide accounts or if you need help, we can research your target accounts for you as well as target contacts.
For example, you may want to follow up with webinar attendees, tradeshow visitors, or people who have performed an action on your website. You may be trying to penetrate key accounts and reach out to specific titles or roles. You may even have a target database already that you want to reach out to. Using these sources, we can help you get the data right and focus your ABM campaign.
- Craft a survey
Thinking about the buyer’s persona will help you get to know your prospects. For example, what is their role? What are their responsibilities? What keeps them up at night? What are their goals at work? B2B target marketing messages must appeal to the emotions, in addition to the more common use of rationale and logic to make the business case.
Getting the answers to psychographic questions like these gets to the heart of why someone would be interested in what you’re offering. Gaining insights into your buyers’ attitudes, values, pain points, and fears is the purpose of our surveys. Our surveys help you uncover what your prospects’ motivators are and how that will affect their purchasing behaviors.
- Launch your survey
The survey is sent to your prospects via a multi-touch approach from “Gatepoint Research,” the research side of our company. This instills confidence and increases candor in responses. We know everyone is busy and their inboxes are full, so we use a variety of email styles, e.g., rich/plain text or different subject lines to catch your prospects’ attention. We can also send a customized link to the survey in a direct mailer (yes, good old-fashioned USPS).
All of the responders come from your target list and target titles. Each responder will answer all the survey questions and opt in to be contacted.
- Follow up
Every time someone submits a survey, a person from your team that you designate will be notified. You can also see the responses and real-time analytics in a portal dashboard or have them feed directly into your CRM or marketing automation tool.
Because you have uncovered your prospects’ key qualifiers with the survey, you can get right to the point without wasting anyone’s time when you follow up. You know what is important to the prospect and presumably how your solution would fill their needs. There are many points of entry you can use when you have the answers that reveal your prospects’ motivators.
- Nurture
You can use the real-time market research that you’ve uncovered through the survey to create content that will resonate with your audience. We can help you with an executive report, infographic, and more. It is peer-to-peer research so it will be interesting and relevant to both people who did and did not take the survey.
When you partner with us for your ABM campaign, you get guaranteed results. You will have the right contacts in the right accounts. The number of survey responders contracted for will be delivered. The quality of responders is guaranteed. For example, if you wanted only senior-level responders, that is what you will get. All of them will have opted in and given you permission to contact them.
When you’re ready to get started on your next ABM campaign and humanize the buying process.
Learn more about how a research-based survey can support your ABM campaign.