As a direct-marketing agency specializing in B2B clients, we’ve been recommending (and implementing) account-based marketing since forever. Since long before COVID. There’s nothing particularly new about it, except that technology has made deploying and measuring it easier, and of course intent data has made it sexier. But the ideas are age-old:
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Get together with your sales team to decide on your best targets for prospecting.
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Collaborate to develop/create a list that includes all the purchasers, users, and buying influences.
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Use marketing automation to deploy a campaign with content aimed at these key members of the buying committee.
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Capture the response, while scoring responders for nurturing content appropriate to their roles and their content consumption.
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Follow up with telephone (in-person) contact.
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Continue to deepen the collaboration with sales to expand the content library, improve lead qualification, analytic techniques, and evaluation criteria.
We did this in 2019. In early 2020, we pivoted. COVID reality was budget uncertainty, together with prospects dealing with the new reality, managers working out new expectations for their staff, salespeople unable to call on their prospects.
By mid 2020, we had adjusted to a new “normal,” requalifying prospects, reevaluating marketing criteria, and planning for a world without face-to-face trade shows, while still focusing on our clients’ best and most desirable prospects.
Today, we are recasting these programs to reflect the new working realities—WFH, less reliance on Trade Shows, integration with virtual trade shows, and overall lower budgets. We are placing even more emphasis on high quality leads aka MQLs and SQLs, which plays into the superpower of any creative agency worth its salt: Content.
Talk to Verdi about any aspect of an account-based marketing program from planning strategy through content development to measurement and analysis. Or learn more at theverdigroup.com