Modern marketers focus on the implementation of Account-Based Marketing (ABM). ABM has become the new shiny object for B2B marketers. Through Account Based Marketing, marketers are able to focus on key accounts, which are more promising. For the sake of ABM newbies, let’s first elaborate on what ABM entails. For clear understanding, we might want to differentiate it from traditional marketing. To begin with, the traditional marketing approach focuses on a broad audience. Therefore, a traditional marketer will send thousands of emails with a broad focus. Basically, in traditional marketing, the marketer doesn’t focus on a specific lead.
With Account Based Marketing, marketers concentrate their sales and marketing resources on a clearly defined audience. The marketer employs personalized marketing techniques. These are markets with specific pain points. The marketers focus on fulfilling the needs that these target customers have. This has better potential since through social media; marketers get access to real-time customer and prospect feedback. A question that arises is how does a social media marketer optimize his account based marketing?
If you have been studying social media marketing, you are aware that it is very important to monitor your social media campaigns. This also applies to those in Account Based Marketing. In this article, we share the top five ways, through which to optimize your account based marketing. These techniques are greatly focusing on using the social media monitoring tools to optimize ABM. So which are these techniques? Continue reading to find out!
#1 Fine Tune Your Social Media Monitoring Skills to Develop A Complete Knowledge Bank About your Clients
While fine-tuning your social media monitoring techniques, you need to look for the target accounts, the decision makers, the executives and also the keywords used by the businesses. These keywords can be product names, and they can also be product nicknames. The data gathered on social media will be very important in observing what the target accounts are talking about on social media. Also, you need to dig deeper into what their clients are saying about the things they post. Note that these form important clues into what these businesses need. Sometimes, you might be much more informed than the internal managers. This is since you dig deeper to include their clients in the analysis of what is being said about the business itself.
Once you have gathered information from your social media monitoring platform, compile it while ensuring you avoid a mix-up. This will form the basis for coming up with relevant content. Remember that in Account Based Marketing you need to personalize the message. To do so effectively, you need to correct relevant data. Note that social media monitoring is the best way to gather marketing information. This is compared to trying to get information that is discussed in internal meetings. Essentially, the social media shares and posts are a good source of information for ABM marketers. Therefore, apply social media monitoring, in order to get the right information. Ultimately, to optimize your Account Based Marketing, use this information to effectively target the specific audience.
Example
A good example that illustrates how social media monitoring helps companies can be demonstrated by Wendy`s fast food chain. Through the screenshot below, you notice that the company is very keen to respond to their followers. This has been very helpful to the company marketing agenda. Last year, the company gained plenty of accolades on Twitter which already has over 1.6 million followers. This was when a young man by the name Carter Wilkerson tweeted Wendys asking “how many retweets for a year of free nuggets”. Wendys noticed this tweet and responded. They set the retweets to 18 million, and the little exchange went viral becoming the most retweeted ever. Read the whole story here. This earned Wendy’s exceptional free press.
#2 Track and Measure Engagements with Customized Content you Post
After a fine-tuned social media monitoring technique, you now need to customize content. Remember that buying behavior in case of individuals is highly defined by how you convince the individual buyer. However, for businesses buying will involve more decision makers.
A CEB survey found out that on average about 5.4 people need to sign off for the business to make a purchase. This is the reason why we emphasize that the content needs to be customized. This is basically to be able to convince these decision makers. Therefore, avoid posting broad strokes and rather come up with content that is highly customized. Once you have come up with the relevant content, add it to your blog posts. Remember to send notifications to target audience and also tag them on social media. This will drive some traffic hence increasing the number of engagements. Now, you also need to track the article to identify who interacted with the content. There are some tracking tools that you can include in your blog content to measure engagements. These provide critical leads and hence a good way to optimize Account-Based Marketing.
Once you have the data on those who read the content, make sure you follow-up these as potential leads. Also, you need to identify any likes, shares, and comments. These are what we refer to as engagements in social media. Basically, when a person likes your post, they are indicating they are interested in the subject matter. The reason why you are monitoring the content is to identify these engagements. Read through the comments and identify who they come from. If you get comments from business executives within your target market, this is a good indication that you are doing well. Therefore remember to track engagements from key decision makers.
#3 Perform an Audit of Your Followers and Increase Engagements with Key Accounts
How many of your social media followers are key decision makers within your target businesses? Review your followers and identify them. Remember that just a following on social media doesn’t necessarily mean you will get a sale. You need to be engaging with these key decision makers for the following to be impactful. Measure and monitor how often they like your content on social media. To optimize your Account Based Marketing, you need to ensure that you catch the attention of these decision makers.
Therefore, you might want to start tagging them in every post that you send out. However, before you begin making blank shots, first review our number one point in this article. Are you aware of the persona you are dealing with? You need to make sure you know what interests these people. Therefore, this is where you are needed to first carry out an analysis of the behaviour of your target audience. Identify what interests them most and focus on the subject.
Example
A good example of a brand that has conducted research to understand its audience is Adidas. In their posts on Twitter, they use key account decision makers and influencers like top sportsmen and those in entertainment. See below screenshot as a good example of how to engage key accounts who also happen to be influencers.
To perform an audit of your followers, you might use tools like Crowdfire. You can use Crowdfire to find out who followed you and who un-followed you on different social media platforms. Once you have this information, you can then start engaging these people appropriately. Track the engagements to determine what especially interests these people. Maybe it is your news post that made them show some love, and they shared the content. Make the engagements as meaningful as possible. Every time you send out a new tweet, for example, read the comments from these key accounts and note down the sentiments shared.
#4 Monitor Conversion Metrics and focus on Improving
The conversion metrics are a clear indication of whether your Account Based marketing efforts are rewarding. As a Business practicing ABM on social media, you need to know if the target customers are taking the desired action. Irrespective of whether your aim is to get a form filled, viewing a product demo, or just simply visiting your website, it’s important to check out the conversion metrics.
Why is Conversion Rates Important?
Through simply viewing the conversion metrics you can be able to identify a potential pain point and optimize the chance. Further, the analytics tell you the areas that you need to change and improve on. Ask yourself the question, “does my click-through rate match my conversion rates”? If you have high CTR but low conversion rate, your message might be falling on deaf ears. Try a more accurate messaging or think about the landing page experience. According to Drew Hendricks on his publication on Forbes, what you need to worry about is the percentage of your target clients adding value to your bottom line.
The conversion metrics might change depending on the type of campaign you are running. However, some metrics like website engagement should lead to high conversion rates if done right. You can use the different third-party tools to measure conversion rates. Before you get started on this, note that according to an article published in Forbes Magazine relating to a CMO survey, marketers should use tracking tools that fit their goals. These are the tools that have passed important validity hurdles.
Therefore, when using the conversion rates measuring tools, be careful not to end up wasting your resources. This not only leads to getting wrong impressions, it is also not accurate.
Further, be advised that the conversion rates might not always lead to a sale. This is according to a publication on Mashable. The author of the article argues that conversion rates should be treated as an indication that you are pushing the customer down the sales funnel. Therefore, you need to focus on following up these conversions as potential leads.
#5 Use Paid Social Media Tactics to Aid your ABM
Another important way to optimize ABM is using the paid social media tactics. Essentially, these are tactics within different social media platforms. Compared to third-party optimization tools, these are more effective. There is a lot that you can achieve through the use of these metrics. For instance, to ensure that you have optimized your B2B leads you might use the following tools.
- AdWords Customer Match
Through Google AdWords, you can be able to determine and generate high-value potential clients. The advantage of using Google is that they apply vast demographic, and user knowledge to advertise to specific clients. Therefore, you might use the same tool to determine potential reach of your Gmail targeted email marketing. A high match rate is indicative of high-level potential, and hence you should continue focusing on these as leads.
- Twitter Tailored Audiences
Are you using the Twitter tailored reach to identify key decision makers? This is another top paid aid for the B2B marketers and can be used to monitor the potential that lies on your Twitter audience.
- LinkedIn account Targeting
This platform also has the same potential as the above two paid B2B social marketing aids. Through LinkedIn account targeting, you can get metrics on which clients get your message hence inc4reasing your sales potential. Being able to adapt the customer needs is a very important factor in B2B marketing. The only way businesses can be able to be sure they are doing this is using these paid metrics to check their target audience.
Key Takeaways
Social media monitoring is a key initiative every business must invest in. The businesses practicing Account Based Marketing should ensure they use the above monitoring techniques to optimize their marketing initiatives. These approaches might seem like they are simple to implement, but they also require some extent of expertise.
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