Five Ways to Integrate Account-Based Marketing Into Your Agency’s Growth Strategy

Account-based marketing has become the standard best-practice for B2B demand generation programs. Since mid-2015, interest in ABM has increased steadily. Take a look at the Google Trends data:

For specialized service providers like ad agencies, account-based marketing (ABM) represents an opportunity to drive brand awareness among specific target accounts or companies in a scalable, effective way. If your agency hasn’t yet considered trying ABM to bring in new clients, now is the time. Below, we break down five account-based marketing tactics that will fuel your agency’s growth.

1. Partner with Dun and Bradstreet

Dun & Bradstreet is the best source for financial and firmographic business data in the market. In fact, every company needs to have a D-U-N-S number, a unique nine-digit identifier assigned by D&B, in order to do things like bid on government proposals, take out a loan or open a line of credit.

Besides maintaining a file on a small business’s’ credit risk for banks and the government, Dun & Bradstreet has partnered with Facebook to make their data available within their ad platform. That means that your agency can target messaging and content to employees at specific companies based on a list of accounts or on specific firmographic data like industry, number of employees, revenue, job titles and more.

Related: Paid Social Marketing is Peaking. Here’s How Agencies Can Take Advantage

2. Create a Custom Audience With Your Email List

When they created Custom Audiences, Facebook presented marketers with a massively valuable use case for customer email lists. Within Facebook’s ads manager, you can create a target audience based on you list of prospects and leads. By promoting social content to these potential customers, you can engage prospects outside the inbox.

3. Set Up Retargeting on Your Website

Let’s say that a prospect visited your website and left. Now what? Using ABM to retarget those prospects directly through Facebook, Twitter, and other advertising platforms is an effective way to stay in front of your prospects and keep them “in the funnel.”

4. Capture More Lead Data

Account-based marketing is all about tailoring your message as specifically as possible to engage your target account. As such, capturing as much data as possible about your leads is a prerequisite to launching the most effective ABM campaigns.

There are two primary ways to go about capturing that data. First, consider adding additional fields to forms on your site to capture more than just the name and email of each lead. Data points like revenue, number of employees, or job title will help you tailor your message to the lead. Secondly, platforms like Clearbit (on the affordable end) and DiscoverOrg (on the expensive end) will help you build out profiles of your target accounts.

5. Aim for 1:1 Sales Personalization

Sales templates are useful tools for scaling your outreach, but don’t get to the point of mindlessly copy and pasting. According to Aberdeen, highly personalized emails improve click-through rates by 14% and conversion rates by 10%. Instead of “spraying and praying,” challenge yourself to customize your sales sequences for every client to address their specific pain points and demonstrate how your services answer those challenges.