Conduct Research to Determine Account Personas
Posted: Sun Jan 19, 2025 6:58 am
If you have a decent client base, you most likely have buyer personas detailing your ideal customers’ information. You could probably even rattle off their personified biography in the same way you would describe your old roommates while having a chat about your college years.
Through these buyer personas, you can repurpose the demographic firmographic and technographic data to create account personas, making it easier to decide just how you are going to carry out your ABM objectives. Start by determining the monthly recurring revenue (MRR) of accounts that bring in the largest profits and record what these clients have in common to build out the first draft of their profiles.
Even if you don’t have an extensive list of clients, you can create account personas based on the problems your product solves. Data such as the number of employees, yearly revenue, seed funding, growth trajectory, software licensing, and so forth are all key inputs that can help you develop account personas that point you towards the best-fit companies for your ABM campaigns.
Define Your Account-Based Marketing Strategy
As we mentioned before, despite the benefits, ABM is not the best approach for every account persona. Your team’s time is valuable, so you’ll need to protect it by weighing the hours it takes to convert accounts vs. the average customer lifetime value. Group account personas based on the most viable ABM strategy: Programmatic, Lite, or Strategic.
For instance, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are not the best candidates for Strategic ABM. It would be like catching a minnow with a deep-sea angler fishing rod. It can get the job done, but the ends don’t justify the means. Instead, SMB account personas would be best for a Programmatic approach where you are reaching out to the decision-makers based on their job title, industry, and sub-market.
Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) matching your ideal account personas are perfect for ABM Lite. The value of these accounts justifies the hour or so of social stalking your team does for each decision-maker in order to create a more customized buying experience.
And, as you may have guessed, you’ll want to save Strategic ABM for the enterprise-level and Fortune 500 companies. Senior and c-suite team members may be more involved in the planning and execution process chile cell phone number database as courting high-value accounts take a great deal of preparation and planning. You’ll want to look at every possible angle. Leaders at your company with extensive personal networks may be able open doors that would otherwise be sealed shut. Or you may find that current clients or vendors can help you earn referrals if the relationship is strong enough. One thing is for sure, Strategic ABM cannot be rushed. Be patient in the process and your efforts will be rewarded if the company is truly a good fit.
By defining your ABM strategies and grouping them based on account personas, your team will have a firm foundation to build their content and campaigns.
Build the Marketing Foundation
Once you’ve aligned your campaign objectives and strategies, you’ll want to start building the marketing foundation. This includes setting up your ABM tools and platform, curating lists of your core audiences, and selecting the sales channels that will be used in the campaigns.
It’s important to keep your strategy simple in the beginning. Once your ABM platform is up and running, you’ll want to start populating it with the account personas you’ve chosen to target. You can pull these personas from your sales data or invest in the ABM tools mentioned later in this article to help you generate account lists.
Through these buyer personas, you can repurpose the demographic firmographic and technographic data to create account personas, making it easier to decide just how you are going to carry out your ABM objectives. Start by determining the monthly recurring revenue (MRR) of accounts that bring in the largest profits and record what these clients have in common to build out the first draft of their profiles.
Even if you don’t have an extensive list of clients, you can create account personas based on the problems your product solves. Data such as the number of employees, yearly revenue, seed funding, growth trajectory, software licensing, and so forth are all key inputs that can help you develop account personas that point you towards the best-fit companies for your ABM campaigns.
Define Your Account-Based Marketing Strategy
As we mentioned before, despite the benefits, ABM is not the best approach for every account persona. Your team’s time is valuable, so you’ll need to protect it by weighing the hours it takes to convert accounts vs. the average customer lifetime value. Group account personas based on the most viable ABM strategy: Programmatic, Lite, or Strategic.
For instance, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are not the best candidates for Strategic ABM. It would be like catching a minnow with a deep-sea angler fishing rod. It can get the job done, but the ends don’t justify the means. Instead, SMB account personas would be best for a Programmatic approach where you are reaching out to the decision-makers based on their job title, industry, and sub-market.
Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) matching your ideal account personas are perfect for ABM Lite. The value of these accounts justifies the hour or so of social stalking your team does for each decision-maker in order to create a more customized buying experience.
And, as you may have guessed, you’ll want to save Strategic ABM for the enterprise-level and Fortune 500 companies. Senior and c-suite team members may be more involved in the planning and execution process chile cell phone number database as courting high-value accounts take a great deal of preparation and planning. You’ll want to look at every possible angle. Leaders at your company with extensive personal networks may be able open doors that would otherwise be sealed shut. Or you may find that current clients or vendors can help you earn referrals if the relationship is strong enough. One thing is for sure, Strategic ABM cannot be rushed. Be patient in the process and your efforts will be rewarded if the company is truly a good fit.
By defining your ABM strategies and grouping them based on account personas, your team will have a firm foundation to build their content and campaigns.
Build the Marketing Foundation
Once you’ve aligned your campaign objectives and strategies, you’ll want to start building the marketing foundation. This includes setting up your ABM tools and platform, curating lists of your core audiences, and selecting the sales channels that will be used in the campaigns.
It’s important to keep your strategy simple in the beginning. Once your ABM platform is up and running, you’ll want to start populating it with the account personas you’ve chosen to target. You can pull these personas from your sales data or invest in the ABM tools mentioned later in this article to help you generate account lists.