Leveraging ABM Through Social Media: Why it’s Worth Your Time
Richie Deocades
Driving Growth for U.S SMB - Enterprise Clients | Outsourcing Demand Gen l AI/ML, IoT, Cloud, SaaS, Healthcare, RPA, Cyber, Logistics
If only the perfect sales process exists. Imagine selling directly to your high-value accounts and moving right into the engagement and delighting stages without marketing to unqualified leads. Sounds, efficient, right?
As per definition, ABM (Account-Based Marketing)? is a growth-focused B2B (Business-to-Business) strategy where the sales and marketing teams combine their efforts to target best-fit accounts and convert them into customers. By enabling you to pick out less-valuable clients early on in the buying process and ensuring that the Sales and Marketing teams are in sync, your team can engage and delight your customers faster.
On a larger scale, ABM is based on the thought that companies should only market to consumers who are a good fit for them, rather than marketing to those who don’t fit their buyer personas.
ABM marketing helps marketing agencies and lead generation service providers know how to allocate finances to various marketing strategies. An efficient ABM marketing campaign assists companies to handle expenses efficiently.
These campaigns require hard work and dedication, so you must focus your efforts on the right leads.
The most effective way to accomplish this is to ensure that your inbound marketing strategy generates high-quality leads who are likely to respond positively to ABM and convert. Of course, you can try many inbound marketing strategies, but the most practical and efficient tool you can use is social media. Hence, the term social media marketing.
Social media marketing is a form of online marketing that utilizes social media platforms to promote a brand’s products and services. The most common platforms used in this strategy are Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Youtube.
The main objective of social media marketing is to provide worthwhile, persuading content that users share among themselves to increase brand awareness and widen its reach.
Leveraging ABM through social media
Nearly 3.78 billion people use social media platforms. Statista predicts that the number will reach 4.41 billion by 2025.
Source: Social Hire
Notice the skyrocketing amount of social media users around this point. As the savvy marketer you are, why not strike the iron while it’s hot? Using social media to interact with your target audience is the best approach to influence them RIGHT NOW.
Social media is typically used by B2C (Business-to-Consumer) companies to reach out to consumers and influence their purchasing decisions. However, its advantages for B2B businesses shouldn’t be overlooked. Given the right approach, social media combined with ABM can help in your B2B lead generation as well as in bolstering customer loyalty and nurturing relationships.
When it comes to functionality, B2B businesses can use social media to identify which keywords are the most optimal for messaging purposes, what content types of content are the most engaging, and what sorts of links are most helpful in driving traffic and generating leads.
Aside from these, social media helps B2B marketers to augment brand awareness, improve lead generation, boost conversion rates, and maintain long-term client relationships.
Now, you might wonder why social media has such a huge impact in leveraging ABM for businesses. The answer is quite simple: people are social beings. They’re keeping up with the latest news and connecting with peers. And besides, here’s where peer recommendations outperform all other types of marketing influence.
Here’s a fun fact. 83% of consumers prefer peer recommendations instead of what they see in ads. People usually trust their friends’ opinions because they believe they’re unbiased and customized according to their personal needs.
All in all, social media can be a very useful tool for finding the right targets for your ABM strategies if only used properly. To help you succeed, check out this list of best practices you can apply to your business:
The first thing you should do is find out which accounts are profitable. You can start by searching for target companies and filtering these results according to industry, service, and location to determine the appropriate decision-makers.
The good thing about ABM campaigns is that it isn't limited to emails, making it an ideal way to convert leads into customers, especially in this digital age. These campaigns can be done through social media in the form of public responses or private messages to queries in your posts.
Through close interaction on social media, you can show your leads that you’re dedicated to assisting potential customers and guiding them as they move along the sales process.
You might also think about producing customized content, like diagrams that provide answers to your prospect’s queries and using whitepapers.
One more tool you can use in optimizing your social listening is by looking for relevant keywords concerning your target accounts like their company name, products/services, decision-makers, and industry-related jargon.
Use social media sentiment analysis tools to better understand what your target accounts are trying to say and the things published about them. It will serve as a foundation for developing an effective content marketing strategy.
Having a clear, creative, and distinct voice and message is a must-have for every B2B marketer. Dull social media content won’t entice followers to visit your site and see what your company offers. You can counter this by posting intriguing content and questions that persuades them to interact with your company.
By creating engaging and innovative content, your chosen social media platforms can generate high-quality leads.
Go back to step 1 to identify which audience you should engage with. Check the type of content they share or publish on LinkedIn and try to determine their interests. Also, be mindful enough not to use duplicate content.
You also have to check if these decision-makers have a blog or a Twitter account. If so, go ahead and follow them as well. As some of these people start to follow you back on social media, you will have more chances to engage and speed up the conversion process.
The one thing that’s constant about social media platforms is that it’s ever-changing and new platforms are always on the rise. Some fads fall quickly as they rise, but some become famous and successfully embedded themselves in popular culture. Wise marketers know how to pick out the most useful platforms for their business types.
Stay informed about the most recent social media platforms by following social media blogs. Doing this allows you to see each new platform’s perks and popularity, and thus allows you to choose the most suitable one for your business needs and inbound marketing strategy.
ABM is all about establishing relationships with your key accounts, and one important element involved in this is building better personas. The more you understand your buyer personas and the experiences that constitute their profiles, the more you will be able to serve them on social media.
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On behalf of your company, there are several content types your social media team should create: stories, facts, and visual content.
Stories consist of customer success stories and new product features and launches. These tell people how your brand helps them succeed.
Whereas, facts are informative pieces that illustrate how a certain product works, what issue it resolves, and how its solution differs from the competition.
Visual content, on the other hand, can attract leads and traffic to your site. You can create charts, flyers, and infographics and share them across social media platforms to catch your buyer’s attention.
You don’t always have to focus on sales when you create and share posts. Think like you’re sharing it with a friend instead. More than just sharing a link, tell a story, The goal here is to establish yourself as your audience’s go-to resource.
Goal-setting is an essential part of building a social strategy, whether you aim to attract more traffic from various niche accounts or if you’re trying to connect with influencers. No matter what your objectives are, here are a few metrics you have to track:
3 ways social media boosts your ABM strategy
Some marketers are still hesitant to use social media to boost their business’ ABM strategy, given the thought that social media is directed to a wide audience while ABM is tailored for individual experience.
Although these two concepts appear to be mutually unexclusive, a combination of these makes a powerful tool for your business’ success. Here are three reasons why social media can help accomplish the goals of an ABM strategy:
By setting up a myriad of social media accounts, you can target different buyer personas in each company. Taking a good look at engagement metrics likes, comments, and followers can help you identify the accounts that gain the most traction. Using different social media accounts also helps you segment your messages.
A best practice that companies can observe is social media marketing software investment. It's intended to assist you in creating, tracking, and managing your various social media campaigns. This will allow you to not just create content but also track its ef?cacy in reaching high-quality leads.
A lead is more likely to fall out of the funnel the longer they are in it, that’s why ABM strives to unify sales and marketing to create a smooth funnel that guides leads throughout their journey. This ensures a shorter timeline and increased conversion rates.
There are two basic ways it does this:
Social media provides a platform for you to showcase and promote your content. Also, you can use it to identify personas who are more likely to engage and convert. Moreover, making multiple accounts focused on specific audiences and segmenting your target audience properly can help you weed out the best picks from dispensable ones.
Utilizing social media to share reviews and feedback will massively boost your trustworthiness and demonstrate value. You can then guide your leads through the funnel more quickly and confidently.
Marketing is where a company's money is spent (aside from the product itself and overhead), and Sales are where it pays off. Companies must therefore understand where their money is going and how efficient they are at recovering it.
ABM provides you the means to track which medium or channels you’re spending a lot on but with very few leads and conversions.
Account-based marketing, according to Optimizely, is responsible for increased returns in 85% of cases.
Social media can help you cut costs in three ways:
Achieve business growth and success through social media and ABM
Account-based marketing and social media aren’t just identifying and connecting qualified leads and sharing valuable content, it’s more about connecting with your audience, creating rapport, and establishing relationships to guide your customers in their buyer’s journey.
Social media’s power in attracting and engaging prospects is not to be underestimated. Regardless of your company's size, its benefits are always evident. If you want to expand your reach and gain more customers to boost your profits, don’t think twice about using social channels together with your ABM strategies. A fusion of these two can skyrocket your business success to greater heights.