Everything You Need to Know About Account-Based Marketing with Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Did you know that account-based marketing (ABM) can help your B2B brand to:

• Increase marketing ROI
• Improve lead generation rate
• Improve win rates
• Increase the average value of annual contracts
• Increase overall revenues

With so many possible benefits, it makes perfect business sense to add ABM to your marketing toolkit. Marketers themselves agree that ABM is a powerful strategy, with 93% of them using ABM and 45% saying that the ROI of ABM is at least 2X the ROI of other marketing methods

ABM is about focusing on high-value customer accounts who are most likely to buy your product or service. It’s about targeting these accounts by treating them as a market of one with hyper-personalized experiences, tailored content, and one-on-one relationships.

ABM is a great way to increase the quality of your accounts pipeline and retain your top accounts for longer. Amazingly, any B2B company can implement a successful ABM strategy – with the right ABM tools. Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) is one such tool.

Read on to discover how you can use SFMC to power your company’s ABM program!

Account-based Marketing with Salesforce Marketing Cloud

An ABM strategy is about focusing on specific accounts and targeting them with personalized campaigns and tailored content. The goal is to build stronger relationships with them in order to boost customer retention, customer lifetime value, deal size, and revenues.

Recent research shows that 69% of business buyers expect companies to anticipate their needs. ABM can help you satisfy this requirement with customized marketing that “speaks” to each high-value account. SFMC simplifies and powers ABM so you can focus on your top accounts to drive higher revenues and marketing ROI.

Get a 360-degree view of every business customer so you can decide which account to target with account-centric marketing. Then deliver personalized and connected engagements for your selected audience with SFMC’s marketing automation capabilities.

SFMC also incorporates a powerful AI engine called Einstein to drive your pipeline and drive more personalized interactions for every key account. With marketing automation and Einstein, you will be able to scale up your ABM efforts and nurture the brand’s relationships with every high-value B2B account.

How to Get Started and Scale Up with SFMC-powered ABM

The first step to getting started with ABM is to determine if you have enough high-value customer accounts to make the strategy worthwhile. Explore the data in your SFMC account to identify these accounts and confirm if you want to invest time and energy into ABM.

Next, do some research into these accounts:

• Who are the customers?
• What are their pain points?
• What are their purchase histories?
• What types of content do they typically engage with?
• Which channels do they use to consume your content and buy your products or services?

The account, contact, and lead record data in SFMC will help you garner these insights. You can also search the web and social media to better understand your target accounts’ specific challenges, priorities, and business needs.

After identifying your target accounts for ABM, use these accounts as templates to:

• Find additional accounts
• Build lookalike audiences for your ABM campaigns
• Expand your ideal customer profiles (ICPs) to align sales and marketing on audience outreach

In this way, you can successively include the best accounts in your ABM program. You can also use Einstein to score and prioritize leads and figure out the next steps in the deal cycle. Make sure to use SFMC to build shared lists of ABM accounts that all teams can easily access to contribute to the company’s ABM efforts.

To take your SFMC ABM program to the next level:

• Use predictive lead scoring to get intelligent insights about which accounts are most likely to close
• Use deduplication rules to automatically connect leads and contacts to the right account
• Develop and target lookalike accounts to reach new audiences at scale
• Deliver targeted account-based journeys to top accounts so they receive the right content at the right time

The Key SFMC ABM Capabilities You Should Know About

Account-based marketing is a powerful way to land and keep the business of your top accounts. And one of the most effective ABM tactics is content and experience personalization. But to create personalized content and deliver personalized experiences, your sales/marketing/customer service teams must be aligned on:

• Which top accounts to target
• What drives them to engage with your company
• Which metrics you should measure to assess this engagement
• How personalization can help you build relationships with these accounts

SFMC can help create such alignment. It provides a powerful data-driven way to plan and execute ABM campaigns. You can leverage its data and capabilities to identify top accounts, deliver connected engagements, create tailored content, and grow customer relationships.

Here are the key SFMC tools and capabilities that you should know about when building and scaling your SBM program:

Dynamic content

Dynamic content is a great way to deliver personalized experiences to business buyers. It refers to content that changes based on the subscribers’ data, preferences, and behaviors that you define inside SFMC.

Some ways to target key accounts with dynamic content in SFMC:

• Use lead capture forms to build a deeper understanding of key accounts
• Create personalized journeys based on buyers’ interests and behaviors
• Segment audiences based on personas and create content for each subset based on what matters the most to them

Personalized email campaigns

With SFMC, you can create email nurture campaigns and templates for all your high-value customers based on their personas, titles, industry, region, company size, etc. at scale. Use these campaigns to answer their questions, address their needs, and create an unforgettable space for your brand in their wallets.

Some tips to make the most of SFMC email marketing for your ABM program:

• Create editable email templates with dynamic sections that change based on the account
• Create sales outreach emails with personalized callouts to account-relevant content
• Include personalized “next best action” offers in every email
• Send personalized event emails that adjust based on recipient location and interests

Cross-channel measurement and analytics

Your business customers’ preferences and needs may change at any time and you need real-time cross-channel marketing performance data to keep up. Tap into SFMC’s automated cross-channel reporting capabilities to better identify high-value accounts, enhance engagement with each account, and design ABM campaigns to attract, retain, and captivate your ideal customers.

Also explore SFMC’s Customer Data Platform (CDP) to build a real-time single source of truth for each account. CDP will enable you to automate engagements, create intelligent customer segments, and activate trusted, first-party data for ABM campaigns so you can:

• Gain a complete view of each customer
• Enrich audience segments with modeled data like propensity and LTV metrics
• Build scalable ABM campaigns with automation
• Activate data to design personalized messaging and experiences
• Track and manage customers’ consent and preferences
• Optimize ABM spends with real-time customer data and AI-powered insights

Einstein AI

Einstein AI is perfect for ABM because its capabilities will enable you to:

• Identify the best B2B accounts to target
• Improve customer engagement with personalized ads, account-based journeys, and dynamic web experiences
• Align sales and marketing to deliver a unified message to every account across every touchpoint
• Measure ABM campaign performance and optimize campaigns based on visual insights
• Use predictive data to understand your audience on a more granular level and engage with them with micro-level conversations

Account Engagement

Marketing Cloud Account Engagement will help you drive more revenues with ABM and marketing automation. Leverage it to design personalized ABM outreach programs. You can easily automate cross-channel journeys for each account and use real-time data to understand how every activation influences the pipeline.

Notable ABM features in Account Engagement include:

• Easy-to-create assets to customize journeys and build dynamic, personalized emails and landing pages
• Connect your marketing tech stack in your automated journeys
• data-driven insights to simplify lead and account scoring

Over to You

ABM is a proven way to connect with your valuable B2B customers, engage them with personalized content, and capture a larger share of their wallets. Salesforce Marketing Cloud provides numerous tools and features to help you get started with and scale up your ABM program. We hope this article shows you the way to make the most of this powerful ABM platform. If you need more support with SFMC and ABM, contact Email Uplers. We will help you accomplish your next ABM mission!