Channels Used: Email & Facebook
First, a little context
The very first time I heard the concept of “Account Based Marketing” or “ABM”, I was instantly intrigued. Why? Because Wordstream.
WordStream’s definition of ABM is the best
Account-based marketing is like personalized marketing on steroids.
I mean what’s not better on steroids?
It made me start reading about it more. (Not because of Steroids)
A more conventional definition of Account Based Marketing by WordStream would be
Account Based Marketing is when high-value accounts or prospects are identified, key stakeholders in these businesses are targeted, and finally marketing strategies are implemented through various channels to appeal to their specific personas and needs.
After knowing this, all I did was ask myself this
Which is better?
Finding a few large and important potential accounts that hold the greatest promise of adding to your bottom line OR Finding a huge database of all people from all walks of life, some of whom might never ever want to be my customers, even if I paid them to?
The answer couldn’t pierce a deeper hole into my heart but that’s exactly how I started my journey with ABM.
The two channels I used to target the key stakeholders of a particular high value account were
a) Email — For obvious reasons
b) Facebook — Because Facebook holds a special place for us marketers, as it has proved to be a great ad platform to target your content to a buyer persona relevant audience.
Step1: Find the Leader
For email targeting; Get your hands on email id’s of all C-level executives from the account you are targeting and send them emails with “minimal info” of your product.
{You can find the key players from a particular company on LinkedIn or other sites that display company related information such as www.crunchbase.comand chrome extensions like Skrapp or Hunter can give your their emails}
We just wanted them to know how our product worked and if interested they could reply back to the same mail. That’s it.
It worked like a charm. Here’s that mail.
If you happen to see this email in your inbox, then you should know what you’re into.
Step2: Target everyone
Create a custom audience and target as many possible employees working for that employer on Facebook.
Finding these many people was a challenge. It’s not like FB has a filter for it.
You can always have a few emails on your list, export it as a CSV, and upload it into Facebook to use as the basis for your lookalike audience.
A lookalike audience is exactly what it sounds like. Facebook takes a list of contacts and then finds a list of people who are similar to the list you provided (the smallest lookalike audience you can create is 1% of your target country).
The smaller the lookalike audience you choose, the more closely it will match your source audience. But even there, the higher the number of similar account targeted emails, more accurate the lookalike audience would be.
Hence the search began.
A little bit of rummaging led me to Intelligence Search — A simple chrome extension to find people on Facebook by their name, what they like, where they work, where they live, whom they are friends with, age, gender, language, and much more. Not just people. You can find pages, groups, events, posts and photos. You can use this tool for LinkedIn and Twitter as well.
Step3: The kill
With Step 1 and Step 2 in place, we went for the kill, with personalized content.
When all was said and done, we had the big fish in our reel.
We often take on adventurous marketing strategies such as these and try to find out how we can use these to get more high quality leads. Follow Heptagon on Medium to see how we conquer our daily marketing battles one kill at a time.
