What Can We Learn from Account-Based Marketing?

Creative agencies have a natural marketing bias

The best brands in the world hire creative agencies to help develop big ideas that shape culture, get people talking, and reach maximum eyeballs. This usually means starting big and wide to reach the maximum audience before slowly engaging and pulling people through the funnel with the desired goal of converting them. It’s what we know, and what we do really well, and it’s often tempting to take the same approach when promoting ourselves. But it’s not necessarily what works best in terms of building our own brands. Why?

For starters, it’s not the way that our customers buy. Flashy taglines, new logos, or “big ideas” aren’t what sells agency services. For the most part, the selection of agency partners has become largely an exercise in risk mitigation. Secondly, we frankly don’t have the money to reach a wide audience, and the buyers of agency services are actually quite narrow. The good news? Account-based marketing (ABM) is a well-established practice that offers a proven approach to guide more effective agency growth.

What is account-based marketing?

If you’ve googled “account-based marketing”, I imagine you had a similar response that I did when I first became familiar with the term: “not for us”. Benefits like improving alignment between marketing and sales don’t seem to resonate when you don’t have a marketing team, much less a sales team. But when you dig deeper, it is full of principles that are helpful guideposts in terms of how agencies should structure their marketing strategy. Account-based marketing flips the traditional marketing funnel and starts by identifying the target "accounts" who are most relevant to the agency, along with the individuals who are part of the buying process. Then, it crafts and delivers highly customized experiences and content with this specific niche in mind.

This simple mentality shift offers agencies a few key benefits. First, it forces you to choose. In the old days, it was beneficial to position yourself as broadly as possible so that you could adapt your strengths to fit whoever reached out to you. But as large full-service retainer relationships have given way to narrow project briefs, it is more important than ever to identify and declare your areas of expertise. And by building account lists around these areas, you can maximize the investment in content and capabilities. Instead of investing tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of dollars into a single huge pitch effort that all goes in the trash if you don't win, you can make smart investments in content that is amortized across a long list of relevant prospects.

Executing account-based marketing - the agency way

There is a lot written about account-based marketing, and you can spend days sorting through various white papers from CRM providers and other technical tools. But the reality is that most of this guidance is intended for much larger companies and isn’t relevant to most agencies. Over the years, we have developed our own “inside-out” approach for agencies, inspired by traditional ABM practices:

1. Identify your unique “right to win”
2. Define ideal customer segments
3. Develop a tailored content strategy
4. Building a list with actual target accounts
5. Creating outreach campaigns at scale

Let’s go through all these steps and see how they can be brought to life.

Identifying your unique “right to win”

We believe that any growth plan needs to start from within. When following this approach, all of our clients end up on their own pathway, as it fundamentally starts from a deep understanding of who you are. We go through many steps to help you do that, from executive surveys and client interviews to talking with prospects and search consultants to understand both internal and external perspectives. We also help you organize your internal data to uncover key opportunities and strengths.

Define ideal customer segments

Agency searches are not a risk-taking exercise. The entire process is about identifying the partner most likely to succeed, based on applying specific filters of relevance including consumer understanding, category experience, specialized expertise, physical location, and personal relationships. Agencies who are seen as meeting more of these requirements have a much bigger chance to win the project.

Develop a tailored content strategy

“Content” is one of the most overused terms in marketing, so let’s be specific about what we mean here. Content should serve as the bridge from your agency to an ideal consumer segment. It needs to offer some level of education or utility, and should reinforce one of the ways that you are specifically relevant to these prospects. Identifying the right resources to produce content efficiently is a key component of executing your plan. While getting content published in trade press is helpful, content should ultimately serve as a conversation starter that can lead to a service you can offer. Having a plan for meetings 2 and 3 is just as important as having the initial icebreaker.

From ideal to actual targets

Once you have developed your ideal customer, agencies can use various digital tools to find companies that fit this profile, choosing how strict or loose they want to apply it. The next step is just as simple. Using similar digital services, they can find and select decision-makers from these target accounts who are influencers in the buying process. Identifying the right tools, and using them properly through a proven process is key to reducing time, effort, and cost in this phase.

Creating outreach campaigns at scale

Now it’s time for the fun part. Agencies can plan and execute outreach campaigns leveraging different tactics. In some cases, a more custom 1:1 approach is called for, but many times you can leverage automated tools to build a sequence that allows you to engage in customized outreach at scale. But beware: these campaigns require an experienced touch to avoid blending in with all of the spam which is commonplace in today's market.

In conclusion

As a creative agency, the journey towards growth demands a departure from how we build our client’s brands. As we've explored, account-based marketing provides a framework for us to take an “inside-out” approach at building our own strategies. One that naturally improves the conversion rate by maximizing the relevance of opportunities. But also improves the return on investment of the content and campaigns we develop.

By identifying your unique "right to win," defining ideal customer segments, and executing outreach with diligence, agencies can navigate growth in a sustainable way that builds equity over time.

Ready to chart your own course?

Sail can help you embrace the principles of ABM strategy to drive efficiency and creativity in your outreach efforts. Get started with our free assessment, and we can schedule a complimentary introduction session.

Sources

• https://www.salesforce.com/resources/articles/what-is-account-based-marketing/
• https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/account-based-marketing-guide
• https://evaboot.com/blog/linkedin-account-based-marketing

‍

‍

‍