When targeting B2B businesses, how often have you been told to remember that there are human beings with varied interests behind every business? The idea is that if you avoid thinking about customers through a one-size-fits-all prism, their more personal stories will give you the information you need to design a winning targeting strategy.

This is what account-based marketing is all about – working out a set of target accounts within a market, creating fleshed-out buyer personas, and finding out what motivates the stakeholders behind the companies you want to work with. How could your product or service bring forward solutions for them and their business?

And more importantly, how can you influence their employer to become a paying customer?

Once you have that information, you can use different tools, even social media, which is underrated for B2B marketers, to target your audience, build emotional connections, and make a robust strategy work. With account-based marketing, you’ll have a focused approach to capture the attention of buyers.

Getting to Know Your Buyer Persona

Ever wondered who is involved in the purchasing decisions in your industry? With B2B businesses, there are different types of stakeholders; the CEO, department directors, engineers, researchers, or those from the sales department. The first step is to try to align your internal organization with people on the client-side.

Then you can work out their gender, location, and interests, using tools such as Facebook Audience Insights, Google Ads Keyword Planner, or SEMRUSH. What keywords are they using, and how are they finding you? The idea is to humanize your audience when you are designing your strategy.

If you know how old they are, whether they are married, what they do in their spare time, where they are based, and their values, you can create an avatar for each one and easily identify the customer journeys. Be sure to take it into account for your account-based marketing strategy for your company.

If you need to confirm this information, doing interviews or surveys with your buyer personas is an excellent way to get to know them better. According to Adele Revella in her book Buyer Personas, you will need fewer answers than you expected. “As you interview your first few buyers, you will begin to hear very similar stories,” and then you’ll know that you have suitable profiles.

Using CRMs and Social Media Simultaneously

Now that you know your customers and their different needs, you can store that information within a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool. CRMs ensure reliability and centralized intelligence so that no customer information can be lost while helping you to have a complete overview of how clients interact with your business.

You’ll be able to follow your target entrepreneurs’ stage in the customer journey, their preferences, job titles, and even job seniority. Each user experience can be personalized to each subset, so you could trial campaigns with different messaging and see which gets greater traction.

Plus, if you have a lead list of 30,000 emails through inbound marketing and newsletters, you can use it to create audiences within paid campaigns and target those specifically.

You could even upload that list on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google to match people’s profiles with email addresses. Sounds interesting, right? If you want to go further, you can create similar audiences based on customer match lists: Google or Facebook will define appropriate profiles based on existing customers. It can become part of your marketing automation plan with personalized campaigns.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is an excellent hacking tool that allows you to access a list of potential customers and start reaching out too. You can automate the prospect part, but the outreach needs to be personalized.

Top Martech Update: Lighting New York Partners with CQL for Salesforce Commerce Cloud Replatform

Remember that with B2B marketing, we are always targeting people, and those customers will be on a whole range of platforms, including TikTok, during their free time. Don’t exclude channels by default but see if they align with your business and approach.

If you are selling something very technical, it won’t make sense to use TikTok. But for lead generation or marketing agencies, what are you waiting for? Get on the channel.

The Strategy Will Always Change

A long-lasting strategy does not exist; you always need to be looking for optimization and fine-tuning. Once you have a strategy, ask yourself from time to time if it is still working.

According to Mark E. Hill, it is vital to think about how the plan can change. In his book Marketing Strategy, The Thinking Involved, he says that “the elements of time, change, and chance must be considered in every strategy”. They drive marketers to remain vigilant and prepared for the unexpected.

But, don’t get me wrong, you can make a long-term strategy, but the only thing that will stay the same is the overarching goals. If a campaign works and gives new leads, that is what can be long-lasting.

For instance, a campaign for brand awareness has a specific shelf life – it could be for two or three months. At some point, the audience would feel saturated seeing the same ads. Ask yourself: Do you ever see the same commercial year on year?

It’s clear that defining your buyer persona and targeting them is very important to accomplish your sales objectives, but there is more. Building an account-based marketing team means defining the actual companies and the people you want to work with too – and that will always be changing depending on acquisition and retention.

Using some of these strategies, you can define your buyer personas and get the sales results you are waiting for. Also, consider that we are all people first – this mentality will allow you to create meaningful and long-lasting relationships with your customers.

[To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com]