Are you looking to get your business back on track? The quickest path to recovery is more sales. Digital Marketing for B2Bs is hands down the quickest and most predictable path to highly targeted awareness and qualified opportunities for your business. Learn how to generate more sales and more revenue this year using ABM surround.
Why ABM Surround?
If you’re unfamiliar with an ABM surround, ABM simply stands for Account-Based Marketing. You probably have a list of targeted accounts, the ones that you want to sell to, or the logos that you’re trying to crack. The goal for your ABM surround is simple, to be wherever those targeted accounts are.
So why ABM surround, and who would benefit from them? You want to consider an AMB surround in particular if:
- You’re not generating enough leads to feed the pipeline
- You feel like you’re wasting money on marketing that’s not producing
- You’re struggling to stay top-of-mind with your most important prospects
- You think you might be the best-kept secret in town
If you’re facing any one of these challenges, then having an ABM surround will likely be a good solution for you. As marketers, we can’t control when a prospect is ready to buy, as nice as that would be. Instead, we just have to be there when they’re ready, whenever and wherever that situation occurs. That’s what an ABM surround can do for you, make sure you’re ready when your prospect makes the change to become a ‘now’ buyer.
Be sure to check out our on-demand webcast on ABM + Demand Generation for a deeper dive into this subject.
Puffer Fish Strategy
While the official term is an ABM surround, a fun nickname might be the pufferfish strategy. We all know what a pufferfish does; they puff themselves up, but why do they do it? Easy, they’re trying to make themselves look a lot bigger than they are. And that’s essentially what an ABM surround does. ABM surround makes you look a lot bigger than you are.
Now, you don’t look bigger to the entire world, but you do look bigger to your targets, the prospects that you’re trying to crack. To those accounts, you’ll look like the biggest fish in town.
What is an ABM Surround?
An ABM surround is a digital marketing strategy that serves your targeted accounts relevant materials wherever they go online. The goal of an ABM surround is to surround a very narrow audience, your targeted accounts list, with your brand so that when they are ready to buy, they already know about you and the problems you can solve.
ABM Surround Strategy
There are four main pieces that you’ll need to implement an ABM surround strategy, and they are:
Target account list – ABM surround starts with who you are trying to sell to. You might not have a thousand logos that you’re trying to crack this year, or even a hundred, but you do have a particular industry, particular size of business, and a particular type of role or function within those businesses that make up your target account list.
Multiple channels – You can’t just expect to do one thing, to be a one-trick pony. For example, you can’t only do Google AdWords or Google Pay-Per-Click and expect to get the job done. While these are good tactics, as a standalone tactic, it’s probably the most expensive digital thing that you can do. You need to be reaching your target account list across multiple channels.
Full-funnel/Intent-based – Most B2B companies only spend their advertising dollars at the bottom of the funnel. To be successful, you need to employ a full-funnel approach. Studies have shown that when you’re investing in full-funnel, when you’re investing dollars top-, middle-, and bottom-funnel, you’re going to get a five times better conversion rate.
Variety of assets – You need to have a lot of different things throughout the year that people can engage with – specially gated assets, something where people are going to opt in to learn more about your business.
ABM Surround Tactics
Once you know the key ingredients for putting together your ABM surround strategy, it’s time to focus on the tactics. One way to think about these tactics is like puzzle pieces; you can’t pick and choose. You need all of the tactics to work together to get the best results.
Full- funnel tactics can be broken down into three main sections:
- Awareness and discovery
- Evaluation and interest
- Commitment and decision
Awareness: When you’re trying to get people that don’t know you exist to know you exist, these are the puzzle pieces you need to be highly engaged in. These puzzle pieces include social selling, targeted awareness, and SEO.
Evaluation: Now that your prospects know who you are, you can start to give them more information and content about your business. These puzzle pieces include calling prospects, intent-based lead generation, and marketing automation.
Commitment: Once you get to commitment and decision, it’s time for your sales team to be the star of the show. The final puzzle piece is sales enablement. You want to make sure you’re giving the sales team everything they need to look good.
Putting Your ABM Surround Strategy in Motion
A recent study showed that top B2Bs were investing in at least three channels and 15 different touchpoints with every single prospect on their target account list. That kind of multiple-channel and full-funnel approach is what we need to be thinking about in developing an ABM surround.
If you’re ready to put your ABM surround into motion, here are some items that you can start doing right away:
Blogging – Blogging is a critical way for you to communicate to your buyer your point of view and how you can help them solve problems. At a minimum, you need to be blogging twice a month.
Gated assets – Every quarter, at a minimum, you need to be coming up with a new gated asset.
Infographs – Infographs are something that were really popular a few years ago, but they’re still incredibly valuable to buyers. Infographs take lots of words and condense them down into images so that your buyer can easily skim the points you’re trying to make.
Video – This is easily consumable media and one that is highly engaging for your prospects.
Drip and nurture emails – A surprising number of B2B companies have thousands of emails on their mailing lists, yet they aren’t emailing their customers. You should be emailing your prospects every single day. Don’t email every customer every day, but some segment of your list should be getting an email from you almost every day of the week based on where they are in their funnel.
Case studies – Prospects need to hear success stories, and case studies demonstrate how you’ve solved similar problems for other customers. This gives your prospects a better understanding of how you can solve problems for them.
ABM surround focuses on building relationships and delivering growth to B2B businesses. At Vende Digital, growing your business is our business. Let us help connect you to your next customer. Contact us today to schedule a complimentary Discovery Meeting where we’ll review your digital footprint and provide you with fresh ideas and actionable insights.
Key Takeaways
- ABM surround focuses on building relationships and delivering growth to B2B businesses.
- An ABM surround strategy makes sure your business is ready when your prospect makes the change to become a ‘now’ buyer.
- The four main pieces of an ABM surround strategy include target account list, multiple channels, full-funnel/intent-based, and variety of assets.
- ABM surround makes your business look a lot bigger than you are.
- Vende Digital can help connect you to your next customer.
