How to Master ABM with Social Media Strategy

By Gaurav Sharma

ABM or account-based marketing is built around the idea that companies only need to target consumers who are right for them, rather than blanket marketing their goods or services to consumers that do not fit their buyer personas.

While social media is usually a part of a wider B2C package, the right strategy can turbocharge ABM to help you generate leads, nurture relationships, and reinforce customer loyalty.

Why the huge influence? Well, the answer is simple. 

People are social beings. They are always connected with their peers to keep up with the news (and gossip)—and peer-to-peer recommendations top all other forms of marketing influence.

Let’s learn more about this exciting connection between ABM and Social Media Strategy. 

Leveraging social media marketing for ABM success

Nearly 3.78 billion people use social media platforms. According to Statista, the number is expected to reach 4.41 billion by 2025. 

Image source: Statista

With the number of social media users skyrocketing at this point in time, there is no better way to influence your target audience than engaging with them through social media. 

For example, you can use the power of social media to understand what kind of content is most engaging, which keywords are the best ones to use in messaging, or what kinds of links are most effective at driving traffic. 

The most benefit of ABM marketing help marketing agency or service provider to know how money should spend on different marketing strategies. An ABM marketing strategy also helps them to manage their spends in an effective way.

Now that you’re familiar with the buzz around account-based marketing (ABM) and social media strategies, here are a few best practices that you can adopt to make it work for your business.

1. Define your target audience and identify them

Before you do anything else, figure out which accounts may be profitable for you. To begin with, search for target companies, and filter the results by location, industry, and service to identify the right decision-makers.

For example, Social media and SEO changed the online b2b marketing strategy and brands develop their OEM advertising strategy as per each platform requirement to get maximum results from their OEM advertising campaign.

If you’re not sure who to send the request to, simply click on the individual’s profile to find information about them or send a direct message. 

The next thing you need to do is come up with a list of all these names and analyze them to figure out who they are. Based on that, you’ll be able to find out the best time to post your content too. 

For example, this strategy works for event lead generation, you can send survey links to the event attendance once the event is over and ask them to fill it. You can utilize event apps management to design effective survey questions and gather the desired information.

2. Follow the right people

One of the other important things to do in ABM and marketing on social media is to follow other social media accounts in your industry. 

And how can you identify these accounts?

Search for keywords related to your brand or industry and then go through each profile to figure out if they match your target audience.

Then, find out if they have published anything. For example, Reshare quotes from a social media personality that is relevant to your industry. Use the right hashtags they are using on LinkedIn Pulse or a Twitter handle. You can mention them in your posts and try to reconnect with them. In this way, you can build good relationships with them and get great engagement by posting their relevant quotes on your social profiles.

This means you can keep track of who they hang out with and focus on the people they spend the most time talking about.

Apart from this, you can leverage affiliate marketing and can do affiliate partnerships with marketers relevant to your niche. In this process affiliate software can help you manage your affiliate program effectively.

Tip: Create a separate list for your main competitors and key contacts in your industry. It will help you keep a tab on their daily marketing activities and how they promote their brand.

3. Customize your social listening platform

Listen to what people are saying about your target accounts, their executives, and other relevant contacts by using your social media apps. All you need to do is find and track the right keywords using it. Additionally, you can leverage social media panel services to manage your social media campaign effectively and boost your campaign ROI.

The idea here is to understand their problems, requirements, preferences, and more. This would help you better market to them with your ABM strategy.

4. Launch Your Online Course

To further enhance the effectiveness of your ABS strategy, you can offer online courses that add value to your target audience. An advanced online course creation platform like Thinkific can help you create impressive courses with ease. With these courses, you can not only establish your credibility but also engage targeted accounts effectively. Thinkific platform is a great platform for online course creators and sellers. If you are going to create and sell your online course then you need to know about this platform in detail. I have written a detailed review post on this platform on my blog Attrock.  Check out it now!

5. Evaluate your content strategy

Now that you have a solid understanding of your audience, why not engage them by publishing blog posts that address their pain areas. You need to establish relevant and measurable content KPIs that help you achieve your campaign goals in an effective way.

Pick a couple of your target companies and mention their key executives in your posts, reference quotes from them, and so on.  You need to focus on more educational content because as we know education content is a good option. You can use different forms of content to get more engagement on your website.

You could also invest in videos. They’re far more engaging than text-based content and can help you further improve your ABM strategy. In fact, videos are twice as likely to be shared than any other form of content on social media. 

Also, you can use copyright free images and customize these images and post them to your social media profiles with relevant hashtags to get more engagement to your social posts.

6. Post Relevant Content 

There are two types of content your social media team should be publishing on your company's behalf: stories and facts. 

Stories are updates related to new features, product launches, customer success stories, etc. They drive the narrative that tells people how your business helps them to succeed. 

Facts, on the other hand, are educational pieces that explain how your product works, what problem it solves, why it is different from the competition's solution, etc.

When crafting your posts, don’t always focus on the sale. Instead, share an article as you would with a friend.  Don’t just share a story link. Write a story. Hear them laugh, see them smile, and think to themselves, “Those guys are great!”. The idea is to become a go-to resource for your audience. 

Visuals content is more emerging so you can create infographics, graphs, flyers design, charts, etc., and can share them to social media platforms and various other relevant publications to attract the right traffic and leads for your website.

But how do you ensure that you’re continuously acing the content creation game?

The method is simple — review your performance and optimize. HubSpot can help you with this. With HubSpot export, you'll be able to collect all the records and performance data about your posts. By analyzing this, you’ll be able to figure out what needs to be done.

7. Get the Most Out of Your Social Content

The next thing that can help you improve ABM through social media is how you use your content. 

Keep in mind the following things when you want to improve your social media content’s utility. 

• Create personalized content based on your audience’s behavior
• Post success stories of your customers and communities 
• Answer as many frequently asked questions as you like
• Hire a designated person for publishing content on social media
• Ask your CEO to engage in a Q&A session or publish a blog regularly
• Provide people with a simple way to share your content among their networks to increase reach
• Repurpose UGC to get the most out of the content created by your audience
• Create a content calendar and stick to it 

8. Build better personas

Building better buyer personas is one of the most important elements of account-based marketing (ABM). At its core, ABM is about building relationships with key accounts because they are one step away from your ultimate target—the decision-maker. 

For example, If you just starting an LLC in New Jersey, USA then you need to create a strong persona around your agency. In this process, you can leverage ABM-based marketing to maximize your limited resources.

The more you are aware of your buyer personas and the experiences that make up their profiles, the better you can serve them on social media.

9. Create a paid social strategy

A paid social strategy will help you drive your brand’s growth. And ABM can further help you improve your return on ad spend. 

LinkedIn offers a unique opportunity to target your ad by first selecting a specific group of people and then narrowing the group even further with additional filters. That way, you can focus on professionals from a particular industry or those with seniority over a certain title.

Similarly, with Facebook Ads, you can create a campaign and target your audience according to their demographics, locations, and interests.

If you've already run Facebook Ads campaigns, use Ad Analytics to analyze your campaign performance and report on all the important advertising metrics. Based on those, you can further optimize your campaign.

You can create ads in the form of promoted accounts, trends, or tweets on Twitter too. For example, promoted accounts appear in a user’s “Who to Follow” section.

Remember: Always consider the return on your investment when choosing paid strategies or tools.

10. Track your metrics to measure your progress

When you build your social strategy, try to set some goals. For example, are you trying to get more traffic from niche accounts, or are you trying to reach out to influencers? There are a few crucial metrics you need to track:

• Metrics like intent scoring and general engagement insights make it easier for the ABM team to evaluate data quality. They can ensure that you approach the right people for your campaign.

• Additionally, the basic data about the customers, like their designation and contact information you get from by creating a landing page, gives an overview of how well-researched the target accounts were.

• Brand awareness is an essential ingredient of ABM. It's very important to know how many prospects know your brand and what that awareness is doing over time. If you can build a brand that no one will forget, then you've also made something everyone will recognize. You can use a tagline maker to create catchy taglines for your brand.
  
  
• Once the lead is qualified, it is time to know if the leads are interested in your company’s products or services. You can track the leads' online activity, their visit history on the website, the number of times they have engaged through social media, or track how many times they have actually interacted with your brand.

• Reach focuses on strategic retrospection. Do you see the results you expected? Are you reaching the right accounts that matter to your business goals (rather than just meeting monthly acquisition quotas)?

• The influence metrics are used to evaluate whether your ABM activities are paying off. See which of your social media activities influence buyers to buy more often or buy more valuable products. If this number is lower than expected, you may need to change the strategy for this account.

Get your social media strategy right around account-based marketing

Social media marketing is about more than just sharing content. It is more about connecting with audiences and building relationships to lead them to the next step -- buying. 

Social media is an essential tool for any company trying to attract and engage prospective customers. Big or small, you can't ignore social media in your marketing strategy. 

If you want to expand your brand’s reach and acquire new customers to boost sales, you have to think about using these social channels successfully in your ABM efforts too.

Do you have any questions about the social media strategy for ABM? Ask them in the comments.

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