ABM SaaS, or Account-Based Marketing for SaaS, is a strategy to target a specific group of people who are more likely to make a purchase or use your services instead of a random audience.
It’s about precision over volume, aiming for the accounts with the highest potential for impact.
Most online marketing campaigns focus only on the “number” of people reached. While getting your name out there to the majority of the public is excellent, it doesn’t always result in the best ROI. This is where ABM can turn things around.
At NUOPTIMA, we create, review, and manage your personalized ABM B2B SaaS strategy. As a leading SaaS growth agency, we have a best-in-class think tank to pinpoint what works and what doesn’t.
We custom-make strategies that best fit your industry and audience. It consists of:
- Identifying your potential audience.
- Creating targeted emails with the help of our SaaS email marketing agency.
- Leveraging multichannel marketing.
- Finding out potential accounts with a higher chance of conversion.
- Measuring the success and shortcomings of your strategy.
Ready to take your marketing efforts a notch higher? Book a call with us for free, and let us help you review your ABM strategies.
Also, be sure to check out our in-depth YouTube video about ABM strategies for B2B SaaS that teaches you how to turn big accounts into partners:
Benefits of ABM for SaaS Companies
ABM campaigns require a lot of research and effort from the sales and marketing teams as they are highly personalized, but they ultimately fetch better ROIs than traditional marketing. There are various benefits of an ABM strategy for your SaaS company. Let’s look at what makes it crucial:
1. Tailored Marketing
Traditional SaaS marketing strategies target a general audience, whereas ABM targets a narrow audience. ABM campaigns are specifically tailored to the audience’s needs and requirements, fostering a sense of personalized marketing, which helps with sales conversion.
2. Smart Allocation of Resources
Human resources, time, and capital are all super valuable assets that must be used intelligently. ABM targets a small number of high-value accounts instead of aiming for a broad audience, so SaaS companies can use their resources more efficiently.
3. Shorter Sale Cycles
Many stakeholders in the B2B industry are in charge of the decision-making process, which leads to longer sale cycles. ABM, with its highly targeted approach to high-value accounts and said stakeholders, leads to shorter sale cycles.
How to Craft Your SaaS ABM Strategy
Since creating an ABM SaaS strategy requires a significant amount of research, here are some steps detailing how you can go about it to make it easier:
1. Identify Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) in the SaaS Space
Several factors can assist you in determining your ICP. If your SaaS product has an existing market, research the current customers who utilize the same kind of services.
Research from scratch must be conducted if you’re trying to enter a new market. Either way, take note of the following factors:
- Solution-orientated: Find the pain points of your target audience. Ensure your SaaS product addresses the unique issues your potential clients might face.
- Challenges: Similar to the solution-oriented point, your SaaS product should help remove any difficulties faced by the targeted accounts.
The features, goals, and priorities of these high-value accounts are additional factors to consider for a successful account-based marketing SaaS campaign.
2. Engage Decision Makers
A major aspect of your SaaS ABM strategy should be conducting research and identifying the key decision-makers of your target companies. As the name might lead you to believe, these individuals are in charge of the decision-making process and hold all the power.
You can perform market research and identify these individuals. Their job titles should assist you, and resources like the organization’s website, social media profiles, and more will be helpful.
Once you have these individuals under your radar, the next thing is to address the specific challenges and pain points they or their company faces while aligning with their goals. Remember that it is not always the people in the decision-making position who rank the highest, so on a case-to-case basis, you might need to connect with someone at a higher rank who’d be more suited to make the decision.
Smaller companies usually have a few individuals in the decision-making position, making the overall process faster and resulting in a faster sales cycle. For larger organizations, the process remains the same, but the overall turnaround times can be a bit longer.
3. Essential Tools and Techniques
You can use various tools and techniques to progress through the research aspect of your ABM SaaS marketing campaign. Utilizing these tools will help identify accounts involved in the decision-making process.
You might already be familiar with LinkedIn, but a regular LinkedIn account has certain limitations. Since our goal is to identify the decision-makers of our target companies, you would need to use LinkedIn Sales Navigator. It is a premium feature designed for sales and marketing professionals. Additionally, building a strong personal brand on LinkedIn can enhance your outreach efforts by increasing your visibility and credibility among potential clients. Sales Navigator allows you to use its advanced filter system to target ideal organizations.
You can also use other social media platforms and blogs to get information regarding potential accounts to target.
Database platforms like ZoomInfo also provide crucial information, such as details about the company and its contact information. Other helpful tools are Leadfeeder, HubSpot Sales Hub, UpLead, and Apollo.io.
Effective Implementation of ABM for SaaS
Implementation of successful SaaS account-based marketing requires a strategic approach. Here are some tips to make your efforts bear fruit:
1. Personalized Content Creation
The same sales pitch does not work for every customer. You need to create personalized content for every account under your radar. You can use data analytics and tailor your content to address the accounts’ pain points, requirements, and goals.
Decision-makers value personalized content that provides the required information to make their decisions easier. Creating content that resonates with them is vital in addressing their company’s unique needs.
As a SaaS content marketing agency, NUOPTIMA can help you create targeted content that engages your audience, generates qualified leads, and grows MRR.
2. Multi-Channel Engagement
An effective ABM strategy requires a comprehensive approach toward engagement, which spans beyond a single channel and needs to guide the consumers through the entire process.
Raise awareness using emails, social media marketing, articles, blog posts, webinars, and SaaS podcast platforms, providing valuable information about your product to deliver your message across several channels.
This approach is bound to maximize your visibility, build trust, and reassure the account that your SaaS is the solution they are looking for. It also highlights your product value and commitment to educating your potential customers.
To make this easier, you can utilize our SaaS PR agency. We help you get noticed and build authority by featuring your SaaS business in top-tier press. LinkedIn ghostwriting, fundraising announcements, and podcast guesting are some of our many SaaS PR services.
3. Aligning Sales and Marketing
Collaboration between sales and marketing teams should be a crucial part of your campaign. By creating a clear channel of communication, the process of exchanging valuable information, such as potential accounts, and defining strategies will be much easier. The ideal scenario is for both teams to work together.
However, remember that picking the best time for handoffs is necessary. Only sales-ready accounts and organizations deemed as such after an analysis by the sales team should receive marketing resources.
Using Essential Features to Supercharge Growth
Your account-based marketing SaaS campaign should leverage the advanced features available to maximize its impact. Let’s take a look at a few:
1. Data Analytics
Using data analytics is essential for any ABM SaaS campaign to succeed. When creating a plan, these analytics can account for crucial information like historical data, industry trends, and customer behavior. Google Analytics is a great analytical tool that allows you to monitor various metrics, such as bounce rate, conversions, and ROI. With this information, you can see how well your website performs and how your target audiences interact with it to get a clear idea of what’s working and what’s not.
2. Innovative ABM Technologies
Staying relevant in the ever-changing market is necessary; several innovative technologies help you easily do that. Here are a couple of examples of them:
- CRM: CRM software is useful for developing a seamless communication channel between the sales and marketing teams. Hubspot is an amazing solution that helps you connect your data, teams, and customers on one AI-powered customer platform.
- Intent Data Platforms: Intent Data Analytics platforms provide data regarding an individual’s digital footprint. An example of such a platform is G2. It helps you discover effective sales habits and customer insights to get more conversions for your SaaS business.
3. ABM + Artificial Intelligence
It is possible to achieve hyper-focused precision targeting when the forces of ABM SaaS and AI are combined. Let’s dive deeper into this:
- High-value Accounts: AI eliminates the need to determine the accounts with the most attributed value manually. AI’s capability to read historical data, engagement patterns, interests, and behaviors allows it to target accounts with the highest chance of conversion.
- Marketing Analysts: With real-time analysis and information regarding current market trends, AI can predict which marketing genre would most likely engage your targeted high-value accounts.
- Hyper-personalized Content: AI can create hyper-personalized content by noting high-value accounts’ content engagement, patterns, and interests.
- Resource Allocation: AI uses a data-driven approach to determine which marketing campaigns, keywords, and techniques yield the best results.
Creating and Maintaining Relationships
Once you have successfully converted a potential account to a customer, retaining them for long-term business growth becomes as important, if not more. A SaaS ABM strategy is as successful as how it can retain, foster, and grow current relationships. Here are some key factors to keep in mind:
| Long-Term Engagement and Retention | Upselling and Cross-Selling by ABM |
| Welcoming Customer Support | Educate and Promote Features |
| Active Channels of Communication | Leverage Data |
| Feedback and Survey | |
| Discounts on Renewals or Referrals |
1. Long-Term Engagement and Retention
- Welcoming Customer Support: Ideally, a customer should never have to go to customer support, but if they must, it should be a good experience. Taking a proactive approach to addressing any issues your customers might have after a purchase improves customer satisfaction.
- Active Channels of Communication: Stay on top of industry trends, update customers regarding features and future upgrades, create quality content to build engagement, and stay active in your clients’ minds.
- Feedback and Survey: Taking feedback and surveys makes the overall experience of a customer feel complete, making them an integral part of it.
- Discounts on Renewals or Referrals: Everybody likes saving some money. Offering discounts or offers on renewals or referrals acts as a perk to your current customers, tempting them to stay and invite others.
2. Upselling and Cross-Selling by Using ABM
- Educate and Promote Features: Make your customers aware of the features you offer and the value they can derive from them. Create guides or host events and webinars to educate them about how to utilize your product and why those premium features are worth the investment. Offer exclusive offers to your current clients to try and upsell.
- Leveraging Data: You can use essential data like engagement rates, interests, usage patterns, and behaviors to create a highly personalized ad campaign.
Scaling Your ABM Strategy
Aiming for the top comes naturally, but starting your ABM efforts with a Pilot is recommended instead of gunning it into a full-fledged campaign from the get-go. This avoids potential loss if your company is not yet ready for upscale. Let’s explore how you can go about it:
#1 Pilot Program
It is best to try out the waters initially with a pilot. Start your pilot program by figuring out the key metrics and high-value accounts you will target. This hyper-focus on key accounts allows you to judge how well the campaign is going and promotes more intelligent resource allocation.
Once you have your target audience set, it is time to create personalized content for these accounts. Address any pain points they have, features that might be interesting, or provide some information content about the industry or your SaaS.
Perform a thorough evaluation of your pilot program. Examine the key metrics and data to determine your wins and losses and make the required improvements.
#2 Expansion or Upscaling
Use the surveys and feedback you hand out during the pilot program to address the issues, consider the customers’ desired features, and devise a plan.
To scale up, high-value accounts need to be separated and marketed heavily, as they will fetch you the most profits. Acquire information about your target accounts, such as their size, financial ability to spend, and whether your SaaS product is the solution they need.
Once you have established your key target accounts, create personalized content that resonates with them. This way, you’ll increase engagement, build a healthy relationship, and better your chances of conversion.
Embracing ABM SaaS for Future Growth
Opting for an ABM SaaS marketing campaign is a strategic move for your business’s future growth. The B2B space is forever changing with new marketing methods, and investing at the right time is essential to gain a competitive edge. Research [1] shows that 92% of all companies that opted for an ABM approach reported a better return on investment than any other form of marketing.
Start your ABM SaaS marketing journey with NUOPTIMA, providing best-in-class solutions. Our comprehensive approach has everything needed for a successful campaign:
- Defining key metrics
- Fishing out high-value accounts
- Marketing to the audience
- Creating high-quality content
- Aligning sales and marketing
- Staying up to date with any relevant industry changes
Book a call with our SaaS experts for a free 30-minute session regarding your ABM strategy and to get valuable insights (+ next steps).
FAQ
Account-based marketing, or ABM, is a highly targeted and personalized form of marketing in which marketing resources are allocated to specific high-value accounts. On the other hand, most generic marketing efforts use a spray-and-pray method.
The short answer is yes. They are valuable in almost any industry. However, the B2B industry is where the ABM strategy truly shines, as it can address the highly complex issues that often arise in this space.
There is no specific timeline for how fast your ABM SaaS marketing campaign results will bear fruit. In several cases, it has happened within days, but as a rule of thumb, expect them to yield results within a few months.
