As marketing and sales strategies merge within event planning, it’s no surprise planners are finding success with account-based marketing. Michelle Schofield, director of marketing and partner alliances for Certain, Inc., reveals her approach toward a more targeted method of communication. She says more marketers are moving away from blasting emails to batches of accounts and looking toward the B2B environment for direction.
“Account-based marketing takes what we know about marketing to individuals today and applies it to the B2B environment, where it’s about marketing and selling to the multiple decision makers within a given organization or account,” Schofield writes.
Events can play a major role in improving marketing approaches for these four segments: large accounts, named accounts, industry/segments and customer accounts. User conferences or field marketing events provide a greater opportunity to use event data with a marketing automation system.
Marketers can begin by gathering an attendee’s profile and their level of interest. This will help them better understand target accounts. From pre-event marketing and registration, this information can be used to gain more insight into the individuals within each account. It also helps point marketers in the direction of products and services that are of most value to each account. This data can then be used towards post-event sales and marketing.
When marketing and sales teams share similar objectives, they can work together to better identify, develop insights and gain knowledge about how to approach key accounts. Schofield says, “Events bring this partnership to life by providing marketing and sales teams the ability to develop and execute a clear plan for targeting the prospects and customers that matter most.”
Schofield offers the following tips to derive greater value from account-based marketing:
-Assess the attendee list and organize it into target account types.
-Research target accounts and learn which business objectives yield purchase decisions.
-Devise the best strategy to engage individuals within each account during in-person events
-Make a plan to follow up with individuals after the event. This includes lead sourcing and using insight from marketing automation platforms.
-Make sure marketing and sales teams are in-sync during this process in order to achieve the best results.
