For tech companies, marketing to the financial services industry is a specific niche and employing account based marketing tactics give you a strategy for more successful conversion. You’ll find a lot of information out there on marketing in general. However, it’s difficult to marry that generalized information with the intricacies of leveraging your benefits, as a tech company, to the very compliance and revenue-oriented specialty of finance. Instead, your marketing efforts need to target your specific audience in a valuable and informative way.
An account based marketing (ABM) approach can be the best technique in working with your finance clients. This directs your whole team toward the strategy you’ve outlined in your B2B marketing campaigns and offers better communication. Your whole company builds stronger relationships with the right people at your client companies to foster long-term loyalty from current customers and expand these existing accounts.
In this post, we’ll dive into what an account based marketing strategy is, how to best employ account based marketing tactics, and whether it’s right for your marketing team. We’ll also give you six tips to market your technology solution to the financial industry, but many of these tips can also be useful for managed service providers and other technology offerings.
What Is Account Based Marketing?
Account based marketing isn’t a new approach, but it’s infinitely easier to use this approach effectively today. Mining the data in your CRM and leveraging other solutions allow for real time information and a great deal of analytics. ABM is a viable approach that means higher ROI. So what is account based marketing exactly?
Using account based marketing tactics, you’re targeting individual accounts in a personalized way. Rather than concentrating your marketing efforts on a general audience, you can fine tune your approach to specific clients. With account based marketing, your team is identifying prospective clients that would be a good fit for your services and, most often, would be a high-end client.
Once you identify the company, and identify which of your services that company would most benefit from, you can research the best contact people. This lets you target those decision-makers with the right sales and marketing information to engage with them on a more personal level. It’s a targeted approach, which means that you’ll be able to customize your messaging directly for that contact and company, making it easier to speak to what they need.
How Does ABM Work?
Account based marketing is more strategic than traditional marketing. It’s ideal for B2B marketing in a set vertical. In this case, we’re talking directly about marketing technology to the financial industry. But these techniques can be customized for your marketing team to use in virtually every vertical.
Identify Your Target
The first step in an account based marketing strategy is to identify the target audience. With ABM, the messaging is absolutely personalized for the client and actual contact person, not just the industry or a wider market. While you can include general messaging (which we’ll discuss in the creating content section just below), you need to identify as much information about your target as possible before choosing your messaging.
You’ll be pulling from several sources to identify your target audience. This might include current customers. Going through your list of current customers, you can look for ways to upsell services or to create services that your current clients need. You’ll also want to look for companies where you’ve seen regular engagement but no conversion. These might be contacts on your social media accounts, who’ve scheduled demos, or signed up for your newsletter.
Going through past client records can also be insightful. Look at where the client might have moved to. Did they go out of business or replace your offering with a different company? Is it possible to win that client back or can you take some information from why they moved on?
You’ll also be targeting companies based on their demographic. The size of the company, type of business they do, and how well your offerings fit their needs.
Once you have a list of companies, you’ll need to research each organization separately to develop a list of contacts. You may want to segment some of your communication based on the contact. There are several people at a company that can help you close deals. We often think of the person with the purchasing power. But at a larger organization, that will often come down to the board or a number of people. The contact person might be someone lower on the chain of command who would benefit from recommending an excellent solution with high ROI. So don’t just market to the CFO or CEO.
Create Custom Content
Once you have the leads you want to target, you need them to tune into your messaging. There are several approaches to get these prospects on board, but the most important aspect will be the type of content you deliver. Be sure that you’re doing the work to understand your customers’ business needs with a high degree of clarity, and craft your messaging to demonstrate that you understand the problem that you’re able to solve, and that you’re the one to solve it.
Value based content that your target audience can use is often the greatest approach. Whitepapers and guides targeted for their specific title or industry can be excellent here. So can webinars and other learning events.
All the marketing initiatives in the world won’t help if you don’t check your analytics. As you move forward with your campaigns, make sure that you check the data to see where your messaging is on target and where you might need to pivot.
6 Tips on Marketing Your Tech Solution to the Financial Industry
Here are six account based marketing tactics to boost your ROI in marketing technology solutions to the financial industry. These tips can also be customized for other verticals and different technology offerings.
1. Make sure your data is high quality. Here’s one mistake that will cost your marketing team in time and money — not having good data. Your CRM is a powerful ABM tool – if used correctly. Make sure that it is being leveraged to help salespeople close deals. Customize the platform in ways best-suited to their specific needs, and identify areas where you can use sales intelligence tools to automate data-entry processes. Entering robust data is an important step in the ABM process and creating a 360 view of the prospective company. Leveraging Emissary Advisor insider insights will help validate CRM-based intelligence and help fill in the blank fields in your CRM.
2. Build personas. Just like you would for other marketing initiatives, you want to build customer personas for your ABM strategy. This will help you organize content for segmentation and ease in your ability to personalize messaging. Financial Services is an incredibly broad vertical. To really hone in on those who will buy your product, take a look at your current customer profile and SQLs and determine what type of company they are – commercial bank, investment bank, mutual funds, wealth manager, etc. Each segment will require their own persona.
3. Use social media to augment information. Most of your target audience will use social media personally and professionally. Don’t be afraid to connect there, but you should also use this information to help build your targeting for those individual accounts. Take a look at what your prospect’s are posting on their media channels and what they are saying to their customers. This will help you identify trending topics specific to their needs and segment.
4. Make sure you use data about the company wisely. You’re targeting individual people at the client company, but you should also be targeting the company’s needs. This means that you’ll want to spend some time with company information, like the number of employees, their locations, company structure, and pain points in their technology. For the financial service sector which is so highly regulated at both the state and federal levels, having an understanding of what regulations they need to comply with will help you formulate how your solutions best fits their needs.
5. Plan for long term commitment. There’s a sales funnel for B2B marketing in general, but you need to plan for a long commitment of engagement to reap real results in the FinServ vertical. It’s important to emphasize your solution’s specific value in the present, but also be ready to demonstrate how you’ll keep working and adapting with them into the future.
6. Leverage knowledge of current tools. Banks and financial services often have special technology and tools in place. It is important to know what they are in advance and how your solution can enhance or be compatible with them. All of our former FinServ execs share that a major pain point is tool fatigue – niche solutions that are developed that cause additional problems down the road. Demonstrate that your solution can streamline processes and seamlessly integrate with current systems and you will win the day.
Are account based marketing tactics right for your company?
We believe it can be a great investment of time for any tech company targeting clients in the financial industry. Emissary’s advisor network can help you develop the right account based marketing tactics for your target accounts. Contact us today to get started or call us at (646) 776-0510 to discuss your business needs.
