Account based marketing (ABM) requires a keen sense of what stage of the buyers journey your target account and contact is at. If you send them messaging or content that's irrelevant to their buying stage, it may have the opposite effect and negatively influence the sales process. 

In this post we'll share how to identify what buying stage your prospect is at, how to design your ABM strategy accordingly, and what types of messaging will have the best results at each stage.

There are three stages in the B2B buyer journey: awareness, evaluation, and decision. 

Awareness Stage

At the awareness stage, your prospect learns two things:

1. That your product and company exist

2. What it is you can do for them

Most website analytics are already setup to measure awareness by default by measuring unique website visitors. Using Mutiny, you can segment your website visitors even more strategically by identifying first-time visitors.

These first-time visitors still won't know what you do or how you can help them, so it will be important to provide them with the most relevant content possible. Below are examples of how to show the right content at the awareness stage of the funnel.

A clear understanding of "how you can help me"

Often the "how it works" section on a website is hidden several scrolls below the fold or a few clicks away through your navigation. This is a big miss for B2B websites. 

Making it easy for first-time visitors to how your product helps them is especially helpful at moving them down the funnel to evaluation.

Segment makes it really simple for their first-time website visitors to learn more about how they can help by showing a notification bar at the top of the homepage that links to a relevant piece

Highlight star ratings from G2, Trustpilot or Capterra

Giving social proof is a well established way to bolster confidence and interest. At the Awareness stage, visitors are looking for a quick thumbs up that you have a trusted solution and happy customers. Give these visitors the quick nod by showing star ratings and review site badges near your CTA or logo bar.

Relevant case studies from lookalike customers

Another effective tactic is to offer a popular case study in a banner on your homepage. Bonus points for personalizing the case study by industry, company size, or use case.

Evaluation Stage

Now that you’ve gotten a prospect to your site and understanding how you can help them, your ABM tactics must now focus on helping your prospect to evaluate your product. 

To identify these prospects, you’re going to need to connect your website to Salesforce through Mutiny. This will allow you to create personalized experiences for your known prospects who are in your CRM and your sales team is likely actively engaging with as well. 

First you’ll want to activate and connect Salesforce in Mutiny. Then you’ll choose ‘Opportunities’ as the data source. From there you can map the columns on which you’ll personalize––such as deal status or deal stage, as well as variables you may want to include company name, roles, region, or industry.

If you don’t have Salesforce or want to supplement the audience, another path is to use behavioral data in Mutiny to identify key behaviours that indicate consideration, like visits to the pricing page, case studies, product pages or any calculators you might have.

Inside the Behavioral Audiences tab in Mutiny, choose Buying Stage as your audience type and name your audience. Then add the relevant URL keywords (e.g. pricing or case studies) to that audience to start identifying stage by URL visited.

It's at the evaluation stage where you get to pull out the fun tactics. Prospects in evaluation stage are familiar with your product so you don’t have to spend your time explaining what you do, but rather educating them on how you do it for them. ABM tactics for evaluation stage include special offers, invites to curated events, links to analyst reports and more.

Give your target account a personalized offer

When engaging with a target account at the evaluation stage, offering a gift can be an especially compelling tactic. Implementation is pretty simple. With your evaluators already identified, you’d only need to create the component content (like a popup or modal), and route the visitor to a form to fill out their address info. The sending of the gift can be fully automated using a platform like Sendoso.

A lower lift technique is to use a standard offer that requires no shipping coordination.  This can be something you offer all customers but don’t advertise, like waived onboarding fees or custom implementation.

Invite prospects to a curated event

Forming a peer set focused on solving common challenges is a powerful event tactic that we use ourselves, and that we’ve seen from companies like Segment.

Inside Mutiny, create a personalized invitation to an event that’s about your target account's vertical or use case. The component should drive to a landing page for a recurring event like a weekly webinar, or to a major tent pole event.

Link to a report with original research and data

A great way to establish your value for your target account and to elegantly position yourself in the ecosystem is to create reports with original research and data that others can reference. 

A lot of work goes into reports and original research – be sure to share it prominently with your target accounts

Once you create a report or white-paper, implementing this is as simple as placing a link to the report prominently on your home page or creating a banner that leads to a downloadable version of the report.

Swap out sections on your homepage to elevate competitor messaging

During evaluation, your prospect will be looking to see how your product differs from the alternatives that exist. Make it easy to stand out by creating a simple headline and body copy that calls out a prominent difference between you and a competitor. You can position this directly on the homepage of target accounts or those who have visited your site multiple times. 

If you’d like to keep your homepage content as is, you can also create a banner that links to a dedicated comparison page.

Give them the option to speak directly with the sales rep

If you’re already in the process of a deal, you can help streamline communication with a modal that links directly to the rep responsible for the account.

Use Salesforce to identify contacts at target accounts, and create a personalized banner or side pop for them that briefly gives context on the deal process and tells them who to contact. In the banner, you can easily link to the e-mail of the proper person on your team and you can even show their headshot.

In this example, inside Mutiny’s experience editor the user

wrote:‘mailto:rep@mycompany.com’ in the redirect field.

You could also include a link to a calendar service like Chili Piper or Calendly.

Decision and Customer Stage

Once your target account becomes a customer (congrats!!), your ABM journey still isn't done. You're going to want to continue to provide value so they stay customers, expand their account value, and so you can use their successes as marketing collateral to power your growth. Let's explore a few tactics that you can use.

Promote a tier upgrade

If you have a freemium model that a customer signed up for, you can create a personalized experience promoting your paid version. Mutiny identifies the visitor's company through IP and matches it to your Salesforce records to identify the current product or plan the visitor is using.

Explain the benefits of how the upsell will solve a problem for the customer. For example, increase your data team’s output by 2x with our full product suite.

Advanced and continual education content

Webinars and educational content are a great way for customers to get more value out of your product. If you’re hosting a webinar or you have playbooks to offer, they can be excellent resources for customer retention and growing brand affinity. Since customers are familiar with your website, they are more likely to ignore the homepage content, so you want to grab their attention before they login with tactics like using their first name in your headline or creating a modal or banner that highlights your resource.

Highlight new product features

As in the above example, above the fold on the homepage is a great place to put content that adds value for your customer. In this case, you can replace your headline with a new feature announcement, that includes your customer’s first name in the headline. You could also announce the new feature in a side pop with a prompt for the customer to talk to their CSM.

You could easily adapt this tactic for an upsell and use the banner or the headline copy on the homepage to promote a new product a customer can add to their plan.

Ask for reviews and referrals

Finally, to ease the path to a customer becoming an evangelist, you can create a modal that asks them to leave a review. Here, you might consider an exit intent modal on your blog or a resources page. Again, since you’ve already identified your visitor as a customer, you only need to create the modal content to run the personalization – and this can be done in minutes.

The modal can link directly to a site like G2 or Trustpilot.

Combining tactics

For added impact, you could combine tactics like referral and review requests, and new product highlights in a single homepage takeover.

At the top of the page, you can promote a referral, use the body content to promote new features and then ask for a review in the footer.

Conclusion

We've only scratched the surface in this post about ways you can personalize your website based on the stage of funnel your target account is in.

Of course, before creating content, ask yourself (or your sales counterpart):- what the distinct needs are at that specific stage?- what’s valuable for your target at that moment?- what's the best experience I can provide for the prospect at this stage?

Thinking from this perspective will often lead to surprising ideas. We’re excited to see how you use these tactics and what else you come up with that we haven’t imagined yet.