How to Create an Effective Account-Based Marketing Funnel

Learn how to create an effective account-based marketing funnel that will help you increase sales and better target your customers.

With account-based marketing, you can get more out of your customer base by targeting specific accounts with tailored content and offers

 1. Know Your Target Audience

You need to know who you’re going after in order to make sense of where the money’s going. For example, let’s say you have a B2B fitness app for yoga instructors or entrepreneurs – you would want to focus on yogis, business owners, and other people that love doing things like running and hiking. Maybe you wouldn’t be interested in someone like me, but I’d definitely have some interest in it because I work in this field (yoga) and I enjoy having my own studio. If I had access to a gym or yoga studio, I am sure I could find other people to join the class or classes. Knowing who you are is key, and if you don’t know, then ask yourself questions like “Who is their closest friend?” and “What do they like the most about working out?” These things can help you narrow down your list.

2. Make sure You Have A Goal

Make sure you have a goal for each segment – one big goal, one smaller goal, different goals for each segment. In the case of any company, we might have something called “Product Goals” in which we want to reach our revenue goal by the end of December, or quarterly “Customer Goals” where we want to improve the number of new members after year end or another revenue goal like monthly email marketing (we get a lot of feedback and recommendations from subscribers). We may have multiple goals like these, depending on the industry you work in. Just make sure you keep track of these types of goals so you stay accountable.

3. Keep It Simple

Make sure you keep the product simple enough to get the job done. Don’t over complicate things, otherwise you’ll lose people who aren’t necessarily coming back for more. So, when you have a really good idea and start talking with potential clients, keep it simple. But make sure it doesn’t suck! When I first started at Google I tried to use too many features, like Facebook Groups and Instagram Reels for video conferencing. That was very convenient, but it did nothing for my sales funnel, so I cut all of them. The same goes for products. Try not to introduce any extra features unless you can prove what those functions have to do with getting the item to the targeted audience. There are lots of apps out there with tons of stuff to get through, so try not to overwhelm users just like you did by adding cool features in every iteration. Also remember that most users look for value, not gimmicks.

4. Reach Out First

You should reach out first to as many people as possible, even offline if possible, because people are always looking for something to motivate them to keep the ball rolling. Then, once you know who you’re pitching to, reach out to them via emails. Email is great because you can send automated emails to a particular group that are easy to respond to, and there are loads of email automation tools. And email is also easy to manage, so you can add more lists (and people) later on, or update your existing ones.

6. Use Tools To Help Build Engaging Accounts  & Profiles

Like anything else, software makes things simpler for us. Tools, such as analytics and CRM, allow us to build high quality profiles for ourselves and to go deeper into what our customers want from our services. As with everything, we have to pick what tools we’re going to use to achieve this – if not, we have no way to find out until we’ve tried everything on various platforms and come up with the right combination.

7. Set Up Campaign Tracking And Analytics

Create campaign tracking for both individual campaigns, but also all pages. Make sure your budget allows and allows tracking all individual campaigns for this and also all pages for all of them. Now, let’s assume we have 3 pages per row with 100 people in total, each with 10 rows. And then we have 5 pages per row, with 20 people, again with 100 rows. Or in our case, 30 people with 10 rows per page, 20 people with 30 rows per page, etc. After setting up tracking for our campaigns and pages, run tests and collect data. As the name implies, analytics and metrics measure metrics like average CTR, clicks, conversions, open rates, leads, etc. What you want to achieve and look at is finding out the top pages with what keywords people were clicked upon, the most common page titles and descriptions, who people interacted with through email on site emails, etc. All of this information helps you understand what works best for your audiences to get more out of your ads and generate more leads.

8. Be Able To Measure Success

For measuring success you can follow some interesting metrics:

Analytics : Total number of impressions, impressions/conversions, click through rate (CTR), Bounce rate, Open rate, time spent on site, etc.

: Total number of impressions, impressions/conversions, click through rate (CTR), Bounce rate, Open rate, time spent on site, etc. Charts: Top pages people viewed through email (e.g. Headlines)

Top pages people viewed through email (e.g. Headlines) Conversions : Number of sales generated due to ad placement, click through rate, etc.,

: Number of sales generated due to ad placement, click through rate, etc., Lead conversion ratio: Ad engagement x open rate.

Ad engagement x open rate. Keywords: Frequency and frequency of appearance across topics in social feeds, keywords used by competitors.

9. Increase Sales With Seamless Path Across Social Platforms

The next step is to connect all your social media accounts, so your content is visible to everyone, but more importantly this improves the efficiency and reach from your posts. Look at the following graph below to learn more about how this will happen.

Next, if you have the choice between using your website and your blog, make your blog the bigger part of your digital presence, since it has a much higher chance of making a difference in people’s lives. Remember though that the primary objective of website builders and bloggers isn’t to get traffic from search engines, but to help visitors find the information they need. Bloggers and website builders usually have less time available so they often have to spend more on SEO and technical skills, so if you are a blogger or a web developer, consider using your platform or WordPress on the frontend, instead of building the entire website.

10. Optimize Every Post & Page

Optimize each post, every single page. Even if you try to optimize every one of them, Google prefers HTML, CSS, JavaScript instead of image files. Optimization is important for SEO because Google’s algorithms prioritize images in documents of lower quality. Therefore, it is essential that your text has an H1 tag or alt tag, to indicate its category, and to prevent duplicates among different categories. To add an image file, you’ll need to edit the code of your website, and copy/paste the link of your image that is located at https://www.google.com/images?q=YOUR_IMAGE_URL into the code area of the document before you paste it. Lastly, you need to make sure that your pictures work across all platforms.

Final Thoughts

There are thousands of articles and resources that support this approach and each strategy, but none that have helped me so much and made my efforts more streamlined and effective. Take whatever approaches you think you can take to get more out of your social posts and your pages by creating engaging, easy to read, informative posts and pages, and more importantly, do proper testing of strategies so you can implement and measure their impact.