Smart Growth for Small & Medium Businesses With ABM

Partner Content

Being a marketer in 2021 “ain’t easy” as they say. As we observe our own marketing team, navigating the ongoing pandemic while shifting from in-person events to virtual wine tastings has been nothing short of miraculous. But, we’ve seen some great success stories in this shift to digital over the past 18 months. While there is still some uncertainty – one thing is clear: small and medium-sized businesses have no choice but to turn to smart growth in order to minimize risk in their company growth strategy.

What is smart growth? How can you make this a focus for 2022?

In short, smart growth is the process of doubling down on efficient growth strategies in order to preserve small business profits and/or cash reserves during uncertain times. Growing efficiently means you don’t require as much capital investment to add a new customer as you did before. Smart growth is as targeted as possible. Some might even call it “back to basics”. Figuring out what’s working well in the business and doing more of it. For some, this might look like performing a cohort analysis of your customers in order to understand which ones get the most value and satisfaction from your product. Once you know who your most valuable customers are, teams can focus and prioritize those types of businesses in sales and marketing. Speaking of customers, don’t forget that smart growth is full-funnel. What this means is that investing in the retention of your current customers is an important way to scale a small or medium company. Happy customers stay longer and improve Customer Lifetime Value. They spread the word about your company and help generate new customers too.

1. Sales and Marketing Must Partner on Account Segmentation
   After you analyse what’s working and who your best customers are, this should directly influence your “ideal customer profile”. Work with your partners in sales to bring this to life.
   
   
   
2. Use Data to Inform Smart Digital Advertising
   Small but mighty marketing teams need reliable strategies to update the marketing database with the right data to use for targeting. It’s important to source trusted business data from a third party but continue to focus on building your own first party data assets at the same time. 
   
   
   
3. Leverage Multi-Channel in Order to “Be Everywhere”
   Just because your team isn’t large and distributed, doesn’t mean that you can’t appear to “be everywhere” to your future customers. In reality, multi-channel ABM is the best way to make your business look big. Investing in an ABM platform that scales with you is a smart growth strategy instead of hiring ten more marketers. When prospects see the same tailored brand message reinforced everywhere (think ads, a website, and even email banners) there’s a multiplier effect on that message. We like to call this “channel stacking”.