Raise Your Value to Referrers With Account-Based Marketing

Sustaining your referral relationships and patient pipeline may have gotten more challenging in recent months thanks to the ongoing disruptions of the pandemic. With the options for your liaisons or other members of your team to meet face-to-face curtailed, some common points of contact are limited. Now and into the future, it will be critical to find innovative new ways to communicate and deliver value to this vital audience.

One such solution is to digitally bolster your outreach efforts. Enter account-based marketing (ABM). This laser-focused form of digital advertising allows you to connect one-to-one with highly specific recipients, such as the individual decision makers within your referral sources. If you thought digital “retargeting” ads that follow users across the web based on browsing habits are eerily targeted and specific, brace yourself.

ABM in a Nutshell

ABM provides a focused approach to marketing that allows you to proactively identify the “accounts” with the greatest opportunity for growth and channel your marketing energy into personalized messages directed to their unique pain points. You pick the specific companies, buildings, titles and people you want to reach, and then you specify the unique message you want to deliver to each one of them.

For senior care providers, this can play a powerful role in supporting high-value engagements with referrers – offering the precision to reach specific people in key roles at organizations you want to connect with. For example, you could zero in on certain disease states relevant to a particular referrer and direct those ads to them exclusively.

ABM Flips the Funnel

Account-based marketing flips the traditional lead nurturing funnel on its head. While marketing often focuses on lead generation, an account-based approach begins with identifying and targeting your highest-impact referral sources. You can then serve personalized messaging to individual decision makers, such as a hospital discharge planner, physician’s office manager, NP or PA. Here’s a quick overview of what the process looks like.

1. Identify and Expand Your Audience: First, Transcend works with your marketing and referrer liaison teams to define a list of target providers who are the best fit for your organization. To do this, it’s crucial that your team agree on your ideal referrer profile. Next, we take your list of target accounts and expand the profiles with the information of key individual stakeholders and decision makers.

2. Personalized and Engaging Content: We then target your marketing approach to the individual as much as possible, developing tailored messaging and creative that will reach specific decision makers with a one-to-one focus.

3. Activate and Connect: With ABM’s deep engagement and intent data in hand, you can help your liaison team identify who to reach out to when, and what pain points to discuss with each of them to continue building strong relationships.

4. Measure: Transcend continuously analyzes performance data focused on account-level KPIs, which are used to fine tune your ABM campaigns as well as guide other referral relationship communications and activities.

Wielding the Double-Edged Sword

ABM’s power is its ability to deliver a new level of specificity to individual recipients, which can offer a highly effective and cost-saving approach, but only if your aim is accurate. To maximize your marketing budget, it’s critical to lead with a strategic foundation that ensures you are targeting the right people with the right message at the right time.

To learn more about how Transcend’s strategic approach can help you reframe your value, more meaningfully connect with key decision makers and grow to your potential, view our deeper dive on ABM or contact christine@transcend-strategy.com.