What if you were able to direct your marketing towards high-value accounts, rather than spreading it far and wide? Enter Account-Based Marketing (ABM), which does exactly that.
It’s a marketing strategy that brings marketing and sales teams together to target key accounts through highly personalized campaigns, designed to resonate with each individual account’s needs.
But what is it about ABM that has the business-to-business (B2B) marketing industry buzzing? In this blog, we’ll dissect some key thoughts, values, approaches, and ways that you can measure your success within ABM, as well as how it stacks up to traditional inbound marketing.
By the time you’ve finished with this guide, you’ll know how ABM can change the trajectory of your B2B marketing and why this is regarded as one of the most powerful marketing strategies for sustained business growth.
What Is Account-Based Marketing?
What is Account-Based Marketing (ABM)? ABM is a growth strategy that’s highly strategic, where marketing works closely with sales to identify high-value target accounts, and then create highly personalized programs designed to win these targets.
Where traditional marketing broadly targets an audience in the hope of identifying leads, ABM provides a direct line to a handful of specific companies, treating each of them like a “market of one.” Focusing on those high-priority accounts, ABM ensures funds are utilized strategically to forge valuable relationships with key stakeholders.
Key Features of ABM
- Quality-Focused Methodology
ABM is about quality over quantity and targets the accounts that have the best long-term potential. - Marketing/Sales Alignment
ABM is all about working together. Marketing develops custom content to help sales close deals. - Tailored Campaigns
Content, messages, and offers are customized for individual accounts to tackle their particular pain points and priorities.
Why ABM is Important
ABM is a must-have for companies that want to augment their B2B strategy, especially in saturated sectors. Here’s why it matters:
- Improves ROI
ABM is among the most ROI-friendly marketing tactics around. ITSMA states that 87% of marketers agree that ABM generates better ROI than any other marketing effort. - Enhances the Customer Journey
ABM Personalization adds value and helps personalize the experience for the customer, which in turn leads to trust and loyalty. You can position your business as the perfect solution for them. - Unifies Sales and Marketing Efforts
One of the greatest advantages of ABM is the synchronization between sales and marketing representatives that it creates. This direction provides a clarity of purpose, message, and roles that “clearly achieves better results.”
ABM vs. Inbound Marketing
Both Account-Based Marketing and inbound marketing strategies are common, but come with different approaches and focus and meet different audiences.
ABM:
- Targets high-value accounts specifically.
- Emphasizes depth and personalization for smaller audiences.
- Integrates marketing and sales programs to facilitate direct contact with accounts.
Inbound Marketing:
- Creates broader-based content to cast a wider net and generate more organic leads.
- Focuses on volume to create more and more leads that are nurtured into interests.
- Depends on tactics like blogs, SEO and downloadable resources to attract potential customers.
Inbound marketing is great for top-of-the-funnel stuff, but ABM kicks in later in the funnel to talk to decision makers and get deals through for larger deals. Most of the time a combination of the two makes for a great mixture.
The Essentials of an ABM Strategy
A successful ABM strategy takes time, purpose, and a shared working of minds. Here are the building blocks of an ABM strategy that works:
Account Selection
The first step of ABM is pinpointing the accounts that best match with your business strategy. Segment based on company size, industry, revenue opportunity, and relationships. It’s a lot about choosing the accounts that display the closest fit.
Account Insights and Research
It’s all about really knowing each target account. For your campaigns, collect data about their business goals, challenges and decision makers. There are also tools that can help with this, including LinkedIn Sales Navigator and account-based analytics platforms.
Targeted Messaging and Content
ABM is all about that custom content. Create customer-specific case studies, solution demonstrations and product collateral materials.
Channel Optimization
Utilize various marketing channels, including email campaigns, targeted advertising and account-specific webinars to reach key stakeholders.
Sales and Marketing Alignment
Clearly communicate, share broader goals and co-ordinate strategies between sales and marketing teams so that any new efforts come from the same shape place.
Evaluating ABM Campaign Success
How do you measure the success of your ABM program? And as with any strategy, you need to determine if you’re succeeding:
- Engagement Metrics
Monitor how engaged your target accounts are with your campaigns. Are they opening emails, clicking links or showing up to events? - Pipeline Contribution
Assess the number of opportunities in the target accounts and the contribution of ABM accounts to your total sales pipeline. - Account Progression
Track to see if your outreach is getting accounts to the right next point in the sales funnel and eventually to conversion. - Overall ROI
Last, contrast the revenue from ABM accounts against campaign costs to get to the ROI. Because of the precision of ABM, ROI is usually pretty good if you’re working with properly executed campaigns.
The Evolution of Account-Based Marketing
ABM’s future is, in fact, looking bright, particularly as personalization at scale becomes more accessible through new technologies.
AI/ML technologies are quickly improving ABM tactics, helping companies anticipate customer demands better and automate tasks.
Also, with rising competition in the market, companies are expected to focus on maintaining important accounts and generating consistent growth over time, and for this they will have to turn to ABM.
So if you want to try out Account-Based Marketing in your business, keep in mind that success depends on collaboration, personalized targeting and constant measurement.
By having an ABM strategy in place now that is organized and focused, you’re positioning your company to experience large quantities of growth and long-term relationships later on.
