ABM (account-based marketing) is a relatively recent phenomenon. It's a marketing technique that concentrates your efforts on certain accounts instead of individuals. While it is a technique to increase revenue from significantly large clients, ABM is anything but a simple time-saving option. When creating content, activities, and campaigns, the marketing team may focus on the people involved with that account rather than the sector as a whole. The marketing is totally focused on one single consumer pr set of large value customer, which has both benefits and drawbacks.
While an ABM strategy can yield positive results, it can also be difficult to implement effectively; therefore, it is important to weigh the advantages and disadvantages before embarking on your ABM journey.
Let’s start with the advantages of ABM first.
Unlike traditional marketing approaches, account-based marketing facilitates and requires the sales and marketing teams to closely connect with each other in order to streamline the process. Aligning sales and marketing teams will allow businesses to focus on specific accounts and provide a more personalized approach to each account. Moreover, businesses that have marketing and sales teams coordinated have a higher customer retention rate as well as a higher sales win rate than standard marketing techniques.
From a marketing standpoint, you'll get to know the stakeholders of your targeted accounts well and be able to build campaigns and content that provides greater value. It is definitely worthwhile if you just have a few top accounts that account for the majority of your target audience. This may be a major help in building customer advocates for your business, especially when it comes to nurturing connections with existing consumers.
These interactions will help you and your customer develop connections. This will facilitate in gaining a deeper understanding of your consumers as trust grows and the connection is nurtured, allowing you to improve your customization efforts. You should gather information on your customer and their activities throughout the engagement. This information will assist you in successfully planning and executing future ABM projects.
When it comes to marketing efforts, it all boils down to how effectively they are influencing the overall business revenue. According to 89% of marketers, ABM has helped them boost ROI more than traditional marketing strategies. Due to the data-driven approach of account-based marketing, it is easier to measure ROI and link it back to revenue than other types of B2B marketing tactics. B2B marketers have reported a 208% surge in revenue along with a 50% increase in average deal size after replacing traditional marketing approaches with ABM.
ABM is focused on accounts rather than just prospects. Because ABM metrics differ from standard demand generation marketing metrics, your assessment and reporting should reflect this as well. Laying the groundwork for your customers with defined goals and KPIs for your campaigns is the very first stage of ABM reporting. In the end, ABM is about coordinating teams to close greater sales in less time. You can establish the efficacy of your ABM strategy by concentrating on three essential factors: efficient and productive spending, marketing and sales coordination, and faster deal closure.
A successful ABM strategy guarantees that marketing and sales are centered around the same set of target accounts. Focusing on a data-driven, prioritized group of accounts allows you to put your money and time to better use. Higher success rates and shorter sales cycles are the results of a targeted, effective ABM strategy.
However, in the case of ABM, there are advantages, as well as disadvantages—similar to any other marketing approach. Here is a list of five frequent pitfalls to using ABM as an element of your promotional strategic approach that is worth considering.
Since pros of ABM are out of the way, here are the cons.
ABM requires not only requires your sales and marketing team to sync but also requires all the teams within marketing to cater their processes, content and plans inline with the ABM goals. Essentially, you would want your content team to dedicate time to create content specific to the ABM target customer(s), paid-marketing team to create campaigns targeting these customers, email marketing team to run email campaigns targeting them and events team to go to events where these high ticket customers usually are present.
This requires significant effort for a good amount of time.
Like any other marketing ABM takes time more so when you are creating specific content and planning for individual clients or groups. This basically means every set of target customers would have a significant lead time for prep and then for actually running and nurturing these leads. Add lead time on conversation and the entire decision making process associated with enterprise clients, you would have to pre-plan ABM well in advance if you are hoping to hit your revenues goals using it.
ABM by its definition requires in sync effort not only between marketing and sales but all the the teams within marketing including content, performance marketing and email to name a few.
This is easier said than done. Every team involved would need to first align themselves with a common goal which is already hard considering team KPI differ within marketing.
Account-based marketing is an effective method for generating demand and leads. It enables specific customer customization and customization. Like every marketing technique, ABM might not be for everyone. Making your own list of advantages and disadvantages can aid you in determining how ABM might – or might not – go with your overall business strategy.
Making sure you're on the same page as your salespeople and the rest of the executive team can help you establish objectives for your entire marketing initiative and ensure that when your techniques develop, you're still able to satisfy the demands of your customers and prospects.
