Most B2B marketers are in fact using a fair amount of strategies related to account-based marketing even without knowing. Working at a B2B company means having to sell their products/services to a specific set of prospects, usually other businesses, by reaching out to target personas within these businesses.
To achieve this, marketers leverage a combination of both inbound and outbound marketing strategies which usually includes emails, outdoor events, webinars and ads among other things.
Account-based marketing essentially is just a more reformed and well thought out version of the above, where instead of going behind multiple personas across a multitude of accounts ABM focuses on specific personas and segments within your target market.
In this article, we shall try to explain why the use of account-based marketing should be considered.
A simple way to look at account-based marketing is to think of it as a way to communicate and bond with a company’s specific target accounts. Instead of taking it as a one-to-one approach, the ABM technique is far more advantageous when used as a one-to-many kind of approach. In this sense, any enterprise-level B2B brand that has more or less 1,000 employees, should have a dedicated team for account-based marketing to help them with the following;
As time passes by, we get to see just how effective inbound marketing is when gauging the attention of highly targeted prospects towards relevant content that is owned by your business. In the same way, account-based marketing makes the most of coordinated marketing tactics by enhancing the targeting ability and reaching out to a company or an account’s decision-makers. Simply put, account-based marketing helps your marketing team to take their mass marketing approach and target a certain market specifically chosen for successful results.
A huge number of companies are already using account-based marketing strategies even more so after the pandemic situation rendered traditional marketing quite ineffective. The following data reveals the percentage of companies using ABM and their respective revenue stats.
Note: aforementioned data was shared in a presentation regarding ABM by SiriusDecisions’ VP & Group Director, Megan Heuer.
This data points out the challenges of B2B companies making somewhere between $101 million and $1 billion because they are “underutilizing” account-based marketing. The companies existing within 18% of the said data should be improving their techniques to scale their growth even further. Streamlining the expansion of marketing efforts could also help such companies.
But irrespective of a company’s revenue, implementation of a full-fledged ABM strategy is feasible and effective for most of the B2B brands with a 1,000 or less number of employees. The only thing that holds back people from giving account-based marketing a try is that they incorrectly consider it a “new” marketing concept and stick to their outdated, inefficient, and inconvenient marketing practices.
It is important to make up your mind about using account-based marketing by checking its compatibility and effectiveness for your company. According to expert marketers, ABM works for you if you are familiar with any of the following situations:
The aforementioned situation requires ABM to unlock your marketing team’s full potential and target each one of the target accounts appropriately. It ultimately increases the number of your loyal clients which is every marketing strategy’s end game.
There is another way to know that an account-based marketing approach could come in handy if your company is observing ineffective sales models which are usually high with direct sales force, less number of sales with a third-party channel, and an insignificant percentage of inside sales.
When you reach a certain point where advertisement does not do the trick. When you notice that there is a total lack of coordination between your sales and marketing team, then it is time to give ABM a try to help your company get back on track, reduce the size of sales force, maximize ROI figures, by establishing a perfect balance between marketing and sales.
For a lot of business owners, it is hard to accept the reasoning why should they account-based marketing for long-term success unless they understand its clear benefits which are:
By implementing account-based marketing strategies, B2B companies can achieve more by doing less. When you do account-based marketing smartly, it becomes possible for account managers to search, target, market to, sell and upsell a growing number of contacts within each account. All of this happens before you feel the need of hiring another manager to share responsibilities with.
This way, account-based marketing ensures that no talent is wasted and there is less risk of getting involved in the hire and fire culture. If your team sets up an ABM strategy smartly, then losing one contact is no longer a problem because several new contacts show up quickly.
Marketing attempts that have been traditionally used are not as compact and precise as the account-based marketing techniques. But the success rate of ABM is much higher than any other marketing practice. It is extremely accurate, smartly targeted, highly personalised as compared to inbound and outbound strategies that take up a lot of time and resources to set up and execute.
Being a sniper-style marketing practice, ABM is easier to keep a track of whenever your team wishes to check its efficiency. Measuring the return on investment and other related statistics for an ABM strategy is easy and quick. At any point, account managers can check online activity from ABM accounts, their response rate, internal stakeholder feedback, etc.
As mentioned above, in the case of account-based marketing, tracking every inbound and outbound marketing activity, its success rate, and other details of team activities becomes easier and quite transparent. This helps account managers to set up team goals effectively so that every person under their command can do their best to find, reach out to, and market products/services to some of the chosen prospects.
Similarly, analyzing each campaign becomes a straightforward task that allows one to draw meaningful conclusions quickly. By concentrating on a smaller set of targeted accounts and channelling all your energy and marketing efforts towards them, you can expect an encouraging result. Comparing end-of-quarter results and even forecast goals is a piece of cake when you are using account-based marketing.
Everything from TV series on OTT platforms to videos on Youtube is being personalized based on users preferences and behavior. One of the major reasons being this improves engagement and eventually revenue.
ABM works on similar principle, usually higher the value of the account higher the personalisation would be. Sometimes to the level of 1-to-1 personalisation for extremely large enterprise accounts.
This basically leads to a higher level of engagement and conversion rates when compared to traditional marketing strategies.
If you ever have been in a meeting between sales and marketing teams you would understand when I say these 2 departments rarely see eye-to-eye.
A lot of B2B marketers fail to understand that the sales and marketing teams are not necessarily different from one another but rather a great combination of people with similar goals but a slightly different approach.
But this becomes difficult especially when Marketing KPIs do not match sales KPIs.
In case of ABM though the KPIs are simple and usually align with both marketing and sales goals and by process they need to agree upon these KPIs before ABM can even be attempted.
As a proven way of enhancing marketing effectiveness for B2B marketers, account-based marketing is a sure way to drive revenue and increase sales for a company. It turns out to be the best kind of long-term investment that any B2B brand owner can make to successfully drive awareness and bring quality traffic to their business. It is important to note that ABM is not a replacement for mass marketing initiatives but rather a different approach where marketers concentrate on specific accounts.
It is the next-level marketing strategy by which you can reach ROI faster than you would have with the help of general marketing campaigns that require more resources and time.
