What is Account-based Marketing?
Business-to-business (B2B) account-based marketing (ABM) is an approach to marketing that targets specific accounts within a business' industry. It uses personalized messaging designed to improve acquisition and retention, increase customer relationships and improve the bottom line.
Why is Account-based Marketing Important?
ABM's goal is to align sales and marketing teams in ways that optimize revenue. It requires the collaboration of sales reps and marketing teams to identify which accounts to focus resources on--only the best, most valuable customers and prospects. Then, after customer profiling, these teams customize messages and decided on marketing activities to convert sales.
ABM takes a more holistic, automated and customized marketing approach compared to traditional marketing. It’s a perfect strategy to upsell and cross-sell existing accounts, while also connecting with prospective customers. And, it has the potential to give you the highest value from accounts.
Account-based Marketing Basics
What are the Benefits of Account-Based Marketing?
This marketing method is gaining popularity among B2B companies that need to focus on bigger accounts or enhance the value of current accounts. If you're striving to focus on specific target accounts, or you want to shorten a long sales cycle, ABM efforts offer unique benefits over traditional, or full-funnel, marketing.
Requires sales and marketing alignment: Unlike traditional marketing that only benefits if the two collaborate, ABM requires the two teams to join efforts.
Accelerated sales cycle: ABM uses personalized messages and marketing automation to deliver the right content to each person at the right time. This streamlines the time and resources from initial point of contact to sales conversion.
Efficient use of resources: By turning attentions to a limited number of accounts, you're able to only pursue marketing activities needed by those accounts, rather than experimenting with different tactics aimed at mass audiences.
Clearer return on investment (ROI): ABM makes it easier to assign marketing expenses to specific accounts. You can then compare it against the sales numbers for each account.
Consistent customer experiences: Effective ABM strategies create a recurring sense of satisfaction and connection with your customer base. To achieve this, focus on prompt communications, campaigns, personalized messaging and relevant product and pricing.
Increased engagement: Throughout the ABM process, your targets feel as if they are the only audience. You offer consistent, personalized experiences that delight them, which captures their interest and drives them to connect with you.
Increased relevance with your customer base: Because you're delivering personalized campaigns, you're also demonstrating how specific products or services address the unique needs of each account. This makes your business their most ideal, relevant choice. By building relationships and relevance, you'll find it's easier to retain customers.
Enhanced business profitability: After focusing on your highest-value accounts, you're able to track your ROI, retain customers that deliver the best margins and you will learn to grow these accounts over time--leading to revenue growth.
What are the Challenges of this Approach to Marketing and How to Overcome Them?
Navigating through ABM program implementation can be challenging. It requires teams to rethink their relationships and learn to collaborate. It requires rearranging resources, scalability of processes and applying new procedures most people aren't familiar with. But this B2B marketing strategy is extremely beneficial when you learn to overcome the headwinds.
Uniting marketing and sales teams and aligning their goals: Traditionally, these departments function in silos and work toward their own goals. Aligning sales and marketing goals can be one of the biggest challenges of ABM. So, bring the teams together for joint planning sessions and keep the doors open for regular communications. Consider establishing shared resources and CRM dashboards to facilitate transparency and idea sharing.
Budgeting resources for ABM programs: New ABM programs may need more money for tools, technology or staff to personalize campaigns for different accounts. Allocating resources can be difficult, especially if budgets are tight and funds are already allocated to traditional marketing programs. To get funding for ABM programs, create a strategy that connects the ABM programs to overall business goals. Be sure to illustrate where some resources will shift and the financial benefits of targeting high-value accounts.
Researching the best tools and technologies: There are many ABM tools available to you, and each has pros and cons. Conducting the necessary research and dedicating the time to this process can be overwhelming for teams. To add to the complexity, some of these tools may need to integrate with existing CRMs, or require training. Before purchasing new tools, consult with your IT department on ways to streamline the integration process to ensure a smooth transition.
Shifting measurement and reporting processes: One of the key benefits of ABM is more accurately measuring ROI. However, this might mean traditional marketing metrics won’t align with your new objectives. Implementing this strategy might require new attribution processes and metrics to measure the success of ABM programs. Gathering and measuring the data could be more complex, particularly if your teams already lack marketing reporting tools.
Scaling ABM programs as business grows: If you are targeting a few existing customers at first, implementing ABM programs might seem easy. But as the number of larger accounts grows, personalizing marketing campaigns will prove to be difficult if your tools can't grow with your needs. To avoid this, be forward thinking and anticipate potential needs and ensure you will have the automated marketing platforms needed for larger ABM campaigns. Also, consider your teams' existing workflows. Ask yourself if your processes and teams can handle growing account lists.
Connecting with key decision makers in target audiences: As with any sales process, teams need to identify their target audience. This is more challenging with ABM programs. Not only is research needed to gather names and contact information, but you need to know what makes that person tick. You must understand their needs, problems, thought processes and office hierarchy. You also need to know if there are other people influencing the buying process. Research these individuals through social media, online searches, industry resources and third-party data. The more you know, the more you can deliver an exceptional experience and build a deeper relationship.
How Does Account-based Marketing Work?
From Beginning to End, What Does this Unique Sales Process Look Like?
ABM is different from traditional marketing. Instead of generating inbound leads to fill your sales funnel, your team does research to identity your ideal customer and initiates the relationship. For example, in traditional marketing strategies, your team creates a blog post to attract search traffic, a website visitor connects through a contact form, then the appropriate teams follow up with communications. In ABM, you identify the company and individuals you want to target. Then, you begin establishing a relationship through personal communication.
Let us explain further by sharing an overview of the ABM planning process and the goals and activities within each phase.
Steps of the Account-based Marketing planning process
Step 1: Identity Highest-value, Target Accounts
Gather your teams and analyze your most profitable existing accounts. Then, ask them to identify high-value prospective customers.
These ideal customers need to be a strong fit for your company. The existing accounts should be open minded to expanding their purchases with you. New customers must be open minded to changing providers and switching to your solutions.
In ABM, you must remember not all leads are equal. You must weed out the accounts that don't align with your strategic vision or won’t help meet your goals. To help narrow lists and identify the best target accounts, have your teams answer these questions:
Does this account have an immediate need for our products or services?
Would this account be willing and able to pay our prices?
Will there be opportunities to upsell or cross-sell our solutions?
Step 2: Identify People within the Buying Process
As with any sales and marketing process, your teams need to identify who makes the purchasing decisions. Is there one person or multiple people involved in the buying process? Beyond deciding who makes the purchasing decision, does anyone influence the purchase? In manufacturing or industrial businesses, input from factory workers might influence the key decision maker.
Identify the needs, concerns and the best ways to engage with all parties involved. Some people might require a face-to-face meeting, while others might want personalized emails.
Step 3: Plan Specific Campaigns
Create personalized campaigns that will engage your contacts. Keep in mind the key to a successful AMB program is nurturing B2B leads. Outline what messages are best for each point of contact. What is the unique sales pitch for each person and any supporting resources? Consider thought leadership pieces, case studies, testimonials, etc.
Step 4: Decide on Effective Marketing Channels
To reach targeted accounts, decide on the must-have ABM marketing tools and channels. This list may vary depending on the person you need to reach or the messages you need to send.
Remember, you need to personalize this experience. Not everyone will engage with emails, and not every point of contact will react the same way to direct mail.
Step 5: Build a Timeline
Imagine the entire sales process and what each step entails. Have your team map out a timeline to distribute the messaging--who should get them and when. Make sure the communications are diverse and consistent. On this timeline, identify members of your team and their assigned task(s). This builds transparency and accountability for everyone involved.
Step 6: Implement Account-based Marketing Activities
Once you outline the details, it's time to engage with your targets. These campaigns can incorporate a variety of marketing tactics, including email, direct mail, hosting special events, or paid ads.
Step 7: Measure Account-based Marketing Campaign Performance and Adjust as Needed
Measuring ABM success is unique because it involves both sales and marketing, unlike traditional marketing activities. Traditional marketing metrics focus on engagement of individuals (i.e., user engagement, social media followers and contact form submissions). ABM metrics highlight the engagement of an entire account (i.e., conversion rate, average deal size, customer lifetime value and customer acquisition cost). More specifically, ABM metrics seek to answer:
Is the account moving through the sales funnel and getting closer to converting a sale?
Are the margins and revenue for an account improving?
Are sales cycles shortening?
Is someone creating new accounts?
If the answers to these questions are no, ask yourself what activities or adjustments are needed to meet your goals? Regardless of what strategies you have, marketing is always an evolution. Look for opportunities to improve processes.
The Future of Account-based Marketing
As more people understand the benefits of ABM for B2B businesses, operations will become more agile and efficient. During uncertain times, including employment shortages, organizations need to streamline processes and grow the bottom line. There will likely be less personnel to drive sales and fewer resources to feed traditional marketing strategies. As a result, sales and marketing teams need to be aligned and learn to function efficiently with smaller teams.
Technological advancements are making the ABM implementation process easier and more appealing. In the past, people may have been interested in using an account-based approach but they lacked the necessary tools and resources. Now, marketing automation and AI technology are paving the way for ABM platforms to be impactful.
The journey toward ABM is an exciting path where efficiency, technology and strategy converge to create unparalleled potential. To successfully navigate this environment, connect with our crew, or check out our additional resources below. Our experience in manufacturing and B2B sectors can help shape the future of your marketing programs.
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