Hold All the Aces With Account-Based Marketing

It’s ABM-this and ABM-that. Everyone seems to be talking about Account-based marketing these days.

But what is ABM? And should you even care to know about it?

Well yes, you should because this strategy has a high success rate, with 85% marketers swearing it brought better ROI than other marketing investments. Companies practicing ABM generate 208% more revenue for their marketing efforts and 100% enhanced engagement with C-suite targets.

Brands that aced ABM:

• GumGum used insights from social media about T-mobile CEO’s love for batman and grabbed a deal with them by publishing a comic book where the CEO was cast as Batman and T-mobile as a sidekick.
• Snowflake has aligned their marketing and sales and targeted customers with tailored content via 500 simultaneous account-based marketing campaigns, each one for specific accounts. None of the content is gated and is present on open web.

With ABM, your business can flourish. Read on to know-how.

How is it different from traditional marketing?

Traditional marketing is like shooting darts in every possible direction hoping a few would hit the target. The target here is a bag full of prospects, which is handled by different departments in the company, often operating in silos.

Account-based marketing, on the other hand, is shooting selected darts at specific targets with hyper-personalized content. It is a must-have, especially in the B2B sector because it is more one-on-one and highly targeted on those key accounts that are of high value.

Why should you care?

When an account-centric approach is implemented, the benefits are significant, which are:

• Alignment of Sales and Marketing: With the alignment of sales and marketing you can save trillions of dollars per year. Often individual initiatives and strategies by sales and marketing can lead to lost customers. When the effort is orchestrated together on specific key accounts, the results will be improved, as focus won’t be divided among the teams.
• Boosts ROI: ROI is the clearest metric to understand the success of any marketing strategy. Since you set specific goals for specific accounts, you can recognize if your efforts received the desired result. 89% of organizations found ABM driven strategies to be higher on ROI and 30% found that their ROI increased by 21%.
• Better Campaign Production: ABM doesn’t let you boil the ocean. It is smart and even smarter when you stack it up with marketing automation tools at your disposal. Your CRM will help you get an idea of the customer accounts that bring you higher revenue and your marketing automation tool will help you pursue those high-value customers with targeted campaigns.
• Bigger Deals: When you are not wasting valuable resources on cold leads, you tend to keep focus on those high value accounts and craft hyper-personalized content that makes customers tick. 91% of B2B marketers stated they could bag quality deals with ABM.
• Optimum Utilization of Resources: When all efforts are geared only toward winning a few key business accounts, resources can be synced together on those specific accounts.
• Stronger Customer Relationships: Think more on a personalized level for key individuals, as opposed to mass messaging. When approaching a specific account, it’s essential that you spend time and effort discovering the pain points of your customers. You can create content that resonates with them or provide them credible answers, that builds trust between you and them.

ABM success stories are not specific to big players, you can tailor your ABM strategy and create your own story.

How to create the perfect ABM playbook?

As great as ABM sounds, the $64,000 question is how to craft the best ABM strategy. Here’s how:

1. Alliance Between Sales & Marketing: It may seem daunting at first but with sales and marketing aligned, focus is narrowed on specific accounts which improves lead nurturing and conversion plus shortens the sales cycles.

2. Target: Select the right account which is in need of the solution you provide, understand the verticals of their operations, and how their processes run. Unified resources of both sales and marketing will help you profile the target better. Identify the right target with predictive tools like Radius , Infer, Everstring, etc.

3. Customer Under Microscope: Conduct in-depth research of the target and dig deeper into their universe with technology to understand their touchpoints. Learn about their key stakeholders, how decision making flows in their organization, and who are the key members. God is in the details, so leave no stone unturned to unlock the potential you can get from each piece of information that you find.

4. Content Creation: Do your homework and customers will love it, just like GumGum did. Content should be fashioned according to the customer, it should be clear, engaging, and should resonate with customers.
Determine gaps in your content marketing efforts and address what your customer is looking for, create something you and your customer both care about or provide new insight into the latest trends, anything that helps you to stand out.

5. Communication Channel: With so many options in the digital landscape, which pipelines should you use to share information with your customers?
– Imagine communicating an urgent message to Gen Z via a pager, can you? No! Choose the right medium according to the persona of your customer.
– Suppose your client is more active on LinkedIn, you can delight them on with articles or insights on new trends, similarly, if they use Twitter you need to craft crisp content to blow them away.

6. Execution: You can choose the approach of execution according to your customer, whether it is via emails, website personalization or dynamic CTAs. Marketing automation can act as fuel to your ABM fire. Stack your predictive tools to identify targets and build custom email campaigns to nurture and convert leads. Tools like Marketo, Eloqua, and Pardot are available to engage and delight customers online.

7. Measurement: Diagnosing the outcome of your strategy is a must, only then can you know what works and what doesn’t.
The results should be measured against the expected outcomes to determine your next step:

– Was the content engaging for the end-user?
– Did they drive any value out of it?
– Was any revenue generated?
– Where can we improve?

Measuring against these metrics will give you better insights.

Verdict

“Getting the like is easy. It’s a light action. Anything else requires trust.” – Jon Loomer

This trust is built with account-based marketing, as it pulls all the tools under one roof and gives a more complete view towards the customer.

This strategy will help win quality leads and add value to grow your business. Tweak your strategy with automation, chatbots or predictive analytic tools to achieve more.

Get the show on the road with ABM.

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