Since making an appearance on Google Trends in 2015, Account Based Marketing (or ABM, for short) has well and truly graduated from being a marketing buzzword to one of B2B’s most sophisticated and celebrated marketing strategies.
If you’re unfamiliar with the term, Account Based Marketing is simply a marketing strategy that flips the traditional B2B demand generation funnel on its head. We love Marketo’s definition, below:
“Account-based marketing (ABM) is a strategic approach to lead generation in which your time and resources target a key group of specific accounts. Lead generation draws in the numbers, and ABM qualifies and targets those leads before you market to them. In other words, by inverting the traditional early-stage marketing process, you target your campaigns to specific customers the moment they enter your funnel, and you do it with real-time, personalized content.”
So why should you consider implementing an Account Based Marketing Strategy? Let’s take a look at three core reasons.
1. Sales and marketing teams evolve to work in harmony
The days of marketing and sales teams being siloed off from each other are coming to an end. With Account Based Marketing, the walls between sales and marketing are broken down as each function must evolve to support the other strategically.
To effectively treat accounts as individual markets in and of themselves, marketing and sales teams must collaborate to identify these accounts, and then to plan strategic campaigns to connect with them throughout every stage of the buyer’s journey.
The result of this is almost always a better customer experience and a more harmonious, results-driven organisation.
2. Less waste and more success
In a sense, Account Based Marketing could be described as the application of the Pareto Principle to B2B marketing.
With more traditional B2B marketing strategies, there has been so much emphasis on marketers generating as much demand as possible. However, the evidence shows that a more mass-market approach leads to more generalised messaging which, in turn, leads to a lower conversion rate.
On the other hand, ABM forces marketers to focus their efforts and budgets on a series of much narrower, clearly defined targets. As a result, their activities have a much higher success rate, and they tend to use a lot fewer resources to achieve these optimised results.
In comparison with ABM’s laser-targeted approach, more traditional marketing efforts begin to look wasteful, inefficient and ineffective. Wouldn’t you agree?
3. Return on investment is more likely
According to the ITSMA Account Based Marketing Survey, 84% of companies say that Account Based Marketing delivers a higher ROI than other types of marketing.
So why is this the case? There are a few factors at play here.
Firstly, ABM allows you to connect and engage with multiple stakeholders within single accounts. This is critical because a buying decision is likely to be made by a group of people rather than a single individual - especially in larger organisations.
Secondly, communications stemming from an ABM strategy are more likely to be personalised, relevant and received at the right time. This means that people are more likely to remember the key messaging and take action on the embedded calls to action.
Finally, when combined with Artificial Intelligencecapabilities and an integrated approach, ABM campaigns can reach prospects across multiple channels, providing brands with true real-time opportunities.
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If you’re looking for a more integrated approach to B2B marketing that allows you to engage with multiple stakeholders within an organisation, adopting an Account Based Marketing approach should be at the top of your to-do list.
Get in touch with our Managing Partner, Philip Martin, at philip.martin@dma-partners.com to discuss how we can help you get started.
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