Whether your business is invested in warehouse solutions software, hardware, or consulting, warehouse automation sits at a nexus of an industry that requires a long marketing reach. If your goal is to increase brand awareness within the warehouse management sphere, it’s likely you’ll have to reach important players in real estate, logistics, sales, design, and even personnel management. On top of that, it’s highly probable that your brand name will eventually have to cross the eyes of the CEO and CFO of an enterprise.
While achieving this level of visibility might not seem like a small task, it’s something that’s much more attainable with an experienced account-based marketing team on your side. This is one of the primary reasons so many of the software as a service (SaaS), point of sale, and automation companies you’ve already heard of are heavily invested in ABM strategy.
Why is ABM for Warehouse Automation Better Than Older Marketing Tactics?
A good marketing team should have a wealth of tools available in their toolkit, but a great marketing team knows which tool to use and when. ABM isn’t a turnkey solution that will floor you with a never-before-seen ROI, and it won’t always work at maximum efficiency no matter what you’re selling, whether that’s investment advice, show poodles, or computer repair services.
Here’s what ABM actually is: a combination of hyper-specific marketing tactics used to influence only the handful of individuals at a company qualified to do business with you.
(Which is why it wouldn’t work very well for computer repair—where your advertising ought to reach as many eyes as possible. It would work fairly well for reaching a more specific group, investment consulting, and oddly enough, might be one of the most effective methods of marketing niche interest products like show poodles; feel free to quote me on that.)
Warehouse automation services are just like show poodles—something most people walking down the street wouldn’t spend a dime on. But once you find the right member of a certain, relatively small group of people in the world, they’ll be willing to shell out everything they’ve got for the best version of that product.
ABM is all about reaching those important individuals, wherever they are, and because warehouse automation has so many important actors working together from different areas of expertise, it makes the value of every single impression your campaign can get skyrocket. At some point, the hardware manager will have to bring up automation to the CFO, and if both of those people have some familiarity with your brand, you should feel very confident about your sales team being able to close that deal.
Because B2B companies’ balance sheets rely on making fewer deals for larger sums of money, you’ll need to reach fewer eyes overall in order to meet, and then exceed your bottom line. Conventional marketing tactics that broadcast to a wider audience can bleed your marketing budget completely dry, without achieving a comparable result. There’s a reason you don’t see many SaaS advertising companies paying $10 million a minute for ad space during The Big Game, for example. That’s because they only need to reach a handful of executives in order to make the sales that will carry their next quarter.
How Does ABM Reach Executives and Buying Committees?
ABM leverages first and third-party data to identify which accounts are the best fit to do business with your company. These accounts are added to a list and monitored throughout the entire process, for both the fluctuation of their awareness level of your brand, and whether an opportunity for engagement is approaching on the horizon. Because an ABM firm would be tracking your target accounts individually, it makes it especially easy to cater your marketing content specifically to one business, and in some cases, cater to one specific department of that business. With ABM, it’s easy to make separate ad sets for your brand that will appeal to the pain points an upper-level officer might be experiencing in his or her department—send finance ads about what their ROI would be with you. Send logistics an ad set that describes how many man-hours your product can save their business each day.
Using tools like reverse-IP lookup in combination with email marketing, programmatic display, and paid social advertising, you’ll be certain the content you’ve made is being seen by the people who matter.
What Else Can Warehouse Automation Businesses Do with ABM?
For businesses specializing in physical products like goods-to-person technologies, pick-to-light systems, or sortation systems, ABM can be used to spread the word about your hardware. For most companies, researching for a large spend like warehouse automation will be a predominantly active process—a handful of qualified specialists will poll the market for systems that meet their needs in particular and make a cost-benefit analysis based on what the top firms have to offer.
Active research like this is the bane of most marketing departments. Research like this will almost always be synonymous with organic search, meaning your brand will have to pump dollar after dollar into SEO strategies, effectively outbidding your competition for position on search engine result pages. While SEO is critical for supporting the majority of marketing campaigns (as it is for ABM), you can create awareness before your target ever gets to that point in the sales pipeline. ABM can give you the power to change queries—from a target’s first search being “best warehouse automation USA,” to your brand name coupled with “warehouse automation services.” Just like people don’t realize they said “Kleenex” when they meant to say “tissues,” ABM can make your brand synonymous with the service you offer.
Where to Start?
If your company is currently working in warehouse automation and hasn’t begun using ABM strategies, it can be difficult to know where your first spend should go. ABM needs three things to get started: target accounts, a functional data stack, and automated position tracking. Give your team the tools to get those things squared away, and you should be ready for your first ABM campaign.