As the world grows increasingly digital, marketing strategies are forced to transform. In-person meetings are via Zoom; business decisions made over coffee have been replaced with a quick phone call or Slack message. This means today’s B2B companies must continue to evolve their playbooks if they want to generate new business and expand current relationships among customers. The successful ones have done so with account-based marketing, a digital marketing strategy that uses personalized content and messaging to identify and engage with high-value accounts.
Account-based marketing (ABM) is a B2B digital marketing strategy that uses highly curated, personalized buying experiences to identify and engage a specific number of relevant target audiences throughout the sales funnel. While traditional marketing tactics take a broad approach by targeting a variety of accounts at once, ABM strategies only target in-market decision-makers. Due to its powerful return and boosted loyalty among customers, ABM is quickly being adopted by B2B companies to generate higher-quality leads and grow revenue year over year.
Whether you’re seeking to increase your ROI, bring your sales and marketing team into closer communication, or improve your data and reporting, ABM is your answer.
A well-designed ABM strategy provides many benefits, including:
Additionally, a recent study conducted by TOPO found that “80% of respondents say [account-based marketing] improves customer lifetime values,” while “86% say it improves win rates.”
An effective ABM strategy improves alignment between your sales and marketing teams. Why is that important? According to Marketo, when sales and marketing are aligned, there’s a “67% higher probability that marketing-generated leads will close.” ABM allows collaboration between the two teams to ensure their efforts are aligned throughout multiple areas including:
The key to ABM is only marketing to the relevant, likely-to-convert accounts. This process begins by creating an ideal customer profile (ICP). Your ICP should be specific and focused on the types of accounts that are most likely to need your product or service. For example, a logistics company specializing in industrial refrigeration may define its ideal customer profile as a decision-maker at mid-to-large size companies in need of cold storage or refrigerated warehousing and shipping. The ICP can be refined even further to include specific job titles, number of employees in the organization, annual revenue, geographical location, size of customer base, and even who their competitors are.
Once you create and refine your ICP, the next step is identifying where those accounts are in their buyer’s journey. ABM combines target data from first-party sources with data from third-party tools such as Bombora, which collects “demographic and firmographic data to provide targetable segments such as revenue, company size, professional group, functional area, industry, and seniority.” With this data in hand, you can create highly-refined audience segments and deliver relevant content at the correct funnel stage.
With an understanding of who your audience is and where they are in the buyer’s journey, you can focus on delivering personalized content that meets their immediate needs. Prospective customers are more likely to engage with content that shows a company understands their pain points.
The key to ABM is delivering the right content and messaging to the right target audience at the right time. As target accounts move through the sales funnel, the content you serve them should watch their precise location. Blog posts, podcasts, and e-books build awareness with prospective customers without pushing a product or service. Providing accurate, reliable industry information without pushing the hard-sell builds rapport and improves relationships with both new and existing customers.
As targets move into the consideration and validation states, they’ll need to engage with content that addresses specific pain points and solutions. Buyer’s guides or webinars that address common industry problems generate more engagement with target audiences and further solidify your brand as a valuable resource in their buyer’s journey.
In the evaluation or decision stage, you must provide content that demonstrates your product or service is the exact one they need—product brochures and product demos are extremely effective at the point in the buyer’s journey.
No marketing strategy is complete without accurate, reliable data to provide your business with the insights necessary to gauge the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. While there are numerous relevant metrics and ways to measure success with an ABM campaign, account scoring is the most accurate strategy.
An account score is an aggregation of data points (Intent data, on-site page views and interactions, and campaign interactions) that provides heightened insight into the quality of the accounts engaging with your ABM campaign. The more engagement and interaction an account has with your content, the higher the account score.
Interested in learning more about account-based marketing? Schedule a demo with our team.
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