Not sure what account-based marketing is? Wondering if you should try it? There are many reasons why ABM could become a key part of your marketing strategy.
Account-based marketing (ABM) has quickly become one of the most valuable and lasting trends to enter the lead generation sphere.
Rather than trying to capture a large audience and then filter low-quality leads out, ABM goes straight for the kill: identifying high-value customers from the very beginning and creating personalised campaigns designed to convert them.
Optimised, targeted and effective, it’s easy to see why marketing managers are adopting this approach to get ahead of the competition.
So what exactly makes ABM so effective?
Powerful personalisation
If creating a solid persona or archetype is like looking at your ideal client through binoculars, ABM is like using a microscope.
The marketing industry is more saturated than ever. People are bombarded with a thousand different messages every day.
The secret to successful ABM is creating highly personalised and niche marketing assets that appear crafted specifically to the individual client or account you hope to win.
Marketers have long used some form of personalisation to cut through the noise – segmenting audiences and tailoring messages to suit. But there’s a limit to how personalised you can get when you’re dealing with an audience of hundreds or thousands. Mail merging names into your eDMs and triggering automated recommendations based on their clicks isn’t going to be enough.
But reduce that crowd to just one business/account, or even one key decision-maker within that account, it becomes easier to build up a picture of their individual wants and needs. Suddenly, your message can become extremely personalised indeed.
Easier attribution
When you’re responsible for a huge marketing budget, you want to know that the marketing campaigns you fund are effective.
Unfortunately, some aspects of marketing can be hard to nail down with precise figures on ROI. How do you put a monetary value on brand awareness? On goodwill? On social clout?
Attribution is easier with account-based marketing because each campaign or tactic is designed to target a single person or business at a time. You’re not chasing the usual metrics like click-through-rates and impressions. Instead, demonstrating ROI on an ABM campaign is much more straightforward.
Did the contact engage with the content? Did they get in touch with the company? Did they end up spending money? If so, how much? If not, why?
ROI may be hard to track for a crowd, but it’s far easier to track against a single point of contact.
Short sales cycle
Previously, the marketing team would be in charge of lead generation. Then, the sales team would spend hours separating the good prospects from the bad. It’s time consuming and inefficient.
ABM does away with those inefficiencies by having both Sales and Marketing collaborate to identify those companies – and the individuals within them – that represent the most attractive and valuable opportunities.
Then, any ABM-based contact the Sales team receives is already pre-defined as a solid prospect – allowing them to move to a sales conversation much quicker without spending time and effort on qualifying the lead.
Unification at last
There’s an age-old argument between Sales and Marketing departments.
Sales says they can’t close deals because Marketing isn’t giving them good leads. Marketing says there are plenty of leads, but that Sales are ignoring or mishandling the most promising ones.
The thing is, when Sales and Marketing work together in harmony, the results can be stupendous.
Accounts based marketing keeps both Sales and Marketing on the same page: one carefully selected contact, one campaign, and everyone working towards closing that one deal.
Account-based marketing isn’t just another trendy way to think about your customers. It offers a brand new system of operating that turns the brand funnel on its head – with tangible results for those who adopt it.
