Account Based Marketing to Drive Business Success
Account-based marketing is a dynamic B2B strategy for reaching and engaging specific targets audience in order to grow sales of businesses.ABM can help align the efforts of marketing and business development for B2B businesses with high-value, low-volume dealsalong with providing more intentional support during complex sales cycle.
According to Digital Marketing Institute, more than 90% of marketers believe that account-based marketing (ABM) is an important aspect for marketing and sales alignment. ABM becoming the B2B strategy of choice, focuses on team effort in attracting, engaging, converting and measuring the highest value accounts.
While 92% of businessacknowledge the value in ABM, only 20% of companies have had full programs in place for more than a year as per digital marketing institute. The study shows that broad adoption is expected in the near future, with more than 60% planning to invest mainly in technology for ABM to have better aligned sales and marketing over the next one year.
Benefits of Account Based Marketing
The development of technologies has enabled companies to automate and scale their efforts, making it easier to target certain specific accounts. So, the process for ABM is there what’s required from businesses and their sales and marketing team is a comprehensive strategy to identify, grab, and allocate target lists to achieve optimum results and growth. To get a clear picture of ABM’s capacity, here are some of the key benefits:
Transparency in Return on Investment (ROI)
ABM has the ability to drive actual results for any business if used effectivelyAccording to the survey by ITSMA Account Based Marketing, the highest ROI is delivered by of any B2B marketing strategy in today’s digital marketing climate.
Personalization and optimization enhancement
According to research done by Microsoft, the initial 10 seconds of the page visit are critical for decision taken by users on whether to stay or leave. Personalization of messaging and communications towards specific accounts is a major part of ABM so that campaigns can reach to target audience. Targeted consumers are most likely to engage with content that is related to their personal needs, tastes, and preferences and is also related to their business.
Sales alignment
Account Based Marketing is the most effective way to adjust sales and marketing. Basically, this is because when a marketer normally executes an Account Based Marketingprogram, their approach is very similar to those in sales, contributing to more a focused accounts and how to target them and generate sufficient revenue from them.
Focuses on resources
ABM being a targeted marketing tool, allows a marketer to focus on their resources in an efficient manner and run various promotional campaigns that are enhanced especially for targeted accounts. To generate positive results for an ABM campaign, right areas should be focused such as focusing on internal talents, technologies, social platforms, analytics, and content creation mediums, among other resources.
How to implement an ABM strategy?
Now after having a look at ABM’S benefits,here are the key elements involved in setting up a successful account based marketing strategy.
1. Identify your high value targets accounts
Forimplementing an effective ABM strategy, the first initial step is to identify who you are targeting for because randomly just shooting in the dark is not considered as a successful idea. Using all of the available technology, it will be possible to prioritize mainly on high value accounts based on revenue potential, as well as other key factors like market influence and purchase potential. So. An important question arise to ask regarding ABM strategy is who does your firm want to work with?
2. Understand your targets accounts
Afteridentifyinghigh prioritized targets accounts, then it is important to understand about their priorities and their wants which can be achieved by investigating their internal structures, having a closer look at components including key decision makers and main influencers. Once the business is familiar with the bottom line information related to their target accounts, then the business will be able to segment them in the way it would adoptpersona based marketing strategy that will allow a business to reach multiple stakeholders.
3. Create and personalize content
For a truly successful ABM campaign, there should be presence of valuable content that focus on critical business challenges that the businesses’ target accounts faces on a day to day basis. Consider how the business messaging and the content produced by business can assist the target account with their personal challenges and enhance the content of an organization to ensure it’s trustworthy, informational, and authoritative benefits.
4. Choosing relevant channels and tools
To make sure that the target accounts are actually engaging with the businesses core messaging, it’s necessary to utilize and leverage channels including social network online mediums and through smartphones among others. On the basis of each individual account it is necessary to determine which channels will be best for reaching and engaging those contacts.
Beside this, businesses do want to identify which tools will be leveraged for their ABM efforts. Marketing automation and CRM software are considered as price of entry tools for leverage, but it can also be combined with other tools like predictive lead scoring, real-time personalization, ad technology, or ABM specific platforms such as Engagio.
5. Offer Solutions
Regardless of the industry or role,Individualswants solutions for the challenges that arises in front of them and getting to know those challenges is important. Once the business time to understand the challenges of its target account, then a business provides content including whitepapers, blogs and eBooks which provides useful insights and ultimately drives engagement.
6. Measure, analyze and optimize
Once your account-based management strategy is in full swing, it’s vital to measure all your marketing activity relating to your target accounts. Take the time to learn which channels and what content yields the best results and adapt, or mold, your campaign accordingly to ensure you’re placing your resources into the right strategies.
It is important to understand how the business firm’s ABM efforts are performing in order to achieve the long term success of the program. Once the account-based management strategy of a business is in full operation, it’s necessary to measure all the marketing activity related to target accounts of the business. To ensure if a business is placing its resources into the right strategies, enough time should be taken for learning which channels and what content gives the best results for the business campaign.
To break down walls between sales and marketing, ABM is pretty close to a silver bullet in that it aligns programs’ dollars and focus behind the accounts that the sales teams cares about. That said, ABM is only as good as your visibility into your highest potential accounts and best-fit customer segments, which gets clearer over time. It’s most effective when deployed as part of a comprehensive set of targeting strategies – ” Dave Karel, Head of B2B Marketing, LinkedIn Marketing Solutions
In a world where less than 1% of leads turn into revenue-generating customers, ABM cuts through the limitations of more traditional digital marketing techniques and offers an increased level of power in terms of creating a fruitful dialogue with your target audience.
84% of marketers who measure ROI describe ABM as delivering higher returns than any other marketing approach; half of those cite significantly higher returns. Today’s digital landscape is saturated with businesses and organizations purely focusing on inbound content marketing. While these techniques are still vital, to take your business to the next level and ensure long-term commercial success, employing a strong ABM strategy and reaching out to leads in a more account focused and targeted fashion is a must.
