Have you ever thought of a growth strategy that is focused, not only targeted but highly targeted, and is designed to create personalized buying experiences for highly-engaged high-value accounts? If your answer is yes, you may consider account based marketing.
If compared with other traditional marketing methods, account based marketing follows an integrated and focused approach to B2B marketing. This is a holistic process where brands put marketing and sales teams on the same page so that they can work together to target best-fit accounts and turn them into high-paying customers.
What is Account Based Marketing?
Account-based marketing is a popular business marketing strategy where companies and brands devote their resources to focus on a set of target accounts within a market.
Once those target accounts and decision-makers are identified, they create highly personalized campaigns to engage each account with tailored marketing messages. The communication is designed as per the specific attributes and business needs of the accounts being targeted.
In addition to making new sales or marketing to existing customers, it proactively encourages upselling and cross-selling to improve revenue generation.
How Account Based Marketing (ABM) is Different from Traditional Marketing?
The biggest advantage of account-based marketing is that it removes less-valuable companies during the early phases of target discovery to make sure that Marketing and Sales are in complete alignment while engaging and delighting only the best-fit accounts.
In ABM, sales and marketing teams consider high-value accounts as a single entity. They plan every marketing strategy around these accounts. The strategy includes personalizing the buyer’s journey and tailoring all communications towards these best-fit accounts.
The benefits of account-based marketing
Traditional marketing methods are quite prevalent in the industry. They have their benefits. But as they target masses and focus on an undefined set of random targets, the ROI they generate is less.
On the contrary, a well-planned account-based marketing strategy helps you boost revenue, optimize your marketing efforts, and provide in-depth campaign insights since it only focuses on highly engaged target accounts.
The following are the many noteworthy benefits of a successful ABM strategy:
1. Personalized and Targeted Marketing Approach
An ABM strategy doesn’t follow a generic marketing approach. Instead, it’s focused on creating personalized messaging for target accounts. The communication being created in ABM is highly customized and aligned to the account’s specific business needs.
2. Effective Sales & Marketing Alignment
The best scenario of account-based marketing is that it brings marketing and sales teams on the same page. This way they can work together to identify target accounts and create highly tailored campaigns specific to those accounts.
3. Improved Sales Cycles
As ABM identifies targeted and best-fit accounts before launching the campaign, it slashes the time consumed in targeting decision-makers in different stages. It shortens the length of the sales cycle.
4. Clearer ROI
Among all the existing marketing methods available, account-based marketing generates maximum ROI because the ABM process is precise, accurate, and measurable.
Communication Channels for Account-Based Marketing:
Deciding on the communication channels to be used in your next ABM campaign is the next phase to go with. After finding target accounts, marketers create content personalized for those segments.
The content is then delivered to those target accounts using several communication channels including social media platforms, events, website landing pages, and email).
Every company selects the communication channels based on the account’s attributes, preferences, and platforms they frequently visit. Some of the major channels to use by the business are the following:
- Events
- Webinars
- Direct mail
- Email campaigns
- Paid advertising
- Web personalization
Key Components of Account-based Marketing
The major pillars of account-based marketing are targeting, engagement, and measurement. They altogether set the stage of a highly customized campaign for your targeted audience with a percent percent of campaign success.
Targeting and managing the right accounts
An account-based marketing process starts with targeting the right accounts. Teams working on account identification utilize tools and technology to identify the accounts that are worth the time.
In such an arrangement sales and marketing teams are on the same page. The ABM gives the ability to centralize account targeting and management from a centralized place instead of following them across several apps.
Engaging Content Across Channels
After identifying the accounts teams move forward to design and plan communication. They design and run coordinated and hyper-personalized content campaigns across all available marketing channels from a unified interface.
The company’s marketing specialists knit all the communication channels together to run blanket cross-channel marketing campaigns for your target accounts.
Measuring and Optimizing campaigns
Once the campaign is completed, insights are taken to determine if the campaign meets its goals. You should be using some good analytics tools to measure ABM campaigns to demonstrate success and find bottlenecks. A premium analytics tool has an all-in-one account dashboard that offers insights about specific accounts, programs, and targets.
Tarun Gupta, CEO of Brainpulse Technologies, is a prolific author and digital marketing specialist. His insightful writings span SEO, content marketing, social media strategy, and email campaigns, offering invaluable expertise to businesses worldwide. Tarun’s contributions continue to shape the digital marketing landscape, guiding success in multiple niches.