Account-based marketing is the process that allows you to align your marketing and sales teams to promote long term business growth for high-value accounts and boost revenue. It is important to know that account-based marketing differs from traditional marketing and other forms of marketing, which I will reveal further in this article.
Before continuing with the article, I will ask you several questions to prepare you for further reading.
How important is account-based marketing for your company? Do you know how to plan it and allocate resources to achieve your best customers? Do you know if account-based marketing is the right marketing type for your business?
In this article, I will reveal what account-based marketing is, how it differs from other marketing strategies and benefits of it for your company.
OK, let’s jump into the journey!
What Is Account-Based Marketing (ABM)?
Account-based Marketing or (ABM) is a growth strategy, where Marketing and Sales teams collaborate to create personalized buying experiences for a set of high-value accounts.
In other words, account-based marketing is a marketing strategy, where key business accounts are marketed directly as one unit. This is different from the typical one-to-many approach.
In these thoughts, high-value accounts or prospects are identified and the key stakeholders in those businesses are targeted. Furthermore, marketing strategies are usually implemented through numerous channels to reflect their specific personas and needs.
Some researchers say that account-based marketing is like personalized marketing on steroids. Others like Elyse Flynn Meyer, the President and founder of Prism Global Marketing Solutions says that account based-marketing focuses on a few large and important accounts or potential accounts that are the most promising of being added to your bottom line.
Basically that’s the main reason why it is so critical to have a highly targeted message to these individuals because they have a great impact on revenue potential and sales and marketing.
Traditional marketing vs Account-Based Marketing
Traditional marketing is the oldest form of marketing and also one of the most researched. It refers basically to any type of marketing that is not online.
Some of the most typical examples I can give you are: print, broadcast, direct mail, phone, leaflets, billboards, etc.
A lot of marketers still use this method because it has been tried and plays a significant part in reaching local audiences. Ads can be kept for a long period of time, as they are physical and the audience is easier to reach through it than online marketing.
On the other hand, account-based marketing (ABM) is as mentioned focusing on key customers, as being the most valuable. This can be either done by traditional or online marketing, but online marketing has proven to be very effective for this purpose.
Account-Based Marketing vs. Inbound Marketing
Account-based marketing and inbound marketing can have great power for your business when used together.
You might be wondering, how can that be?
Well, I reviewed that the definition of account-based marketing is a highly-targeted strategy between marketing and sales teams.
On the other hand, inbound marketing acts as a foundational element in this process. It is the strategy that allows you to attract customers with the creation of valuable content, SEO, and a nice customer experience.
Let’s look at outbound marketing for a while.
Outbound marketing, also called Interruption marketing is the process of promoting a product through continued advertising, promotions, public relations, etc.
In regards to this, inbound marketing allows you to organically provide information to your audience when they need it. This also lays the foundation for a strong account-based marketing strategy by allowing targeted and efficient resource allocation of your high-value accounts.
Here I will give you some more reasons to implement both ABM and inbound marketing:
- Inbound marketing helps you attract target accounts and delight those target accounts with remarkable customer experience.
- Inbound marketing is the foundation of a strong ABM strategy by allowing for targeted and efficient resource allocation of high-value accounts.
- With the combined approach of ABM and inbound marketing, you can attract a broader group of prospects and catch any opportunities the other strategy may have missed.
- You can create content that serves both an ABM and inbound strategy f.ex. creating a personalized case study for a target account that you share on your website.
The Differences Between Account-Based Marketing and Inbound Marketing
Here is an example of the difference between account-based marketing and traditional inbound marketing.
With traditional marketing you have the three funnel steps:
- Attracting visitors to the site and getting them to fill out forms
- Nurturing them with automated emails
- Identifying target companies
With Account-based marketing you have the following steps in the funnel:
- Identifying target companies
- Engaging those companies with personalized conversations
- Building lasting relationships that lead to new opportunities
A great thing to mention here is the role of live chat in Account-based marketing.
Personal live chat communication has been proven to be very effective in building personal relationships and trust with clients.
That’s why I would recommend using Live chat alternative as a tool for account-based marketing.
It is now time to look at the top benefits you can have with ABM for your company.
The Top Benefits of Account-Based Marketing
Here I have revealed the benefits that positively impact most businesses.
1. It gives Strong Alignment Between Sales And Marketing
Marketers have been trained for years to write and create campaigns for people in particular markets and industries. On the other hand, sales have been focused on engaging with just those accounts that are likely to buy.
With ABM, sales and marketing are working toward a common goal, which is focused to target accounts.
According to Forrester Research, organizations, who have aligned sales and marketing teams see a 32% annual revenue growth, on average, while less aligned companies see around 7% decline in growth.
With ABM your sales and marketing teams become a single unit.
2. Efficient and Optimized Marketing & Sales Funnel
ABM is so targeted with its marketing efforts, that it is resource-waste limited.
A good example to Remember is that ABM is fishing with a spear, instead of a net. There’s considerably less catch as you’re only engaging with prospects, who are likely to buy.
Account-based marketing requires personalization of almost everything. By this I mean you need personalized content, product information, communications, and campaigns for each account that you invested your resources in.
So, your content and interactions have to be tailored in a way that shows your accounts how your specific products, services, offerings, and team are for solving their challenges and to grow better.
If you also combine that focus with good customer experience, you will witness higher conversion rates.
3. Better Customer Experience
Instead of being broad with content that appeals to a particular market or industry, with account-based marketing you can go deep in researching accounts and design campaigns specifically for them. In this sense, every touchpoint along the buyer’s journey is personalized.
This is how you’ll make each account feel that they are your sole market and then they would not ever want to stop doing business with you if that’s their experience.
Delivering these long-term and consistent experiences may seem a bit overwhelming, but the good news is that ABM is a process that naturally would encourage you to do that.
When you create a universal understanding of those factors within your company, Marketing and Sales and anyone else involved will be able to effectively deliver the same feeling of consistency through everything they share with each account (f.ex. personalized content, targeted campaigns, pricing, product information and more).
4. Return On Investment
The biggest marketing challenges have always been connected to justifying the budget.
As ROI surveys may not be enough to convince decision-makers in your company that ABM is worth, what will convince them is proving ROI by running a pilot program within your own company.
It is beneficial to measure the return on investment ROI for each account you invest your resources into. This is because you can confirm if certain accounts you invested in are the right ones for your business.
You can then nurture and delight those accounts in the long term and identify and target similar accounts.
If your ROI proves your ABM strategy worked well, you can use these results as a motivator to drive your strategy forward. This can ensure you continually improve your bottom line.
5. Streamline the sales cycle
The sales cycles look different for different industries. For most of them they could look something like this:
1. Prospect – 2. Research – 3.Connect – 4. Present – 5. Close – 6. Delight
With account-based marketing, this cycle is streamlined because you focus your efforts on specific high-value target accounts. By this, you save time and resources and spend more time on the stages of the cycle that positively impact your bottom line.
In this case, it looks like this:
1. Identifying Target Accounts – 2. Presentation to Target Accounts – 3. Closing Target Accounts → 4. Delighting Accounts
Rather than experimenting with different strategies to prospect and qualify many leads, ABM ensures that your target accounts are ideal for your business. As a result of this, you can then quickly dive into building relationships with them.
6. Expanding business through account relationships
I can easily say that Quality over Quantity applies to account-based marketing. This process requires you to invest time and resources in engaging and delighting a group of carefully-chosen and high-value accounts.
This contradicts with most other strategies when trying to quickly close deals with less-qualified leads. These leads are most probably not the best fit for your company in the long run.
When you take the time to build these trusting relationships with accounts, you’ll just expand your business by retaining these valuable customers longer.
Additionally, as a result of personalized customer experiences, accounts will become loyal to your business over time. In this sense, loyal customers could become your best marketers and brand advocates.
This means that your accounts can help you expand your business in their networks (partners, customers, referrals), word-of-mouth, testimonials, and more.
I will now give you some examples of campaigns for Account-based marketing!
Examples of Account-Based Marketing Campaigns
Here are two great examples of some inspiring ABM campaigns I came across.
Pizza story
Recently, account-based teams have experimented with “pizza-nars”. This is actually a webinar accompanied by pizza. The idea behind it was that pizza was delivered to target accounts to enjoy while watching your webinar.
You should not just limit yourself to pizza, as this approach can be done with anything for example coffee, food items of their choice, and more. In this way, you can dine with your prospects, when they are at their comfort desks. This is a great way to encourage prospects to pay attention to.
You just need to keep in mind that the webinar content has to be compelling, and you have to think about the messaging you deliver so that you can have a follow-up or call to action at the end.
This approach can be useful from initial engagement to renewals and expansion.
You could even build out personalized webinar experiences with specific landing pages so customers feel as if the webinar was hosted just for them. This can be a great way to show product updates and educate people on your platform.
GumGum story
When the computer vision company GumGum wanted to win over the business of T-mobile, the CMO of the company researched the buying committee starting with the executive leadership team.
He then discovered that T-Mobile CEO John Legere was a big fan of Batman. They used this to develop an idea that made the CEO part of the GumGum story with a comic book –– T-Man and Gums.
It was created by their team of writers, editors, and illustrators. They shipped 100 copies to T-Mobile and its agencies of record and this is basically how they won over the account.
This example was very resource-intensive, so you would probably want to reserve campaigns like this for your top tier accounts. You can also achieve similar effects in many ways like running personalized direct mail campaigns to those contacts. It could be merch related to their favorite movie, or a bag of their favorite coffee so that you can spark a conversation.
Conclusion
I hope you have a good clarification of what account-based marketing is and why it is so important for many companies today.
Many companies still try to find the best balance of their ABM approaches.
As mentioned, ABM is different from traditional marketing and requires more devotion and different approaches.
For this reason, I expressed the most important benefits of ABM and some successful strategies to get high-quality accounts.
In summary, those benefits are:
- Strong Alignment Between Sales And Marketing
- Efficient and Optimized Marketing & Sales Funnel
- Better Customer Experience
- Return On Investment
- Streamline the sales cycle
- Expanding business through account relationships
- Using Live chat alternative as a way to build personal relationships
By knowing them you can tailor your own Account-based strategy in order to achieve the best out of it.
Keep in mind that you also need to focus on specific value propositions in order to attract high-quality accounts. This also relates to building a personal connection with your customers, so that they can remember you and be loyal.
I would now like to thank you for your time in reading this article and I wish you all the best with your account-based marketing strategy.
