What Does It Mean: Account Based marketing (ABM)

What if you can jump directly to engaging High-end leads, saving your time, effort, and energy from the unfitted ones. It’s time to kick off with delighting target accounts, boosting revenue return potential, satisfying customers, build relationships, and fatten the business of your organization or company.

What is Account Based Marketing ABM?

The term account based marketing is an umbrella term that includes all the activities that are aimed at engaging with the audience and customers of the business.

ABM can be used in many ways today like generating leads, getting more sales, improving customer retention, and so on.

It is a key power tool for generating continuous revenue growth.

Account based marketing ABM is flipping the funnel of Traditional marketing.

Instead of putting bait on a large group of leads and nurture them for a while to land on the target leads in the last, with guide light to account based marketing ABM strategy, start with high-value targeted account and build lasting relationships. This efficient way of building quality and relationships with high-value key specific accounts, specifically identifying the Key Stakeholders and targeting business with the right inbound marketing strategies mediums.

Account based marketing is a specific type of marketing strategy. It is typically used by digital marketers to reach out to a company’s current customer and targets. The main goal of this strategy is to make customer retention easier by focusing on targeting accounts with high potential for revenue growth.

ABM is essentially a market segmentation process, where marketers identify and target their best prospects with tailored messages that will motivate them to make purchases or engage in other desired behaviors.

ABM is about concentrating on specific customer segments like industry, geography, company size, etc. And developing custom strategies to sell your product or service to them. This way, you’re not wasting time and resources on customers who are not interested in what you have to offer.

Account based marketing or ABM can be defined as integrated marketing ABM strategy. As marketing campaign strategist Mike Gospe states, consumers are more interested in engaging in a relevant and meaningful dialog on a valuable topic or title rather than facing direct sales. ABM is greatly personalized and targeted marketing sales alignment strategy. You do profiling of your valuable customers/clients and then design and optimize marketing strategy aligned to their profiles. As Mike Gospe puts it, Account based marketing for enterprise key accounts = Victory!

A recent Research and Market report revealed that the Account based Marketing industry is predicted to touch $1,196.9 million by 2023. Share on X

It is estimated to have a Compound Annual Growth Rate of 12% between 2018 to 2023. Account based marketing programs will undoubtedly keep the marketing community on its toes. The research report also guides to account-based process and indicates that large enterprises will dominate Account based marketing practices in the forecast period. Of course, we aren’t surprised by that! 

Exemplary:

Marketingsherpa had reported how SAP created about $27 million in new pipeline opportunities after implementing Account based marketing or ‘ABM.’ SAP implemented the ABM for their top 10% of the ABM customers who contributed to a third of the revenue in the America region.

We knew that we were touching them regularly via marketing activity, but what we found when we looked across it was that those marketing touches were not being conducted in a way that was personalized or customized to that account, typically. ~ Eric Martin, VP of Marketing at SAP.

Like Eric Martin said, despite tedious marketing programs and marketing efforts somewhere, there was a lack of personalization. It was more challenging because a company like SAP has a vast customer base. Many companies often face this problem. That’s when they turn to account based marketing.

Does Account Based Marketing Fit Your needs?

To be explicit with you, ABM delivers results effectively and is also a fine way to design a strategy and implement it as it’s less in cost compared to inbound marketing. People have been following the inbound marketing methods for quite some time. It now serves as a perfect feed and guide to account based marketing, so the marketing efforts put in developing the traditional marketing would not go in the vain and inbound marketing mix in a much better way for account based marketing.

With the perfect foundation laid by traditional marketing, you create a tremendous amount of personalized content and relevant content, besides content marketing and digital marketing. You can attract significant numbers of crowds, curate them and then filter these existing audiences. These are your high-value clients and must be specifically catered with personalized campaigns implement along with direct mails. It helps you milk the long-term benefits of Account Based Marketing.

These marketing tactics on specific or particular accounts rather set off to the best-fit customer experience when implemented with the best practices. Marketing ABM efforts makes it easier for us to target accounts with multiple decision-makers without losing on a suitable marketing strategy to gain significant high-value results.

How Account Based Marketing Works?

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a customer acquisition approach that drives leads and generates revenue by focusing on specific accounts or customer segments.

This approach is in trend because of the importance it gives to individual customers and the deep understanding of their needs.

The aim of this technique is to generate revenue by focusing on accounts and customer segments, instead of using a one-size-fits-all strategy.

It’s an effective way for marketers to follow and to spend money more wisely since they can focus all their budget and efforts on leads who are most likely to buy from them and not spread it out across the board.

Marketing tools or software that caters to many companies/businesses strive to incorporate account based marketing steadily. Account based marketing is essential for any and every enterprise or company. Let’s follow on how exactly account based marketing work-

Identify your targeted audience

Account based marketing needs to narrow down the focus on your potential audience and streamline lead generation. In doing so, step 1 is identifying the high-value customers or instead accounts you would want to target. In this case, unlike inbound sales marketing or outbound marketing, you’re crystal clear about what you’re going after.

ABM strategy ensures you have the right people in place, making it a lot convenient to target sales and hit the right point. This outreach form is seen mostly in B2B companies with B2B marketers who want to reach out to decision-makers in the industry. Understanding lead history is crucial to who they’re; their challenges are the key to this area. When we give the B2B marketers the confidence to understand their challenges, help them to solve them, their trust develops in line with us that we can provide them with the right solution, which eventually ensure splendid results in long-term relationships with high value accounts.

Account based marketing ABM include highly targeted approaches and efforts, and here we need to keep it clear in mind that we are targeting the particular accounts rather than the markets or the industry. So be sure to set criteria to narrow down the accounts ABM requires according to your specifications and keep the previous experiences and familiar references to lay down excellent solutions to win over the high-value accounts.

Do research on the prospect’s pain points

Directly recognizing the prospect’s current pain point and critical challenges is the further important action step in every line with dedicated ABM strategy decisions. It should be clear that your product or service is delivering in order to answer the biggest pain points your prospect is facing rather than anything else because if not, you won’t be selling the product. Go ahead, see, experience, and remember to figure out the challenge and its magnitude before you offer to solve it already.

You should have a clear view of all the aspects and actions needed, which play the lead, supportive, and neutral roles in deriving the solution faster. They might also be using something similar, and you have to keep a tab on that as well; being well acknowledged with these things considered gives you an upper hand allowing you a better role to play.

So your marketing message would be often geared towards displaying why your single solution could be a pause for prospects to gaze upon and why it is powerful enough and outstands the rest. Your sales reps should be committed to preferring and focusing on main pointers elucidating to opportunities to communicate on a personal level and try to close the deal elevating close rates.

Thus, your sales team rep plays important roles in laying the initial step 1 or first victory flag in your professional approach path forward in order to sell and contribute to your company’s growth.

Align sales and marketing teams

It creates a common ground for people working in sales teams who focus spend their time on the opportunities interested in buying and the people in the marketing sector focusing on the demand generation and attracting people to their products. With the help of the ABM marketing approach, you get past limited cross-over, thus it makes the pipeline refined, goals more specific, and doubles the important forces for the similar desired outcome.

It is essential though have sales and marketing alignment while you’re working to move and drive account based marketing campaigns. If sales alignment isn’t there with marketing, you end up burning your midnight oil unnecessarily that actually doesn’t fix your bottom line. Develop a well-defined strategy to keep a clear understanding of all aspects of the whole process to optimize it productively.

The marketing team can prefer to craft their messages to communicate without even analyzing who they are reaching out for as an opportunity, resulting in dumping back useless or low-quality content pieces that aren’t sufficient and brings less traffic further in terms of quantity. So while the sales team researches prospects, the marketing team should know the same history and think around to craft the personalization messaging strategy to serve certain relevant content or personalized content based on that same thing or the same model actually generating no engaging forces.

Thus, getting to align sales and marketing teams. There is no place for starting to being generic in aligning Account Based marketing in terms of personalized campaigns and apply it extensively. Surprisingly this also yields an excellent revenue potential.

Attract your prospects with some offers

These are specifically customized marketing campaigns for the highly targeted account ABM requires. We do not bluntly tell about the product and specification. With in-depth research, the personalization of each phase of the buyer’s journey with a customer-centric approach lead to the same desired results given by ABM strategy.

An idea for a customer-centric approach is customized and personalized content marketing or digital marketing efforts by creating offers explicitly tailored for your specific target account. Share on X

This way you will upgrade and advance brand recognition and increase the relevancy among your audience or buyers, making it easier to find and attract more valued specific accounts.

90% of top marketers opt for account based marketing, elevating the B2B marketing strategy like digital marketing. It is more of a team effort to bring about engagement and conversion. Reaching out to the prospect or potential buyer with an offer is step 1 to engagement. When you provide them a personalized messaging and a solution that they can try or see, it creates the first impression. If you’re providing a Retail Service and reach out to industry leaders, it would be efficient to send them a personalized video molded for their business and a free trial for them to play around with.

Start with the right list and communication channels

How would you reach your real prospects or potential buyers? You have to determine and develop individuals’ personas as well as comprehend and analyze the channels so that you can implement the targeting plan through high-value personalized messaging marketing campaigns for your company’s sales. It could be online platforms, mobile, or might be offline. Sometimes even events are great to do this. Ensure that you know where your new potential customers are present so that you can connect with impact and you can steer your marketing campaigns to optimize strategy that way as per standards.

For example, if you look at finding and targeting top tech-savvy decision-makers, you might want to use LinkedIn InMails. InMail is a fantastic tool on LinkedIn that allows you to reach out directly to a potential client. It’s a lot like email, except your message only goes straight into the inbox of the person you’re trying to reach. And it gets read quicker because it bypasses all other features of LinkedIn.

Facebook also serves as a fantastic platform to know, study, and figure out your clients for better targeting and success of your social media campaigns. It should work together in a way that your creativity might hit their point of wow and attract so that they develop interest in your campaign. You can send personalized messages through this channel to all your near and far identified potential customers. This internal channel communication and quality messaging can be one to one, one to few, or one to many.

It goes without saying that based on this aspect, you can think to choose the success mode keeping the stakeholder requirements in person, via email or direct mail or online like targeted ads, paid social platforms, relevant webinars topics, e-news letterings, and quality virtual events. The more clear and creative, the better!

Setting and measuring goals is easier

Harp on the required iterative calculations to analyze and review the results, identify the potholes across the road from the beginning, and then fill them in order to personalize strategy for smoother journey cycles and delightful internal results. Calculating the effectiveness attributes of ABM campaigns is easy. You know you’re watching forward at a set of target account lists, and you have plans for every account list as well.

At the end of the quarter, you can easily measure back how various dedicated conversions happened. Since the focus is narrow, it is visible what the result is. The best way to measure your ABM campaigns attributes is to supervise your defined internal strategy.

Here you have to ask yourself many analytical questions and demand yourself to derive the accurate measurement of goals and results. Like what methods worked in the field and what didn’t—the clients’ responses for a different set of phases, identifying the challenging parts and the hurdles. The engagement with stakeholders and your team’s involvement, it’s time taking to create and close the deals, percentage of the successfully closed deals, the new revenue potential generated against expending, and lastly, taking feedback from the clients.

For example, if you’re using online ads to a set of target accounts, you can check how many people come and have clicked and what the CTR is. You can also set up conversion metrics for the same. It will help you optimize your personalized marketing campaigns on the fly. You can also see if ABM strategy is making your aligned sales process cycle shorter for your sales team. The reach and awareness have a more considerable impact, reducing the typical sales cycle journey to get potential customers. This step should serve only to motivate us to achieve better in terms of Deals. It is one way to exceed beyond the present level to great success.

Be Consistent and a good storyteller

Prospects like stories and personalized offers. It is like you are one only talking to them, and the feeling of exclusivity is the key behind ABM marketing. It is why to date, email marketing automation is the best option, to begin with the outreach messaging. It is, in fact, suitable for inbound and outbound.

When you send them not just what you offer but also explain how well you understand their challenges, it would have instant gratification. They will realize you did your homework to solve it and will love you for that king of messaging. It creates a long-lasting impression on their minds. It will initiate the first meeting that you’re looking for exactly!

Benefits of Account Based Marketing ABM

Account based marketing is one of the most powerful strategies to increase customer acquisition and customer retention.

The reason ABM is a top priority for any business which looks to acquire new customers is that it’s a unique way to find prospects and audience members who have shown wide interest in your product or service.

The benefits of Account Based Marketing tactic include many things. It can help businesses in smooth navigation towards achieving their goals, use resource elements more efficiently and provide broad or deep insights into the customer’s needs. Furthermore, ABM helps address everything- cuts out unnecessary spending on average, helps companies make certain fine decisions, and allows them to focus on their top clients.

To sum up, marketing ABM’s desired gains keep the alignment between marketing sales teams to hold onto the common goal. It is unique, Efficient, and Easy. It spreads Business awareness and displays your robustness across the wide ground which means things travel fast when the impact is charming. Finally, it helps you refine your approach which means you can provide and deliver a consistent and good client experience. The personalized and optimized method of delivery programs is the key to overcoming and solving challenges, creating professional and impactful outreach messaging.

The benefits of account marketing are magnificent as it lets you keep track of your goals, evaluate all aspects and metrics of delivering a project, measure the investment as such in ads, etc., and generate revenue thus bringing win dynamics. Resources get to develop and used in an optimal manner, reducing cost and waste thus multiplying revenue. The sale cycle helps and supports your sales teams with efficient solutions in various different places and builds a more robust area of expertise. In culmination, this all is designed to take you towards particular concreted growth in the business and resources company/organization saves are a plus.

Marketing automation tools make Account Based marketing easier

Earlier, this was a hectic task and was used only by very large companies to drive ABM strategy. But with the advent of marketing automation platforms and services, the effectiveness of ABM efforts has become more robust and a bit easier. One size fits-It is effortless to generate and deliver messages or conversations to a large set of target accounts in no time.

Automation is critical as it delivers more extensive ABM campaigns while offering ease to determine predictive similar leads, predictive analysis, lead nurturing, and programmatic advertising attributes and measures. Reaching out to decision-makers and also getting noticed is how marketing automation tools enable and connect brands. Irrespective of how big or small, it influences the brand to expand and gives the expected success for good growth.

Rather than looking for standalone account specific based marketing tools, it is easier to shift to an advanced automation platform like Aritic PinPoint. Aritic PinPoint, which is a comprehensive and all-in-one integrated tool, offers an account based marketing feature. It enables tracking and monitoring accounts in real-time to bring about a clear understanding of each account’s purchasing intent, making it easier to strengthen a relationship with a prospect.

In ABM approach, one account has multiple decision-makers in the loop. In Aritic PinPoint, ABM features marketing account based scoring, which takes lead scoring to the next level. Each decision-maker under one account is tracked, and scores are put. The total score of the entire account includes all the scores of each contact within the account. It helps make a more precise decision on which “account” is moving ahead in the funnel and which one is stagnant or going backward. There are two major ways this is performed:

• Account based contacts grouping
• Segment groups filters based on the filmography

You can also build model account based workflows within Aritic PinPoint when creating a new company profile. Based on the filters and tags, monitor and cross analyze how individual contacts within each account are behaving on the initial level, comprehend their buying intent, and set professional relevant workflows that provide you with many sophisticated and forward tools to simplify and enhance the opportunity.

You can also lookup for a company right within the tool, i.e., do a quick Google search on the resources company’s profile; at least you want to know more about your new client. The best part is, you can prioritize your individual contacts within each account as primary, secondary, and more based on the conversation flow you’ve had with the same for the more organized experience. If you find an account repeating, you can merge it with your existing company list. An organized approach always makes the way more clearer to be built upon further.

5 Best Account Based Marketing tactics that you can look up to

The account-based marketing process is about engaging and expanding the funnel. There are quite a few strategies that many companies and brand of B2B domain with B2B marketing deploy for kicking this off. The basic and robust tools that can be used here are phone calls, quick, straightforward, optimal way. The next one can be direct mail which is formal and standard. Video call comes with the benefit of having facial and presentative interaction with each other in order to communicate spontaneously. Chat tools or Chat boxes can be a creative way of approach. Social media, on the other end, provides good engagement between the parties. Here are 5 best tactics you could actually start leveraging.

1. If you have a blog channel, start writing around industry trends and mention a set of target accounts in the same. This approach boosts their ego and also will show your appreciation. Also, in social media, it is executed by using hashtags and keywords.
2. Once you executed the blog, share this on social media and mention your target accounts. Tag them, and this will catch their attention and drive engagement. It also gives them a sense of importance and a platform to show off among their peers.
3. Leverage paid ads digital media such as Facebook custom audiences and target this account list for advertising. They have brilliantly made algorithms perform these tasks and almost always working in the right direction and emerge successful in attracting a target audience or a buyer.
4. Try out LinkedIn Company target advertising. Research all your target accounts and send them an InMail. LinkedIn is a platform that offers a comprehensive audience targeting option. It is easy to make that first connection with a few marketing dollars. LinkedIn also quickly gives the data to narrow down our list and target the most suitable accounts.

Lastly, of course, you have to go back to using an email marketing campaign. Create and deliver real personalized drip email marketing campaigns efforts to target your audience. It requires a personalized touch in conversations as it always hits the last soft spot.

Start Account based Marketing with Aritic PinPoint

To kick off your Account Based Marketing Strategy, it is imperative to identify the set of right tools. Also, this will help you slice and dice data and create actionable data insights from the personalized campaigns. Finding out an excellent Account based Marketing strategy stack is also very relevant in this context, helping you manage and nurture your lead prospect information.

On a general note, Account based Marketing requires efforts that are actually a long process with account managers in place, new vendors, and risks involved. But automation can make this a no-brainer and optimize it effectively. At the same time, make sure that your inbound marketing process is at par with the Account based marketing activities and marketing tactics you intend to do following the world trends. It is like modern valuable customers not to buy something they are being told to. They like to explore, which is where it requires you to ensure that your brand is discoverable through emails, websites, social media, and more.