Account-based marketing (ABM) is a marketing strategy used to target and personalise campaigns at an account level. In comparison to traditional marketing, it is more focused and sees individual accounts as having a market of its own rather than trying to appeal to an entire market.
Rather than wasting time on unqualified leads, this method ensures that your Marketing and Sales team are aligned so that you sell directly to those accounts which are a good fit and of high value to you. ABM can be used alongside Inbound Marketing to attract target accounts and win them by providing an outstanding customer experience.
ABM Benefits
Here are some of the most well-known benefits of Account-Based Marketing:
Aligning Marketing and Sales goals
ABM encourages collaboration between the marketing and sales team, which can be highly beneficial for the organisation. With improved communication and transparency, both teams will have a similar understanding of the targets, budgets, and other information, which will encourage them to work towards the same goals.
Reduced resource-waste
As we mentioned earlier, ABM is highly targeted, which means the resource-waste is reduced. You are creating personalised content, communications, campaigns, and everything else for each account which also means that the relevancy is highly maximised.
Easy to measure ROI
With the use of ABM, the return on investment for each account can be easily measured. This information can help clarify if the accounts you invested in are ideal for your business.
Client Retention
Building and retaining accounts to expand your business.
ABM requires you to invest significant time and resources on engaging and delighting those carefully selected high-value accounts. By building a trusting relationship with these accounts, you will be able to retain them for a longer period rather than hunting to obtain new leads, which can be twice as costly and time-consuming.
Account-Based Marketing Strategy
Now that we have acknowledged the benefits that come from ABM, we will look at how the strategy can be applied successfully:
Securing organisational ABM alignment
All your internal stakeholders must come together and agree on various factors relating to the accounts. This will ensure that your strategy is streamlined, and it will also be easier to create more consistent experiences for accounts.
Your ABM team
Build your ABM team with a minimum of one marketer and one sales rep who is dedicated to the accounts. Depending on their roles, the team members will manage and close business deals as well as create content and publish them. (HubSpot recommends limiting the team size to no more than one marketer and ten sales reps.) Other team members, such as customer success rep and campaign managers, should also be aware and aligned to your ABM team.
Target accounts
Next, identify the high-value target accounts on which you plan to invest your time and resources.
Accounting planning
Encourage your Marketing and Sales team to create account plans together; keep in mind that these should be easy to access for all involved team members.
Here are a few questions which will need to be accounted for:
- Who will we need to know?
- What kind of content to create to attract and engage with relevant stakeholders?
- Which channels to use to share the content?
How can we provide the right support through each stand of strategy and sales process?
- Build contacts from high-quality accounts.
- Forge a good and long-lasting relationship with the account's buying committee. To this end, you can start by developing a tailored interaction that ensures engagement. Also, consistent one-to-one interaction will make the buying committee feel personally valued; this includes continuous and well-organised communications such as email sequences and well-timed meetings.
- Monitor and analyse ABM results. After completion of the steps above, you must review and analyse the results of ABM. This way, you can monitor its success and identify opportunities, leading to a more improved and effective strategy to be implemented in the future.
ABM Software
Implementing Account-Based Marketing can be overwhelming; however, following the steps above and utilising ABM software such as Groove, Personalyze, and HubSpot should improve your understanding of ABM and make the process easier.
If you are looking to transform your business through an Account-Based Marketing strategy, get in touch with ExtraDigital and speak to our consultants today.
