What is an Account Based Marketing Approach?
Account based marketing approach is a well-planned B2B marketing strategy, which targets high-value accounts (not individuals) to initiate one-on-one personalized communication. On a more close-up level, ABM campaigns can be used for more than just lead generation purposes. With account-based marketing strategies, you can reach your existing customers for upselling and cross-selling your products/services to gain valuable deals. Account-based marketing solely stands on the pillar of a personalization approach, as it plays a key role in driving customers’ interest. According to a survey by McKinsey, around 71% of customers anticipate personalized communication from the brands. And these are just daily consumers; imagine the level of anticipation that company CEOs, decision makers, and key stakeholders hold. This clearly indicates that ABM strategy is the popular choice among the B2B brands, looking to sell products and services to large accounts, such as public establishments, legal firms, healthcare systems, and much more. There are three types of ABM campaigns, which are:1. Strategic ABM:
Strategic ABM is known as a one-to-one marketing approach, where specific or high-value accounts are targeted for lead generation. Its main aim is to establish a strong business relationship with customers through hyper-personalized business communication. In strategic ABM campaigns, B2B marketers use highly targeted promotional content that perfectly addresses the pain points and challenges of individual accounts. The aim is to reach buyers on a deeper level and convert them into regular customers.2. ABM Lite:
ABM lite is also referred to as one-to-few targeting efforts. Here, only a handful of accounts that exhibit common challenges and pain points are approached. With less personalized or customized marketing efforts, businesses reach out to a similar set of accounts having the same needs and goals. You can see such type of marketing approach used by companies trying to sell to E-commerce retailers who share similar requirements. By successfully collaborating with the sales team, marketing professionals select the same type of accounts, address the common goals and challenges, find the general value proposition for products/services, and finalize the similar content required for targeting the potential accounts.3. Programmatic ABM
It is a one-to-many Account-Based Marketing (ABM) approach, where a group of high-value accounts and personas is targeted at scale. Contrary to “spray and pray” techniques that consume most of your marketing resources on individual accounts that are less likely to convert. In a programmatic ABM strategy, sales and marketing automation are utilized to simultaneously nurture a high volume of accounts with personalization at scale. A study by Momentum ITSMA reveals that 84% of B2B companies using a programmatic ABM strategy witnessed substantial growth in sales funnel, faster deal closing, and hefty revenue returns.Key Differences Between Account Based and Traditional Inbound Marketing Strategy
Often, B2B marketers are at “sixes and sevens” when it comes to choosing between ABM and inbound marketing strategy.
But let me tell you one thing – both strategies are two faces of the same coin with minor differences!
Is it confusing? Here is the clear explanation.
When both traditional inbound and account-based marketing strategies are utilized together in the B2B lead generation campaign, you can succeed in achieving your marketing and sales goals.
In conventional inbound marketing efforts, you target prospects mostly from the top of the sales funnel.
On the other hand, the latest Account-Based Marketing (ABM) strategy involves identifying and reaching high-value customer accounts, instead of targeting wider audiences.
ABM – Account Based Marketing strategy is designed in a way to target only buyer personas with high account contract value (ACV).
Having said that, both inbound and Account Based Marketing (ABM) strategies have several clear differences, such as:
| Factors | Account Based Marketing (ABM) | Inbound Campaign |
| Focused Audiences | ABM aims to reach high-value accounts and buyer personas. | Inbound campaign aims to reach more potential customers. |
| Type of Approaches | ABM focuses more on personalization. | Inbound marketing focuses on generic advertising content to engage with large group of audiences. |
| Marketing Strategy | Gain industry patterns and market insights. Ensure the potential accounts perfectly resonate with your ICP, and initiate marketing communication. | Attract visitors through website and other content. Prospects with high purchasing signals reach you via opt-in forms or lead magnets. |
| Alignment | Involvement sales and marketing team can be seen here to prospect and nurture the potential accounts. | Typically, only marketing team indulge in targeting and prospecting the intended prospects. |
| Who Can Use It? | B2B companies and marketers looking to reach high-potential accounts with maximum contract values. | Every organization that focuses on reaching out to potential prospects for effective lead generation campaign. |
| Examples | Engaging high potential accounts through email, direct mail, cold call, social media, and much more. | Targeting the wider and possible accounts via web content, blog, videos, webinars, business gatherings, and more. |
What are the Benefits of Implementing Account Based Marketing Strategies?
Apart from shorter B2B sales cycles and guaranteed ROI, ABM strategy provides a vast benefit for your business. A few of the advantages of integrating Account-Based Marketing (ABM) strategies are as follows:- Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) and Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) generation rate by 30%
- Achieve a pipeline growth rate of 28%
- Enhance open and click-through rates of your promotional campaign by 25%
- Maximize responses and engagement rates of high-value accounts by 24%
- ABM enables your businesses to seamlessly align the sales and marketing teams to drive conversion rates like never before.
- By targeting existing customers via ABM – account-based marketing efforts, B2B companies can accelerate their up-sell and cross-sell rates by 29%.
- ABM strategy allows B2B companies to increase overall revenue results by 10X faster.
Active Steps to Align Marketing and Sales Teams in ABM to Yield Real Results.
Overlooking the alignment sales and marketing teams in ABM may adversely affect your campaign’s results. Encouraging a successful collaboration of these two departments will prevent potential harm that may occur in your ABM campaigns, including:- Data Silos Between the Team
- Missed sales or business opportunities
- Blame between departments in case of declining outreach results
- Step 1: Make sure your sales and marketing teams never work separately.
- Step 2: Initiate productive meetings, where both departments work towards similar objectives.
- Step 3: With successful partnerships, target potential accounts with the same purchasing intent, common market segments, and consistent needs and challenges.
- Step 4: By doing so, consultatively, you can begin a strategic and personalized ad that precisely fits your ideal customer profile (ICP).
- Step 5: Ensure both teams are following unified communication, allowing your business to avoid missing sales and marketing interaction with potential accounts and high-ranking stakeholders.
- Step 6: You can achieve this by integrating Avention Media’s top-quality database of key decision makers and industry leaders across your sales and marketing platforms.
- Step 7: Ensure a unified B2B targeting by inter-departments, establish a strong and profitable business connection with high potential accounts.
How to Create a Sales and ROI Winning ABM Strategy?
ABM strategy is not limited only to B2B marketers to reach intended accounts; till the minute you are reading this article, it is relevant among many companies seeking to yield maximum sales and ROI. ABM is a type of B2B marketing strategy that demands the sales and marketing teams come closer to work together in a consistent way. In this marketing method, internal teams within the B2B organizations engage high-value accounts, have common business difficulties, requirements, and goals.Strategy #1: Identify Your Well-Defined Goals
The first and foremost step of building an effective, hassle-free, and optimized ABM marketing campaign is to identify marketing and sales objectives. Whether it is growing business ROI, engaging high account contract value, enhancing your sales, or optimizing your brand awareness. That being said, do you have an idea about SMART goals? Obviously, every marketer will definitely know this, which stands for:- Search
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Relevant
- Timely
Strategy #2: Make an Ideal Customer Profile
Before conducting effective ABM efforts, ensure that you’ve well-defined customer profiles or potential accounts. Make sure that these high-value prospects or accounts fit the following criteria:- Targeted Location: Country, State/City, and Zip Code
- Focused Audiences: Key Decision Makers, Multiple Stakeholders, and Industrial Influencers
- Company Size: Small, Medium-Sized, and Large Enterprises
- Revenue Size: $10 M to $100 M, $500 M to $1000 M, and more
- Employee Count: 10 to 50 employees, 100 to 300 employees, 500 to 800 employees, 900 to 1200 employees
- Challenges: Outreach difficulties, inter-team misalignment, and poor ROI, etc.
Strategy #3: Build a Potential Account’s Database
The next step after making an ideal customer profile is to build a potential and highly-focused account database. Utilizing our best-fit customer profile allows you to curate an account list that perfectly resonates with the sales and marketing campaigns. You can curate a focused accounts database organically or by partnering with a reputable B2B data provider, such as Avention Media. Avention Media offers a fully customized list to target relevant buyer personas, eliminating the need to target generic and wider audiences. Moreover, using a well-crafted database enables you to reach purchasing authorities and executives of a company, such as:- C-suite Executives
- V-level Professionals
- Directors
- Procurement Officers
- Human Resource Heads
- Marketing Managers
- SDRs
- And Many More!
Strategy #4: Select the Right Channels for Targeting
Once you have completed building a list of potential accounts. It’s time to start reaching out to your targeted accounts based on their preferred marketing channels. ABM supports multithreading across multiple channels, allowing you to establish a profitable business connection during the sales and marketing interaction. Moreover, before initiating the ABM strategy, it is highly important to identify where your targeted accounts or buyers spend most of their time. By doing so, you can reach out to them according to their channel of convenience, such as email, paid ads, direct mail, telemarketing, SMS outreach, and others. Remember: to break through the noise in this marketing ocean, it is crucial to select the channels that are familiar to your intended buying committees.Strategy #5: Personalize Your ABM Marketing Message
Personalization in the ABM marketing message is like icing your cake with cherry; you can reach highly targeted accounts that are looking to buy your products and offerings. Integrating personalized content in your ABM campaign enables your B2B marketers and sales reps to achieve optimized conversions at an unprecedented rate. With a personalized marketing approach, you can meet potential accounts, place your brand message on the right audiences, maximize your lead volumes, win overall sales and business ROI without any extra efforts. Moreover, according to the latest report by B2B companies, 75% of B2B marketers who have used personalization in their ABM campaigns have generated maximum account-based revenue.Strategy #6: Measure and Optimize the Outcomes Frequently
ABM strategy is not a one-time approach, where once you execute B2B targeting, you don’t have to track the metrics of the campaign. It takes consistent refinement and improvement of your outreach efforts. By consistently measuring the open and click-through rates, responses, and engagement rates, lead quality, and sales rates enables you to determine the performance of your ABM strategy. Having such crucial insights will allow you to address the issue and resolve it as soon as possible. Therefore, it is crucial to assess the results of your ABM campaign and iterate it accordingly to make your performance better.How Do Industry Leaders Define Account Based Marketing (ABM)?
Many industry leaders have considered account-based marketing (ABM) as a powerful strategy to reach focused accounts and secure high-stakes deals. Here are the opinions of different influential stakeholders on ABM strategy.1)Christopher Engman
He defines ABM as: “having a deeper insight about newly targeted accounts and the existing ones will help you set new milestones in your ABM strategy.” Chris Engman is the Vendmore’s CEO globally recognized as thought leader of Account Based Marketing. The organization specializes in providing ABM services to businesses worldwide. Initially, even before they knew the term “ABM,” they called it pipeline marketing. As it positively impacts the sales process through personalized and direct targeting. Later, when they get to know about the ABM strategy, they use it as a top-of-the-line strategy to let go of traditional generic targeting and grab personalized outreach efforts to attract both new and existing accounts.2)David Raab
He defines ABM as: “The perfect amalgamation of technologies and advertising approaches in ABM strategies allows the sales team to find and close deals with potential accounts.” David Raab is an alumnus of Harvard Business School. He has more than 25 years of experience in B2B marketing. He thinks ABM is an effective route for SDRs to reach and crack profitable deals.3)Megan Heuer
She describes ABM as: “Due to recent shifts in technology and widespread communication availability. ABM has become even more efficient for sales and marketing executives to target potential accounts and generate maximum outcomes.” Megan is a former VP of Sirius Decision Research. With over 20 years of experience in the B2B marketing field. She feels that, in ABM, along with the prioritizing of account engagements, it is also crucial to concentrate on converting accounts into high-paying customers.Top Real-World Account Based Marketing Examples
Gaining theoretical knowledge is paramount. However, some B2B marketers may feel to witness a practical proof of ABM strategy. or They may have questions in their mind, like – are ABM efforts practically possible? The answer for this question: yes, it is! Here are the top real-world Account-Based Marketing Examples:Example #1: Dialpad
Dialpad is an AI-driven cloud-based platform that helps various teams within an organization to seamlessly communicate with each other.
By successfully collaborating with Avention Media, Dialpad has made sales and marketing team alignment effortless, eliminating the risk of data silos.
Avention Media offered a highly responsive list of high-value accounts, which featured firmographics, online behaviors, and other useful data intelligence that perfectly resonated with the ideal buyer personas and best-fit accounts.
Utilizing both the database and its in-house communication platform, Dialpad conducted a hassle-free ABM campaign, generating the following results:
- Maximized Account Engagement
- High Call Connect Rates
- Increased Volume of Sales Calls
- Optimized Conversion Rates
- Quick Deal Closing Rates
- Reduced Marketing Expenses
- Enhanced Overall Revenue Returns
Example #2: Dark Horse Comics
Dark Horse Comics is a creator-owned comics publishing company, which is known for its best works, such as “The Umbrella Academy” and the “Star Wars” comics.
The organization saw a sudden decline in its sales rate due to a shortage of illustrators and Photoshop editors.
However, with a strategic partnership with Avention Media, they executed a ground-breaking ABM campaign, connecting with top designers and editors who use Adobe on a daily basis.
By contacting Avention Media, the company explained its needs, challenges, and pain points. Based on their requirements, our lead experts suggested the ABM method along with a top-notch quality list of best-fit accounts.
Using this database, the organizations reached highly skilled Adobe experts for a productive partnership or recruitment opportunities.
Within a month or two of integrating the list and ABM strategy. The comics producing firm could able to achieve the metrics mentioned below:
- Accelerated Contract Closing
- Enhanced Employee Onboarding Rates
- Simplified B2B Communication
- Improved Digital Engagement Rates
- Optimized Sales Volume
- And Many More!
Level-Up Your Account Based Marketing (ABM) Strategy with Avention Media
Future-proof your Account Based Marketing using perfect data intelligence from Avention Media. Employing the 100% opt-in and fully compliant data in ABM campaign, your businesses can yield the following results:- Deliverability rate than ever before
- Higher online engagement rate by 10X
- Meet potential accounts with strong buying signals
- Call connect rate by 6X faster
- Crack larger size deals for maximized ROI
Make Sure Your ABM Campaign Generates Huge Sales and Revenue Returns with Avention Media’s superior-quality database of best-fit accounts