B2B Account-based Marketing (ABM) is not a new tactic in the marketing world. But it has evolved like never before. It mainly focuses on creating personalized communications using data and automation to ensure that communication is highly relevant to targeted high-value accounts.
With its personalized approach and attention to detail, effective B2B account-based marketing solutions allow you to tailor your customer’s needs effectively.
According to a survey by SiriusDecision, 70% of a B2B marketer’s budget was used only for ABM in 2016; this might grow in the near future. And according to Forrester, a lot of new start-ups are comfortable investing in ABM.
What is Account-based Marketing?
B2B Account based marketing is a well-known B2B marketing strategy that enables your sales and marketing team to address the pain points directly and offer unique solutions to high-value accounts.
ABM strategies acknowledge such B2B purchase decisions that are majorly made by any set of individuals in a company. So, rather than promoting your product or service to the general audience, you can target the stakeholders or an actual business with account based marketing solutions.
Rapid technological growth, data accessibility, and sophistication gave rise to ABM, which now interests many companies. Tools such as Customer Data Platform (CDP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) gather customer data to help compile the best companies to work with.
Who Uses Account-based Marketing in B2B?
ABM is a modern marketing strategy that works solely in B2B and less in B2C. It is not suitable for B2C because it will be unprofessional to tailor one-to-one campaigns as per someone’s personal preferences, the sales cycle isn’t long enough, and there isn’t enough ROI.
ABM can work best for companies with ongoing customer relationships, larger deal sizes, longer sales cycles, and those who aim to solve specific customer issues.
Promising Benefits of B2B Account-based Marketing
Account-based marketing comes with many direct and indirect benefits. You may use your ABM strategy with website personalization, digital advertising, or email marketing. With proper implementation, you are surely going to get the incredible benefits:
- Market and sales alignment becomes exceptionally easy
- Improves consistency and engagement
- The prime benefit is an increase in ROI
- Shifting the focus to retention
- Maximize capabilities and potential of Marketing Automation tools to save time
- ABM Strategy -> Right Target -> right leads -> More Revenue
- Greater opportunity to be expert
- Primary trust building is done by ABM
- A way to stand out from the crowd
- Better Reporting
- ABM helps to listen to your customer
- ABM builds content that interests customers
- Well-optimized and effective funnel
- Speed up the sales cycle
- ABM helps in expanding your budget
- Team development
1) Effective collaboration between the marketing and sales team
There should be good cross-team collaboration and effective communication to focus on the same goal. In the context of ABM, alignment of the marketing and sales team promises more transparency and efforts toward the same purpose.
Also Read: Boost Your ABM Strategy with Intent Data
This alignment assures consistency concerning all the interactions, communications, and content for the accounts you are working with. There is no space for confusion for team members or customers. Irrespective of how long an account works with the company, a continuous and seamless user experience is guaranteed.
2) Improves engagement and relevance
ABM ensures consistency in experiences among all accounts for each individual at every possible step. The benefits of using the ABM strategy are the unification of everyone’s goals and unity in moving forward.
For B2B, continuous customer interaction is essential for your business to expand. So, different communication channels create inconsistency as companies plan different ways of interacting for platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and other social media.
ABM unifies these accounts and makes everything aligned and up to date. So, there is no inconsistency in messaging and overall content.
3) Increases ROI
Measuring Return On Investment (ROI) is easy with account-based marketing of the accounts where you invest your resources, time, and talent.
Doing this you have two benefits:
- You can confirm whether a certain account you are investing in is ideal for your business or not. If it is a perfect account, you can continue nurturing and delighting those accounts.
- If it is not a definitive account, you can shift your focus onto other ideal accounts and propel your strategies further. It is like a low-investment and high-value opportunity.
4) Shifts the focus to retention
Founder of Ubbersuggest, Neil Patel, says, “It costs seven times more to attract a new customer than it does to retain an existing one.” Customer retention is a significant step to drive your success in B2B marketing.
A B2B account based marketing strategies helps businesses retain current customers and expand their connections with the company. To maintain a steady revenue stream, keeping more focus on existing customers is essential. Because acquiring new potential customers can be expensive.
5) Maximize capabilities and potential of marketing automation tools
Combining marketing efforts with technology helps you systematically proceed with your campaign. Marketing automation with an account-based marketing strategy in B2B provides the following benefits:
- Effectively targeting all C-suite executives within an account helps unify experiences among organizations.
- Automation in account scoring, activating campaigns and workflows inside and outside of the inbox.
- Constructive linking of buyer behaviors and data among contacts for a unified account view.
- It can enable maximum personalization with minimum effort.
- It boosts relevant messaging.
6) ABM Strategy -> Right target -> Right leads -> More revenue
The advantages of account-based marketing are numerous. But specifically, it targets only those accounts that are most likely to close. The right leads are more valuable than 1000 directionless leads.
Spending your time, energy, and money on low-level or less profitable clients will not win you this B2B journey. ABM is a non-traditional and revolutionary marketing strategy that adds more value in scoring the right leads. This generates more revenue than 100 wrong leads.
Also Read: The Art of ABM: A Strategic Guide to Account-Based Marketing
7) Greater opportunity to be an expert
ABM offers you the chance to work from the grass-route level. This is high time for customization and personalization. Having the knowledge of a generalized market will not help you in modern marketing. Thinking on a personalized level to know more about your audience, their preferences, choices, and behaviors help you build expertise. This will help you a lot in the B2B world.
8) Building a trustworthy and robust relationship
Words are most important in trust building. While clients are looking for an answer to solve their issues online, ABM comes into play. ABM gives you the medium to have relevant interaction through blogs, videos, whitepapers, and social media. This quality content helps to solve their issues and convince them that you are the perfect ship in the widest B2B ocean. It will not only help in building a relationship, but it can get you strong leads.
9) Standing out from the crowd
Viewing each account as a user group of one empowers substantial customization of a marketing approach. This enables any organization to differentiate its tasks and work from the rest of the competitors. No one can copy your work using this approach.
ABM empowers to have a direct word around an offer that naturally eliminates the rest of the selling competition.
10) Better reporting and channel metric
B2B Account-based marketing is usually costly. As it is a more focused strategy, you’ll have fewer metrics and KPIs to keep track of. Interestingly, goal-setting and examining whether you met those goals are a breeze. In addition, it is easy to track your plan’s progress which you drew at the beginning of your campaign. ABM helps to plan, keep records and track with ease.
11) Helps to listen to your customer
To gain success, you must pay attention to the slightest signals that your customer sends. It majorly includes:
- Pre- and post-sale signals like B2B intent data
- Tracking contact’s social media activities
- Monitoring account news and updates
- Contact’s sales and marketing engagement
ABM helps in reading your customer’s minds. This passive listening can help in boosting your quality leads. This is a clear benefit of account-based marketing.
12) Builds engaging content
Content misses the spark while focusing on boring, product-centric, and technical language full of jargon. A marketer often makes a mistake in thought leadership; it is too high to take action. In account-based marketing, we may create less content, but whatever content we create is much more relevant to our ideal customer’s needs. ABM’s content is non-lengthy, compelling, actionable, and practical.
13) Creates a well-optimized and effective funnel
ABM hits the traditional marketing funnel. In account-based marketing, both sales and marketing teams work together. They ensure that each stage is well-optimized for every customer. It helps in furnishing personalized experiences and transforming prospects into clients. Sales and marketing teams collaborate effectively to ensure that every client who enters the funnel is highly qualified. Also, irrespective of their stage, their needs must be accurately addressed.
14) Accelerates the sales cycle
ABM insists more on targeting key accounts which are of high potential. With ABM, you can start influencing decision-makers and executives before their initial talk with sales. Involving marketing in the sales funnel helps in shortening the sales cycle. This can be done by:
- Prioritizing resources based on account scoring
- Personalizing marketing through ABM
- Common goals and metrics set by sales and marketing
15) Expands your budget
ABM strategy helps to avoid unnecessary spending, as you attract qualified leads only. Rather than paying time and money to reach a set of people who are unsure and might consider converting someday, you are spending time and money to acquire qualified people to become high-value customers with ABM.
Interestingly, a high-value customer spends more than the average customer and continues engaging with your product over time. In this way, if everything goes well, you’ll earn high with less spending.
16) Develop the team
ABM is itself an excellent strategy. It opens up many ways to develop your sales team thoroughly. It enables salespersons to create and track nuanced practices and guides them in strategizing processes and planning. This indirectly improves the whole team to support ongoing and future operations.
Winding Up
Account based marketing in B2B is the best modern marketing technique, where the target is specific, the interaction is relevant, the goal is clear, and, the results are profitable. To convince you in-depth, we have uncovered the 16 best ABM benefits. These benefits show a clear path to success and help to avoid B2B ABM mistakes.
There is no time to lose. Stop waiting and start planning your ABM with Binary Demand.
