What is B2B Account based Marketing (ABM) An Ultimate Guide

The Ultimate Guide to B2B Account-based Marketing (ABM)

By Binary Demand - Last Updated on March 9, 2023

In the current B2B competitive landscape, niche marketing is the name of the game.

Whether deliberate or inadvertent, most marketers make the mistake of generating unqualified leads and audience engagement, which might not be the perfect fit for their business. This is when most of their time, effort, and money are wasted.

Are you seeking the most effective B2B account based marketing solutions for this dilemma? One message to one audience is required to tackle this.

This is where account-based marketing comes into play. It eliminates less-valuable leads early and ensures that marketing and sales are in sync.

With the resurgence of B2B account-based marketing, B2B marketers can home in on essential accounts, firms with a particular revenue or a specific size, and develop a marketing campaign to appeal to those particular accounts, resulting in more excellent closure rates, improved ROI, and more revenues.

Let’s quickly peek into a few mind-boggling account-based marketing statistics to understand this strategy’s importance.

In this article

Interesting B2B Account-based Marketing Statistics

  • According to research by MarketingProfs, companies with aligned B2B account-based marketing strategies have experienced a 208% increase in marketing income.
  • 53% of firms, according to a combined survey done by HubSpot, Litmus, and Wistia, measure the success of their ABM strategy based on the revenue gained.
  • SiriusDecisions showed that 30% of account-based marketers reported increased engagement with their C-level targets of more than 100%.
  • 97% of marketers believe that ABM yields a greater return on investment (ROI) than other marketing tactics. (Alterra Group)
  • 94% of B2B marketers utilize ABM. (Terminus)
  • 82% of B2B marketers believe ABM significantly enhances sales and marketing team alignment. (LinkedIn)

Reading through the account-based marketing statistics above, there’s no doubt that B2B account-based marketing represents a massive opportunity for both marketing and sales teams to improve their ROI dramatically.

What is B2B Account-based Marketing?

B2B marketers have used B2B Account marketing for over a decade. The sophistication and accessibility of relevant data and ABM technology drive broad interest and implementation of this strategy.

But what is account-based marketing? Here is a clear and concise definition of account-based marketing.

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a growth strategy wherein the marketing and sales teams work to develop individualized buying experiences for a group of high-value clients that have been jointly selected.

Also Read: The Definitive Guide to Converting More Leads

The strategy is often confused with inbound marketing, so let’s differentiate.

Account-based Marketing Vs. Inbound Marketing: Which is Right for Your Business?

Parameters Account-based Marketing Inbound Marketing
Audience An ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is required, and decision-makers of firms that may need your product or service are targeted. A bigger audience that may or may not include your potential customers.
Strategy Research the market, determine your ICP and choose organizations that align with your ICP and target. Make the initial contact. Develop website and social media content and wait for the audience to arrive. Some viewers might be your future clients.
Message It is usually personalized using sales intelligence data. This marketing is generally content-specific.
Examples Outreach via email, phone, social network, and offline Content shared only via websites, blogs, videos, events, SEO, SMM

When B2B account-based marketing and inbound marketing are combined, they can generate waves for your organization.

ABM is a highly focused technique, whereas inbound marketing is more fundamental. Inbound and ABM are complementary in several ways.

Inbound establishes the groundwork for a practical ABM approach by enabling the highly targeted and efficient deployment of resources to high-value clients.

The History of Account-based Marketing

The roots of account-based marketing metrics can be identified as far back as the 1990s, a time when businesses recognized the necessity for more customized marketing. In response to the increasing desire for personalized buying experiences among customers, numerous marketers embraced best practices in account-based marketing.

ABM (Account-Based Marketing) has gained momentum only recently, primarily due to the B2B marketing industry trends, which prioritize B2B demand generation and return on investment (ROI). Additionally, the increasing availability of advanced B2B ABM solutions from multiple suppliers has contributed to the growing adoption of ABM strategies.

Why is Account-based Marketing Important?

Account-based Marketing (ABM) is important because it allows businesses to focus their marketing efforts on high-value accounts and personalize messaging for maximum impact.

Also Read: The Art of ABM: A Strategic Guide to Account-Based Marketing

By targeting specific accounts and decision-makers, ABM can increase sales effectiveness, shorten sales cycles, and improve customer retention. It also encourages alignment between sales and marketing teams, leading to better collaboration and enhanced ROI.

Overall, ABM is a strategic approach that helps businesses achieve better results and higher revenue growth.

How Does Account-based Marketing Function?

Compelling account-based marketing needs a multichannel approach and strong coordination between a business’s sales, marketing, and customer success departments.

Account-based marketing solutions can be coupled with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or B2B marketing automation technology to conduct campaigns directed at your target accounts.

Account-based marketing has achieved considerable success because it engages consumers on their terms through digital channels besides email and telephone. ABM is easily scalable since these marketing efforts involve the lead and the entire account.

Today, ABM software enables marketing across personas, sales phases, campaigns, or within a CRM, making it simple to engage and nurture your target customers wherever they are online.

Steps to Implement Account-based Marketing

Account-based Marketing (ABM) is a strategy that focuses on identifying and targeting high-value accounts or customers with personalized and relevant messaging to increase the likelihood of conversion. You should implement ABM for higher conversion rates, better alignment between sales and marketing, increased revenue, improved customer retention, and competitive advantages. Here’s how to implement ABM:

This part will explore a step-by-step strategy for implementing account-based marketing. Skimping on the procedure will result in thoughtless mistakes.

Step 1: Determine your most valuable target accounts

These particular accounts have the most potential to contribute to your company’s income.

Step 2: Research the respective accounts

Note their customer needs, pain points, and where they are in the customer journey.

Step 3: Create individualized marketing campaigns

Using the research phase’s findings to influence your strategy, you must generate creative materials that resonate with the target account.

Step 4: Conduct your targeted advertising campaigns

Send your marketing campaigns to the specified account.

Step 5: Measure your personalized marketing efforts

Analyze the data to determine the performance of your efforts.

Tools Needed for B2B Account-based Marketing

There are several account based marketing tools available for automating and executing ABM plans. These include B2B data enrichment tools, AI-based predictive analytics and recommendations, interaction management (i.e., digital advertising, direct mail, websites, events, and sales outreach), and ABM infrastructure and orchestration.

Since data enrichment is a key competency of ABM tools, it is essential to understand the sorts of data that these platforms can process:

  • Technographic data: Identifies the hardware and software systems accountants use to operate their firms.
  • Firmographic data: Provides quantitative business information, including market vertical, firm size and number of locations, number of workers, yearly revenue, and growth.
  • Intent data: Identifies firm behaviors or signals that indicate if a customer is “in-market” for a solution.

Account-based marketing software shifts the focus of marketing and sales teams from broad branding and lead generation methods to a more precise strategy by first identifying high-value target accounts and then implementing a tailored marketing approach.

Now that you’ve understood the basics of ABM, Binary Demand highly recommends checking out our second blog on this topic to discover more valuable insights and practical tips that help boost your ABM efforts and drive higher ROI.