What is Account-Based Marketing?

As the world grows increasingly digital, marketing strategies are forced to transform. In-person meetings are via Zoom; business decisions made over coffee have been replaced with a quick phone call or Slack message. This means today’s B2B companies must continue to evolve their playbooks if they want to generate new business and expand current relationships among customers. The successful ones have done so with account-based marketing, a digital marketing strategy that uses personalized content and messaging to identify and engage with high-value accounts.

What is Account-Based Marketing?

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a B2B digital marketing strategy that uses highly curated, personalized buying experiences to identify and engage a specific number of relevant target audiences throughout the sales funnel. While traditional marketing tactics take a broad approach by targeting a variety of accounts at once, ABM strategies only target in-market decision-makers. Due to its powerful return and boosted loyalty among customers, ABM is quickly being adopted by B2B companies to generate higher-quality leads and grow revenue year over year.

What are the Benefits of Account-Based Marketing? 

Whether you’re seeking to increase your ROI, bring your sales and marketing team into closer communication, or improve your data and reporting, ABM is your answer.

A well-designed ABM strategy provides many benefits, including:

• Alignment of sales and marketing teams
• Enhanced audience targeting
• Improved audience engagement
• In-depth data and reporting capabilities

Additionally, a recent study conducted by TOPO found that “80% of respondents say [account-based marketing] improves customer lifetime values,” while “86% say it improves win rates.”

Why ABM Is a Collaboration Between Marketing and Sales 

An effective ABM strategy improves alignment between your sales and marketing teams. Why is that important? According to Marketo, when sales and marketing are aligned, there’s a “67% higher probability that marketing-generated leads will close.” ABM allows collaboration between the two teams to ensure their efforts are aligned throughout multiple areas including:

• Developing buyer personas: Marketing understands which companies and job titles to target; sales can help identify common pain points and provide valuable input from previous experience.
• Identifying target accounts: Sales and marketing work together to create a target account list of the accounts that are most likely to lead to conversion in the future. Misalignment around target accounts would lead to both teams targeting different accounts, wasting both energy and money.
• Choosing the right content: Your marketing team has the data on which content performs the best while your sales team knows what type of content their accounts want to engage with.
• Omnichannel alignment: Alignment across digital marketing channels ensures neither team is delivering duplicate or irrelevant content to your target audience.
• Data and reporting: An ABM aggregated data dashboard helps to communicate campaign performance and relevant information to both parties.

How Account-Based Marketing Targets High-Value Accounts

The key to ABM is only marketing to the relevant, likely-to-convert accounts. This process begins by creating an ideal customer profile (ICP). Your ICP should be specific and focused on the types of accounts that are most likely to need your product or service. For example, a logistics company specializing in industrial refrigeration may define its ideal customer profile as a decision-maker at mid-to-large size companies in need of cold storage or refrigerated warehousing and shipping. The ICP can be refined even further to include specific job titles, number of employees in the organization, annual revenue, geographical location, size of customer base, and even who their competitors are.

Once you create and refine your ICP, the next step is identifying where those accounts are in their buyer’s journey. ABM combines target data from first-party sources with data from third-party tools such as Bombora, which collects “demographic and firmographic data to provide targetable segments such as revenue, company size, professional group, functional area, industry, and seniority.” With this data in hand, you can create highly-refined audience segments and deliver relevant content at the correct funnel stage.

How to Use Account-Based Marketing to Improve Campaign Engagement

With an understanding of who your audience is and where they are in the buyer’s journey, you can focus on delivering personalized content that meets their immediate needs. Prospective customers are more likely to engage with content that shows a company understands their pain points.

The key to ABM is delivering the right content and messaging to the right target audience at the right time. As target accounts move through the sales funnel, the content you serve them should watch their precise location. Blog posts, podcasts, and e-books build awareness with prospective customers without pushing a product or service. Providing accurate, reliable industry information without pushing the hard-sell builds rapport and improves relationships with both new and existing customers.

As targets move into the consideration and validation states, they’ll need to engage with content that addresses specific pain points and solutions. Buyer’s guides or webinars that address common industry problems generate more engagement with target audiences and further solidify your brand as a valuable resource in their buyer’s journey.

In the evaluation or decision stage, you must provide content that demonstrates your product or service is the exact one they need—product brochures and product demos are extremely effective at the point in the buyer’s journey.

Why Account-Based Marketing Provides Enhanced Reporting Features

No marketing strategy is complete without accurate, reliable data to provide your business with the insights necessary to gauge the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. While there are numerous relevant metrics and ways to measure success with an ABM campaign, account scoring is the most accurate strategy.

An account score is an aggregation of data points (intent data, on-site page views and interactions, and campaign interactions) that provide heightened insight into the quality of the accounts engaging with your ABM campaign. The more engagement and interaction an account has with your content, the higher the account score.

Interested in learning more about account-based marketing? Schedule a demo with our team.