What is Account-Based Marketing?
According to Hubspot
“Account-based marketing, or ABM, is a targeted approach to B2B enterprise marketing — one that involves honing in on key accounts, creating hyper-targeted content and campaigns, and delivering a personalized experience to the companies that matter most .”
From the above definition, we can tell that ABM is all about personalized marketing.
If you are sending an email blast, What is the click-through rate?
What if you are sending 100s of emails daily and just 1 – 2 people click on it? In that how many converts? If this is your case, probably you are doing it wrong.
People receive a lot of emails every day. They do not even open it if they feel it is irrelevant.
This is because you lack personalization. Personalization is the key.
What you do here is you understand and identify the prospect’s problem and all you do is send content according to their needs.
You create hyper-targeted content for a particular prospect or company.
By doing this you have a higher chance of conversion compared to other marketing methods. Companies that use account-based marketing actually generate 208% more revenue for their marketing efforts.
Consider the above graphic.
While the traditional method focuses on fishing on a wide net and nurturing them through the wide sales funnel.
ABM does exactly the opposite of that, you are fishing with spheres.
You target one particular account and nurture them with hyper-targeted content.
And Marketo says that 85% of B2B marketers say ABM provides significant benefits to retain and expand client relationships.
Increase your sales with Account-Based Marketing.
Segment audiences so you can better refine your approach:
It’s a waste of time to send a generic email to all of your contacts.
You don’t have to send 100s of people the same email.
You have a very low click-through rate for these emails.
Instead, treat every single prospect, and customer, as a personalized account.
Do some research on what exactly your prospect is looking for and narrow your content to that particular prospect.
Do this for all your contacts and segment according to their interests.
Personalize your content
Personalizing content to a particular account is the key.
Personalized emails can actually deliver 6x more transactions.
You here build a valuable relationship with your prospect by giving informative, valuable, and helpful content.
You don’t do direct sales here. All you focus on is bringing value to your customers.
All you should focus is on generating quality content for your audiences and reaching out the right content to the right people.
By doing this you can significantly drive more sales and increase your ROI.
Align Marketing and Sales
Marketing and sales should go hand in hand.
Marketing and sales should speak the same language. Sales and Marketing people should know what and whom they are targeting.
As ABM is a targeted approach, you focus more on quality rather than quantity.
So every account here matters. You should have keen observation while approaching a particular account. Because it has more value now.
In ABM, you have to organize, track and nurture those relationships. So it is very crucial for sales and marketing to work as a whole and which results in a successful ABM strategy.
Target the right Leads:
ABM only focuses on the right lead which has a higher chance of becoming a customer than wasting time on many low-qualified leads.
High-qualified leads can make more revenue so it is very important to invest time here.
Build Trust with Prospects:
Trust is built when you can effectively solve the challenges your prospects are facing.
You here focus on finding a problem of your prospect and providing him the solution.
By doing this the prospect’s trust is built and a relationship is formed and then the lead is converted to sales.
When Account-Based Marketing and Inbound Marketing work together.
Account-based Marketing and Inbound Marketing together work really well as they share some similar core principles.
Both Inbound and Account-Based Marketing both focus on personalization and sharing relevant content.
So how do they differ?
Inbound marketing attracts customers with the quality content you are producing and has an idea of what type of content your audiences are interested in.
While Account-based Marketing relies on outbound channels like personalized emails and targeted advertising.
If both these tactics work together, it can extend the personalized experience of your audience.
But be careful, while sending outbound emails. Make sure you are sending the right email to the right audience.
What are the Benefits of using Account-Based Marketing?
Shorten sales cycles:
ABM eliminates all the unqualified and less qualified leads and shortens the sales cycle process.
By doing this, time and resources are saved.
ABM only targets highly qualified leads that have more chances of conversion.
Now the sales along with the help of the marketing team can focus on more personalized services for the targeted prospects.
Efficient use of Marketing Resources:
ABM effectively uses marketing resources. With a narrow focus, only on the qualified leads the resource and time are saved abundantly.
ABM works well with both the marketing and sales team, so both teams can focus only on closing the qualified leads with more personalization for the prospect.
This also helps in a good relationship between Marketing and sales which is a very important factor in ABM.
It can boost your ROI:
ABM is highly calculated, targeted, and measurable.
It provides the best ROI than any other marketing strategy in B2B Marketing.
ABM has very fewer accounts that can generate more revenue.
Helps in analyzing reports:
The advantages of using ABM are, You will have fewer targeted accounts and very few metrics that you should keep track of.
This makes it easy to draw more accurate conclusions with ABM and helps in Goal setting and analyzing reports compared to pulling larger data from different accounts.
With the well-documented analytical report, it is easy to compare the goals quarterly or annually.
Conclusion
We now know how personalization plays a vital role in connecting people.
All you have to do is establish a long relationship with your customers, audience.
Account Based Marketing is targeted, calculated, and when it is correctly done. It is more effective.
So stop sending boring generic emails to all your contacts. It is frustrating.
If you want to win over your audience and increase your sales include Account Based Marketing in your Marketing strategy.