Marketing and sales teams that take an ABM approach together can be up to 6% more likely to exceed their revenue goals than teams that are less ABM-focused. - Forrester
Account based marketing is one of the fastest-growing trends in the marketing industry and with good reason. This strategy focuses on high-value accounts, the type that has a strong interest in the products and services you’re selling. There are no wasted resources on trying to entice unqualified leads that don’t fit the bill for your company. Instead, your sales and marketing teams can move straight into engaging target accounts and securing their business.
That’s the case if you have an effective account based marketing strategy in place.
What is Account Based Marketing?
Typical marketing methods attempt to reach many people in one go. Campaigns aren’t personalised, and the result of a one-size-fits-all marketing and sales strategy, is that it fails.
Account-based marketing, however, follows a one-to-one approach. The strategy begins by identifying high-value prospects or accounts. Key stakeholders within these organisations are then targeted, with personalised marketing techniques being implemented across various channels.
ABM is all about utilising promotional strategies that appeal to the specific needs and personas of those targeted accounts. Each one is treated like an individual market, which means you personalise the buyer’s journey at every step. This includes tailoring all campaigns, content and communications to specific accounts.
The result: your business will experience a greater ROI and an increase in customer loyalty and revenue.
Why are businesses adopting an Account Based Marketing approach?
For those that measure ROI, more than 80% of marketers claim account-based marketing outperformed their other promotional investments. The difference isn’t minor, either – almost half of that 80% stated ABM was significantly better than alternative marketing strategies.
Search for any ABM statistics and you’ll see similarly lofty figures in its favour. They almost speak for themselves.
Any B2B company that has the resources to market to individual accounts should incorporate ABM. There’s a reason why the ABM market size is expected to reach $1,196.9 million by 2025 – more than double the valuation in 2017 at $534.8 million. It continues to grow in popularity due to the proven, long-term results it delivers.
Download our Account Based Marketing guide here
Partnering Account Based Marketing with inbound marketing
As the account based marketing with HubSpot guide states, it makes perfect sense to pair up ABM with inbound marketing.
Why? ABM, as established above, is a highly targeted technique. Inbound marketing, on the other hand, has a more foundational structure. It focuses on SEO, the production of valuable content, and delivering a fantastic customer experience. Rather than being a disruptive presence when targeting customers – outbound marketing, we’re looking at you – inbound marketing presents the opportunity to organically supply relevant information to your audience when they want it.
When both ABM and inbound marketing join forces, you’re left with a strong digital foundation for all campaigns. ABM builds off this foundation, accelerates the process, and opens the door to efficient and targeted resource allocation to your identified high-value accounts.
The benefits of Account Based Marketing
As you’ve likely anticipated, there are several benefits to using an effective account-based marketing strategy, including the following:
- Streamline the sales cycle: When you specifically target high-value accounts, you’re effectively eliminating regular sales cycle elements like research and making connections. ABM is efficient, saves time and resources, and allows you to focus on the important stages of the sales cycle that enhance your bottom line.
- Align your marketing and sales teams: Cross-team collaboration is always beneficial for any organisation. The good news: ABM encourages alignment between your marketing and sales teams.
- Provide consistent customer experiences: Delivering consistent experiences is the backbone of any ABM process. You need to delight accounts and make each one feel like the most significant for your business. When marketing and sales are aligned, providing a consistent customer experience is natural, and you’ll ensure your accounts don’t want to leave for a competitor.
- Measure your ROI: Due to the nature of targeting individual accounts, it’s particularly easy to measure the return on investment.
- Boost sales figures: It’s proven that it costs less to retain customers than attract new ones. When you build trusting, long-term relationships with accounts, you’ll retain their business for longer, and boost sales numbers in the process.
Tactics to maximise your Account Based Marketing Strategy
Let’s take a closer look at the tactics that can take your account-based marketing strategy to the next level:
Produce a full-scale ABM strategy: Preparing a digital account based marketing strategy is the first step towards achieving the desired revenue goals from this plan. Create your strategy with key insights into your ideal buyer. Include details such as:
- Business Overview
- Key Business Initiatives
- Customer Relationship Landscape
- Customer Products and Revenue
- Account Competitor Analysis
- Buying Process and Selling Points
- Relationship Goals and Strategy
- Sales Opportunities and Risks
Create prospect-specific offers: When specifically targeting accounts, create offers that fall in line with your target buyer’s wants and needs.
Get meetings with developed sales offers: When you need to get in the door and secure a meeting, enticing accounts with a focused sales offer is an effective method.
A personalised website experience: A personalised landing page on your website is another way to make accounts feel like they’re the centre of your attention. By displaying custom content and offers to specific accounts, they won’t need to browse your entire site for the information they need. Find more information on merging ABM with digital tactics.
Produce sales territories that convert: When you have specific teams targeting certain accounts, you have a greater chance of creating opportunities that are relevant to each account. This is because each territory should have built strong social connections with each account.
Develop a one-to-one campaign: Persona-based campaigns are an effective approach to ABM. By reaching out on a one-to-one basis, with personal and ‘real’ messages, it makes it easier to connect and build relationships with accounts.
How to drive effective Account Based Marketing through a CRM
Are you leveraging your CRM enough for ABM? If you’re currently using a CRM like HubSpot, you could be developing and personalising your campaigns specifically around your targeted accounts.
HubSpot has the foundations for all your target account needs. Create campaigns where you can track all progress from sales and marketing relevant to targeting specific accounts, and set up tailored reports for each campaign to measure ROI. With HubSpot you truly begin to see the benefits of sales and marketing collaboration, while gaining real-time insights into your business’ growth.
If you invested in a CRM to align marketing and sales and begin your digital transformation, but you’re still not seeing a return on investment, ProsperoHub can support you by producing a growth strategy tailored to your business, adding focus to everyday sales and marketing operations, and developing a fully realised lead flow strategy that generates more revenue.
If you have the appetite to explore ABM through digital sales and marketing, but haven’t yet invested in a CRM, we would suggest taking a look at HubSpot. Business as we knew it has changed this year, and it’s much harder to reach potential buyers without the right tools – even with an ABM strategy in place, you could be losing your share in the market without automated processes to streamline your sales and marketing activities.
Don’t have the firepower to manage your sales and marketing activities? Invest in a digital consultancy like ProsperoHub who can manage your strategy for you, so you can dedicate your valuable time focusing on growing your business.
Account based marketing can have a significant impact on your business. Fashion a more focused approach to generating revenue and delighting high-value accounts.
Your business cannot afford to miss out on ABM. You also cannot implement a half-baked strategy that isn’t effective for digital.
To avoid wasting time and resources, download our full account based marketing template below to target key accounts. This guide will give you a step-to-step plan that ensures your ABM strategy includes all the relevant information for you to incorporate into your sales and marketing campaigns.
