Depending on your business niche, you may be competing with hundreds, or even thousands, of other companies. This is especially true for B2B companies, who are competing for high-value clients. As a result, many more companies have turned to account-based marketing (ABM) to outperform their competitors.
What is Account-Based Marketing?
Account-based marketing is a strategy that narrows down the target audience to provide personalized marketing campaigns focused on specific traits, attributes, and needs of targeted accounts.
B2B companies utilizing account-based marketing focus their sales and marketing resources on a smaller group of specific accounts, and deploy personalized marketing plans for each account.
In the age of personalization, many companies have found account-based marketing to be an effective, cost-efficient marketing solution, especially with recent advances in technology.
Benefits of Account-Based Marketing
The benefits of account-based marketing include:
- Increased ROI: Account-based marketing plans consistently deliver some of the highest returns on investment, in large part due to coordination of sales and marketing departments to accomplish shared goals.
- More Efficient: Since account-based marketing plans are specifically targeted to specific clients, they allow marketers to focus their energy and resources, rather than a machine gun style of marketing.
- More Personal: One of the most significant advantages to an account-based marketing plan is that the campaigns are more personalized. Today, people are much more likely to interact with a personalized message than a generic message.
- Easier to Track: Account -based marketing makes tracking the effectiveness of campaigns much easier. As a result, analytics are quickly produced, and used to perfect campaigns more quickly, thereby generating desired results more quickly.
How B2B Companies are Using Account-Based Marketing
Around 62% of B2B companies recently surveyed have a full ABM plan in place. What’s even more interesting is that just 41% of companies surveyed in 2016 by SiriusDecisions had an ABM plan in place. Furthermore, in the same 2016 survey, around 91% of respondents said that the average deal size is larger for ABM accounts.
B2B companies are using ABM to increase revenue and remain competitive in an increasingly challenging environment. Market saturation, resulting in customers having higher expectations every year, has encouraged aggressive B2B companies to implement ABM plans to win clients and retain more customers.
Two of the top companies offering ABM solutions are:
- Marketo offers tools such as account scoring, custom segmentation, account-level predictive analysis, and much more.
- Infer is a predictive sales and marketing platform that aggregates data from internal and external sources, which are run through algorithms to produce potential leads. Other services provided by Infer can also aid marketing and sales teams in producing effective plans to reach top-ranking companies.
Implementing Your ABM Plan
The basic components of an ABM plan, whether large or small, are the same. So, even if you are a small company on a shoestring budget, you can get to work with account-based marketing.
- Coordinate your sales and marketing departments, so they work closely in tandem to accomplish shared goals.
- Select key accounts to target, and create a marketing plan for each.
- Setup each targeted account in your CRM, with as much information as possible on existing contacts.
- Create hyper-personalized campaigns for each of the accounts, which can include in-person meetings and teleconferences, opportunities to meet in person at tradeshows, email and social campaigns, website content, and internet ads.
- Work contacts, and build a network of new contacts, within each targeted account.
Take Away
Whether you own a large corporation with a multi-million-dollar marketing budget, or you are a sole proprietor starting a new business, ABM is about building multiple relationships with members of the organizations you target, on as personal a basis as possible.
Image Building Media helps clients with the Internet processes needed for account-based marketing. We work with clients to create custom internet Marketing plans that meet their exact needs. Check out the success of some of our featured clients, and contact us for a free consultation.