In B2B Marketing, casting a wide net does not always have its advantages. Certainly, you can reel in some customers, but if you want to lure in the big fish—high-value clients that fuel your brand down its path, then you will want to employ a different strategy. A more targeted strategy called Account-Based Marketing (ABM) focuses on targeting and developing a relationship with very specific companies (accounts) that align with your ideal business profile.
ABM focuses on fewer high-value targets compared to many. You can think of ABM like spear fishing versus net fishing. Using a spear, you are attempting to “catch” a very small number of fish (high-value accounts), but you will be targeting them in a very specific and personalized way. With enough time and resources, the upside potential can be significant establishing strong relationships with them where clients could generate reliable, ongoing revenue streams for your brand.
What is Account-Based Marketing (ABM)?
In essence, ABM is account-specific personalized marketing. This is not about broad marketing campaigns that can speak to many organizations but specifically about focusing marketing on a smaller number of targeted organizations that match your ideal customer profile. With ABM, you create hyper-targeted content and campaigns that enable you to engage and nurture accounts through their buying journey.
In other words, ABM is not a one-size-fits-all marketing approach. ABM is about creating a custom experience for the specific decision-makers at the specific organizations that you want to win. You can think of these customers like they are VIPs—because they are!
Why ABM is So Effective for B2B
B2B sales are usually long and complicated sales processes with multiple stakeholders and decision-makers. Just because you get one person at a target company committed does not mean the sale is a done deal. You must also get buy-in from many other stakeholders and decision-makers. Regardless of if they are procurement, finance, or C-suite, the likelihood that multiple decision-makers have substantial influence in the sales process is very high. This is the beauty of ABM! You can create custom messaging related to the specific needs of each stakeholder.
Here are a few solid reasons not to ignore ABM as a tactic for B2B:
- Personalization at Scale: ABM provides you with an opportunity to customize the experience for each account. While you could continue to send the typical emails and content or reach out to businesses with ad hoc content, ABM allows you to directly address the specific challenges of a specific business and its goals, which makes it so much more impactful.
- Better Alignment Between Sales and Marketing: ABM demands that sales and marketing work together even more closely. Since both teams share the focus of engaging the same target accounts, there is less friction, and they can work more collaboratively to achieve that goal.
- Higher ROI: ABM provides a way to spend your marketing dollars more wisely since you can target the highest-value accounts. Rather than disperse heavy budgets and try to appeal to everybody, you are focusing your attention on high-value accounts. Companies that practice ABM are likely to earn higher ROI compared to those that don’t leverage ABM. Recent research suggests that audience engagement is much more meaningful, producing significantly higher revenue returns.
- Stronger Partnerships: ABM is about establishing partnerships. Consumers want relevant, valuable content for every stage of the buying experience, and the more trust you establish will ultimately lead to superior levels of loyalty. Stronger levels of trust will create more loyal customers who spend more money.
Account-based marketing is a great approach when planning to engage a smaller selection of targeted, high-value accounts.
Step 1: Identify High-Value Accounts
The first step to deploying an ABM strategy is to identify which companies you want to target. You want to pick companies that will provide value back to your organization—high-dollar contracts, long-term partners with future contracts, or measurable savings. Some things to consider when selecting the high-value accounts are: the size of the organization, sales, industry, and if they align with your product or service. While building out your list, utilize your sales team to ensure you are only targeting the accounts you want to target.
Step 2: Research the Accounts
So after you identify the accounts you want to pursue in your ABM strategy, the second stage of the process is vital; you have to do your real homework. You need to gather as much information about each targeted company as possible—what the current pain points are, their goals, trends within the industry, the decision makers, etc. Understanding this information can help you create content and messaging that is targeted to each account.
Research the account company on LinkedIn, trade publications, company websites, etc. The more you know about the company, the better you can set yourself up for success.
Step 3: Create Customized Content
With research completed, you now know the most relevant topics to create customized content for each account. The customized content could include blog articles, case studies, webinars, or even customized videos that are specific to the client’s needs and challenges.
For example, if you are working with a software company and they have trouble with customer retention, you could offer a case study that showed how a similar company used your product for retention. The intent is to comply, but also to find a way to engage that is relevant, exciting, and problem-solving.
Step 4: Engage on Multiple Channels
If that all sounds good, then know that ABM should never be a single-channel marketing approach. The most effective ABM strategies will employ a multi-channel approach to engaging target accounts anywhere that engagement can occur—through email, social media, webinars, or direct mail.
For example, you might send a personalized email to the key decision makers at a target account, then follow that up with a LinkedIn connection, and finally an invitation to attend a customized webinar. The idea is to create a number of touchpoints to help keep your company and solution top of mind as they work through their buying process.
Step 5: Evaluate and Edit
Like all marketing methods, it is important to evaluate your results, measure key metrics such as engagement metrics, meetings booked, and closed business, so you can understand the data and use it to better improve and maximize your ABM campaigns.
Conclusion
Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is one of the most accurate forms of B2B marketing and provides the right acquisition and growth of the right clients with relevant and valuable communications. ABM provides great upside in return on investment (ROI) and relationships with clients for the long term, but it needs a tighter upfront process and tighter sales and marketing collaboration.
If you are sick of shooting into the void, now is your time to develop an account-based marketing strategy. Put your strategy towards landing bigger clients to drive business growth. Like anything in marketing, if you do not use metrics to measure your results, you are just guessing at what worked and what didn’t. Track things like engagement.
Ready to build a focused ABM strategy that wins high-value clients?
Get in touch to discuss how we can tailor it to your business goals.
