Account-based marketing (ABM) is a marketing and sales acquisition strategy where you run highly personalized campaigns to attract a discrete set of potential customers.
Traditionally, marketing focuses on inbound strategies, such as content marketing, or lead-based marketing, where you cast a wide net and hope that people respond. With account-based marketing, you try to target specific individuals within an account and coordinate your marketing efforts with the sales team.
With ABM, you target specific, high-value prospects to convert them into sales.. You don’t waste time trying to market to unqualified leads who aren’t the right fit for your business.
72% of B2B marketers who used ABM in 2021 reported an increased ROI compared to other forms of marketing.
ABM strategies focus on creating personalized buying experiences for better customer acquisition, relationship-building, and business growth. It is best applied to mid-market and enterprise accounts because the customer acquisition cost can be high.
ABM helps your business work and communicate with high-value accounts as if they’re individual markets. By doing this — along with personalising the buyer’s journey and tailoring all communications, content, and campaigns to those specific accounts — you’ll see greater ROI and a boost in customer loyalty.
Identifying and targeting key accounts has always been a best practice for B2B marketing and sales teams. What’s different today about account-based marketing is that improved technology gives marketing teams the tools for account-based marketing at scale.
In this guide, we’ll explain what ABM is, why it’s so beneficial, and give you actionable steps for creating your own ABM strategy.
Benefits of Account-Baed Marketing
Account-based marketing isn’t a fit for every business. It is a strategic initiative that requires sustained investment to deliver maximum results. Organizations that have run their ABM programmes for three years or more are more likely to generate higher returns from ABM than from other marketing programmes and to be measuring the return on their programme in the first place.
There are many benefits associated with account-based marketing. Let’s take a look at some of the great benefits ABM offers businesses:
1. Increase ROI
The majority of B2B marketers say ABM campaigns are great value for the money.
An ITSMA 2020 ABM benchmarking survey3 found that 77 per cent of marketers who measure return on investment (ROI) described ABM as delivering higher returns than any other marketing approach. Just over a quarter of those marketers surveyed said that ABM delivers more than 10 per cent better ROI than other B2B marketing approaches.
ROI improves with time, with double the amount of marketers seeing better ROI after their programme has been established for three years.
2. Create more consistent customer experiences
According to PwC, 48% of consumers say consistent, reliable experiences are key to loyalty.
Account-based marketing strategies align your sales and marketing initiatives. All communications, interactions, and content become consistent for all the accounts you work with. ABM-specific marketing platform also makes it easier to deliver consistent, quality experiences across all of your brand channels.
This creates a seamless and delightful customer experience.
3. Align sales and marketing
Traditionally, sales and marketing are siloed into separate departments. This leads to miscommunications, conflict, and lower campaign performance.
With ABM, sales and marketing both work towards converting the same list of target accounts. This means arguments over lead quantity and lead quality go away, and your sales and marketing teams become unified in their focus.
According to Forrester Research, organizations with aligned sales and marketing teams see an average of 32% annual revenue growth, while less aligned companies see a 7% decline in growth.
Types of Account-Based Marketing
There are three types of account-based marketing: Strategic, Lite & Programmatic.
Strategic or one-to-one ABM
Strategic ABM is the most appropriate strategy for those accounts grouped by their revenue potential, or whose proportion of your future revenues is so important that it will make or break your future business.
Strategic ABM only makes sense in accounts with large budgets because it is so resource-intensive, with marketers looking after between three and five accounts, or sometimes a single, large account.
In 2020, 41 per cent of ABM-ers used strategic ABM9 with a median of 14 accounts in a programme. Usually, this type of ABM is used to increase business with existing clients (57 per cent), with only 43 per cent using it to break into new accounts.
Lite or one-to-few ABM
In lite ABM, you’ll deal with clusters of accounts that share similar characteristics. These clusters typically contain five to 15 accounts, based on these common characteristics or issues.
By creating a “one-to-few” grouping, you can still get highly specific about the desired goal of your target market, but it’s at a slightly more general level that several companies may share. It’s not so specific as to be relevant to only one company.
Why would you ever choose to do one-to-few ABM instead of one-to-one? Because you can effectively speak to those common characteristics and a more personalised treatment may not be necessary.
ABM ‘lite’ was the most popular type of ABM in 2020, used by 58 per cent of ABM-ers and with a median of 50 accounts in a programme. It is focused on accounts that are either still strategic but unable to be addressed with full ABM due to resource constraints, or are a second tier of accounts that, while still significant, do not warrant the investment of the top tier.
Programmatic or one-to-many ABM
Programmatic ABM is most often used for generating a higher volume of opportunities from your target account list.
If, for example, you have five accounts in your one-to-one program, and another 45 in your one-to-few, you might have 1000-plus in your one-to-many tier.
Programmatic ABM is much less resource intensive and more applicable for businesses that don’t have the same complex, large, multi-year deals of those that have been using strategic ABM. It still includes personalization, to the extent that certain characteristics are common to hundreds of accounts: maybe industry, stage in the sales cycle, a particular focused product, geography, and so forth.
Programmatic ABM is reserved for accounts that do not yet warrant the individual investment of the other two types. In companies with lower value sales that still want to adopt ABM principles to improve their campaign effectiveness, it is usually the only form of ABM done.
Programmatic ABM is mostly used for new accounts that may or may not have indicated purchase intent.
You don’t have to use one single type of ABM
There is no sharp line separating these forms of ABM. You don’t have to adopt one single approach. Instead, you can have one-to-one ABM in place for the most critical accounts and be doing, for example, one-to-many marketing for the launch of a product into a relatively new market.
You can also shift accounts between tiers. For example, if it becomes clear that an account in your one-to-one program has nowhere for your company to grow its revenue, it might be time to move it into one-to-few.
You still want to give the account some extra attention to retain it because it is probably among your top revenue-generating accounts, but it might not make sense to spend at the one-to-one level to do so.
In taking this action, you free up the resources to move a new account into one-to-one with a large potential for growth.
Creating an Account-Baed Marketing strategy
Now that we know the basics of account-based marketing, we’ll outline the steps you can follow to create an ABM campaign.
Identify Target Accounts
The first step of account-based marketing is to identify. With traditional lead-based marketing, your marketing team focuses on feeding as many leads as possible at the top of the funnel. With the account-based marketing funnel, you start the sales process by focusing on a single point of contact. You target your best-fit lead and create a contact.
This contact potentially is a good fit for your business. You determine whether they’re a good fit by using a set of criteria. This set of criteria aligns with your ideal customer profile. After you have determined that this contact meets your ideal customer profile, you begin the process of turning the contact into a full account.
Account selection has a major impact on your potential success with ABM, regardless of whether you are just getting started, increasing your programme’s size and scope, or managing a mature programme. You can give yourself the greatest chance of meeting your objectives for ABM by selecting those accounts that have the best potential to achieve your ABM goals.
If your main priority is account growth, for example, it is essential to select accounts that have an appropriate level of spending (sometimes referred to as ‘size of wallet’) to support your growth ambitions. Also, you’re unlikely to get significant growth in an account where your customer is already spending 90 per cent of their available budget with you. If your main priority is to win some flagship companies, or anchor accounts in a market or sector, you need to select those that have influence over their peers and the confidence of analysts for their foreseeable future.
Build Account Plans
The second stage of account-based marketing is to expand. This involves expanding your contact into an account. After the account is created, you further expand the account by adding more contacts. Your ideal customer profile is the type of company (the account) you want to work with. Within those accounts, there are contacts (the people who will use your product or service).
Often, expanding is the toughest stage for marketers who are used to traditional lead-based marketing. With lead-based marketing, you’re starting big at the top of the funnel, then slimming down the leads through different stages of qualification. Switching from lead-based marketing to account-based marketing requires a fundamental shift in the mindset.
Tailor Value Proposition
The third stage of account-based marketing is to engage. Engagement is where your content and channels come to life. This stage is by far the broadest because there are so many ways to engage with your prospects. Engagement often is where marketers become scientists. They test different types of content to find which types resonate with specific types of contacts and accounts.
Using personalized marketing, your marketing and sales teams engage all of the contacts within an account. You target your marketing messages to your best-fit customers on the channels where your ads are most likely to be seen, whether that’s social media, display advertising, video, or mobile. This creates more energy to close deals sooner.
Engagement is the broadest stage of account-based marketing because there are so many ways to engage with your prospects. Think about email, webinars, ebooks, targeted ads, videos, events, and any programmatic or automated ways you use to get in front of your target audience (target audience is the key phrase).
Keep in mind that ABM is about understanding what an individual client needs and targeting or developing solutions to meet that need. This is what differentiates ABM from typical products or services selling.
The very nature of ABM means that you are able to create content that is more personalized and relevant than that used for market- or segment-based campaigns. As a buyer yourself, you know how you are constantly bombarded with advertising messages or sales calls and you probably automatically screen out anything that isn’t immediately relevant and of interest to you. Your buyers are doing the same.
Popular Account-Based Marketing Tactics
Attention to detail is important with this ABM tactic. First, you need to choose platforms where your target accounts are active and engaged. Next, you want outreach to feel authentic.
Let’s discuss the five most useful ABM tactics:
Webinars and Virtual Events
You need to hold interactive events rather than those where the audience sits passively watching. and buyers value knowledgeable and engaging speakers.
The aim of the event is to create a shared vision of how to work together on a key issue to deliver a mutually beneficial business outcome and in the process deepen relationships and create new opportunities. Bring your potential solutions to life in a detailed action plan that both parties can then work on together.
Account-specific (Bespoke) Thought Leadership
B2B buyers pay significant consideration to thought leadership when making their selection decisions. They want suppliers to demonstrate they can contribute genuine insights to improve their business performance.
When producing thought leadership, keep in mind that there should be close liaison between the subject matter experts who produce the insights and anyone charged with client contact, with the subject matter expert increasingly delivering thought leadership in person as the buyer moves through their purchasing process.
Executive-to-executive Relationship Programmes
If you are preparing an integrated sales and marketing campaign to one of your most strategic accounts, it should include some of your executives. As suppliers compete for C-suite positioning and relationships in their most important accounts, the people who can most effectively support these relationships are those who are, in effect, peers to the C-suite executives in the account.
Executive engagement can take the form of one-to-one meetings, or it may be private meetings about the governance of existing contracts or the bidding process for new contracts. It can also include hospitality events or visits to executive briefing centres. It can also take the form of executive roundtables focused on a specific discussion topic.
Paid Social Media
When using social media in your ABM campaigns, bear in mind that what the content buyers value most from you is original content authored by your people.
After that comes curated content on a topic that interests them, which you have handpicked and introduced with some copy authored by you.
The least valuable to buyers is filtered content that has been served to them based on their profiles. As we all know, the real win comes when your content is shared on social media by the buyers and influencers you are targeting.
Email Marketing
For example, you might be sending out an email to a group of executives in the same cluster with similar issues such as reducing operating costs. It might lead them to a website, invite them to an event or share a relevant case study with content tailored to specific individuals.
Don’t forget that its effectiveness will depend on how relevant it is to the individual at this point, even if you are targeting 10 people in a cluster with your email.
I hope you have found my article on account-based marketing useful. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me.
