An Introduction to Account Based Marketing
Account-based marketing (ABM) is a vital element of marketing strategy because it delivers business growth through relevant customer experiences. Account-based marketing is a highly strategic approach that focuses your efforts on developing your relationship with your highest value target accounts, taking into consideration all of the contacts that you might have in an in organisation. Based on overall account awareness, Account Based Marketing takes a one-to-one approach, tailoring campaigns to connect with individual prospects within companies, rather than casting your net to a wider audience. This approach is particularly helpful when you want to work with higher value customers, or need to reach multiple stakeholders in an organisation to achieve a sale.
Imagine that you have planned an email campaign that’s intended for the pharmaceutical sector. That’s a diverse category often with complex purchase processes and decision-making. 1827 Marketing’s automation platform would allow you to start with a great looking but non-personalised email and landing page for those companies that you don’t yet know well. That same email and page could automatically bring in paragraphs and images that are directed to organisations of a particular size and scale, or even for a specific organisation. You could also automatically personalise messages to address different roles - R&D, Compliance, Sales, Directors, Procurement and so on. Everyone would get content that’s relevant to their sector, their organisation and their role. You would only have to set up one campaign.
What are the benefits of Account Based Marketing?
1. It's personal and relevant
Account Based Marketing ensures your marketing campaigns are designed to resonate with the decision makers in your target accounts and allows you to personalise your messaging to increase its relevance to their specific needs.
2. It's attributable
With ABM, you know exactly where your marketing budget is being spent making it is easier to track your return on investment and target your resources on the accounts that have the most significant business value.
3. It's aligned
The focus in ABM is on how to most effectively market to a specific customer to generate a sale, reducing the amount of prospecting and qualification the sales team needs to do with the leads generated by marketing. Combined efforts lead to a more effective strategy. Better quality leads reduce the length of the sales cycle and the cost of acquiring new customers.
4. It's a better customer experience
Account Based Marketing not only brings your sales and marketing teams into closer alignment, but it also recruits those departments as part of your ongoing customer service efforts to retain and potentially grow existing accounts. As consumers, your customers receive highly targeted and personalised messaging and now expect a more tailored approach as business buyers too. Creating and delivering relevant and resonant content to a wider network of contacts across the organisation strengthens your relationship while improving their customer experience.
5. It’s enabled by automation
Marketing automation lets you personalise at scale. A high-touch and highly tailored approach such as Account Based Marketing is possible thanks to automation. With the right platform behind you, the data you collect will enable your sales and marketing team to construct a highly personalised and automated process to move your target account through the sales funnel. It will also free your team up to add the human and creative touches that your clients value most highly.
Get started
Define your target
Working closely with your sales team, define your key accounts. High-value, in most cases, will see you focusing on revenue and profitability; however, more intangible factors might come into play, such as clients you feel proud to be working with, or have considerable industry influence and visibility.
Do your research
Make yourself familiar with the company structure, how the organisation makes decisions, and who the key decision makers and influencers are. You might already have this information within your sales team or in your CRM, or you might need to fire up LinkedIn and the company's website.
Create your content
The next step is to create personalised campaigns that:
resonates with the specific interests, needs and challenges of your identified key personnel;
builds your relationship by providing outstanding value;
nurtures the organisation's stakeholders through your customer journey and generates consensus on a purchase decision.
Define your channels
Part of your research phase should include finding out where your key decision makers and influencers 'live' online so you can reach them where they already are.
Execute the plan
Before hitting the 'Go' button, make sure you have co-ordinated across your sales and marketing teams what needs to happen, when and across which channels. Technology will help to deliver a more flawless campaign, but increasing the alignment between your sales and marketing team is an important benefit of an ABM strategy, and this happens most effectively in person.
Track, measure, optimise
Test and tweak to improve your results and demonstrate your ROI. Define your KPIs with your focus not just on your contacts but on the account.
While Account Based Marketing can initially seem intimidating, the foundations are things you’re already doing. Such an individualised approach based on research, targeting and personalisation can play to your benefit, differentiating you from the competition, improving your customer's experience and strengthening relationships.