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Infographic: What is Account-Based Marketing?

Account-Based Marketing is strategic approach to business marketing in which an organization considers and targets prospect or customer accounts based on the likelihood of them doing business with the company. This is typically based on an ideal customer profile (ICP) that matches both needs, technologies, and firmagraphics.

Account-based marketing (ABM) has become the go-to strategy for B2B companies to target and acquire customers.

Based on its surveys of B2B marketers, ABM delivers the highest return on investment of any marketing strategy or tactic. Period.

Momentum ITSMA

SiriusDecision’s State of Account-Based Marketing Study found that 92% of B2B marketers said ABM was extremely or very important to their overall marketing efforts.

What makes ABM so attractive right now is the way it combines insights for strategy and technology for execution. Marketing teams who understand ABM are in a powerful position to better align to what sales needs, and to make smart choices about the right actions to take and the right time to take them to grow high-potential accounts.

Megan Heuer, Vice President and Group Director at SiriusDecisions

Account-based marketing may be taking the B2B world by storm, but what does it involve, and why all the excitement? Let’s take a deeper look.

ABM coordinates personalized marketing and sales efforts to open doors and deepen engagement at specific accounts.

Jon Miller of Engagio

While there are many ways to describe ABM, most practitioners agree on a few fundamentals. ABM campaigns:

  • Focus on all key decision influencers inside a company (account), not just one key decision maker (or persona),
  • Look at each account as a “market of one,” with messaging and value propositions customized to the needs of the individual company as a whole,
  • Use custom content and messaging aimed at addressing the company’s specific business problems and opportunities
  • Consider not just the one-time sale but the lifetime value of each customer when setting priorities,
  • Value quality over quantity when it comes to leads.

Familiar Tactics, More Effective Targeting

The good news for any marketer wanting to try an ABM approach is that the tools and tactics aren’t strange and new; they’re based on the proven methods B2B marketers have used for years:

  • Outbound prospecting with email, phone, social media and direct mail
  • Inbound marketing with top-of-funnel content, blogging, webinars and social media engagement
  • Digital tactics like IP-based ads and retargeting, social media advertising, web personalization and paid lead gen
  • Events, trade shows, partner and third-party events

The big difference is in the way these tools and tactics are targeted. As Miller says:

It’s not about any one tactic; it’s the mix of touches that drives success.

Shifting the Focus from Persona to Account

Traditional B2B marketing approaches are based on identifying the right type of decision-maker (or persona) and creating marketing campaigns to attract their attention. ABM is driving a shift from finding generalized personas to identifying groups of specific influencers. According to a 2014 IDG survey, a typical enterprise purchase is influenced by 17 people (up from 10 in 2011). An ABM approach recognizes that when selling a particular product or solution to an enterprise-level company, you might need to get your message in front of a host of people at different levels of authority with different job functions.

The Right Tools Make ABM Easier

Since ABM is a personalized approach, it depends on good lead data. If you don’t have an up-to-date, accurate database to rely on, reaching all the people in the decision-making chain inside an organization can be hit or miss. So can efforts to target custom display ads and other online outreach by company IP address.

Successful ABM marketers have learned that predictive analytics platforms designed for B2B lead generation provide accurate and complete lead data to make ABM possible. Advanced predictive analytics solutions can also help identify the right companies to target based on how ready they are to buy, saving time and increasing the chances of success

Most also integrate with marketing automation platforms like Marketo and Eloqua, and CRM tools like Salesforce. Integration with marketing automation and CRM allows companies to plan, implement, measure, and optimize ABM campaigns using their existing marketing stack.

Target, Market, Measure

Now that you understand the fundamentals, how do you get started? The first step of implementing an ABM campaign is identifying your target accounts. Maybe you already know who you most want to target. If so, go to it. If you don’t, or if you’re looking to start a new business, or a new product line, or drive new leads for an existing business, you need a prospect list.

Since ABM focuses on the companies most likely to become your best customers, you need to know what your ideal prospective company looks like. This means prospects who are not only likely to convert but also to generate long-term value.

Your ideal customer profiles should include demographic, and firmographic data, and factor in behavior, fit, and intent. What is the ideal business size? How much is their annual revenue? What industries do they work in? Where are they located? In addition, an ideal customer profile should look for behavioral clues from prospects, such as how many times they visited your site, and an understanding of what other products and services they use in their purchasing process.

Organize and Prioritize

Once you have identified quality prospects, the next step is to organize and prioritize the list and make a marketing plan for engaging the strongest leads. As mentioned above, you are not trying to target an individual but all the decision-makers within that company. This requires a more comprehensive marketing approach that expands the reach of messaging across multiple channels. This approach can include dynamic display advertising, outbound marketing, social media, and more. The key is for marketing and sales teams to work closely together to achieve their shared goals.

Get Aligned

The fact that ABM brings sales and marketing together is huge.

50 percent of sales time is wasted on unproductive prospecting and that sales reps ignore 50 percent of marketing leads.

Marketo

Misalignment not only results in lost productivity but also lost business opportunities.

Organizations with tightly aligned sales and marketing functions experience 36 percent higher customer retention rates and 38 percent higher sales win rates.

MarketingProfs

Focus on Lifetime Value

With ABM, closing a deal is not the culmination of a relationship, but it is beginning. Once a prospect becomes a customer, they must be satisfied. This requires data. B2B organizations need to know what happens after a customer buys, what they use and don’t use, and what makes a customer successful. A customer is not valuable if you can’t retain their business. How engaged are they with the product? Are they at risk of leaving? Are they good candidates for an upsell or cross-sell?

With ABM Leads, It’s Quality Over Quantity

The number of leads and opportunities is not enough to measure ABM. The strategy does not operate on the traditional lead definition and values quality over quantity. In the past, ABM was primarily used by large, well-resourced enterprise companies that could invest significant time and money into a high-touch process. Today, technology is helping automate and scale ABM, which brings costs down and makes ABM more accessible to enterprises of all sizes. Research clearly shows that the B2B marketing is moving towards ABM. It’s just a matter of how fast.

DCI has produced this infographic that visually walks you through what ABM is, its statistics, its differentiators, and its processes:

what is abm account based marketing infographic

Doug Bewsher

Doug is the CEO of Leadspace. Doug has 20 years of experience building world-class brands in the technology industry. He's created and led B2C and B2B product marketing, demand generation and brand building programs for disruptive technology products and services.

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