81% of B2B marketers who measure ABM ROI report higher returns compared to other marketing initiatives.
Account based marketing (ABM) has become a vital part of overall B2B Marketing Strategy. This allows marketers to create highly personalized marketing campaigns targeting high-value accounts. Before we jump to how ABM helps B2B organizations develop a robust ROI driven marketing strategy let us learn a little about what ABM is.
What is Account-Based Marketing (ABM)?
ABM is a highly targeted marketing strategy that allows organizations target specific accounts rather than a broader set of audience. It is centered around developing marketing strategies that aim to engage high-value prospects. An integral part of ABM is the alignment of sales and marketing teams to create a personalized campaigns for individual accounts.
Key Components of ABM:
Identifying Target Accounts:
Identifying high-value companies that match your ideal customer profile (ICP) that are best suited for your offering. This involves data analytics, collaboration between sales and marketing and carefully selecting only those accounts that are most likely to convert.
Personalization:
ABM revolves around personalization since ABM treats each target account as “market of one”, the messaging is tailored to resonate with each organization and its decision maker(s). 56% of marketers advocate for the use of personalized content to achieve success in ABM initiatives.
Multi-Channel & Multi-Touchpoint Engagement:
A multi-channel engagement is an integral part of Account Based Marketing. Multi-channel engagement in ABM ensures that target accounts experience consistent messaging and interactions across multiple touchpoints. Marketers employ a mix of methods (digital or offline) to reach out to decision makers.
Sales & Marketing Alignment:
Alignment between sales and marketing is essential to have a comprehensive ABM strategy, as both teams need to work together in order to ensure ABM’s success. A collaboration between both teams helps identifying the accounts that need targeting, which is the first step towards implementing ABM. Also, sales constantly feeds marketing with information like real world insights, pain-points of prospects, understanding what content is working. This feedback loop helps marketers to optimize their ABM campaigns.
Businesses with aligned sales and marketing teams are 67% better at closing deals.
Measurement & Optimization:
Measuring and optimizing ABM strategy is crucial to ensure your program is driving the right amount of engagement, growth in pipeline and overall better ROI. Measuring your ABM program on the bases of account engagement score, content consumption, website visits, average duration spent on the website and sales cycle length are paramount. These matrices would allow marketers to refine the messaging and the content to match the requirements of their target accounts. Conduct A/B testing on which content is driving better engagement, this will also help marketers track which content and channel had the highest engagement.
Now that we have covered the fundamentals of Account Based Marketing (ABM) let us now look at why a large number of marketers today are adopting ABM. Approximately 70% of marketers have active ABM programs, reflecting its growing prominence in B2B strategies.
Benefits of ABM
Higher ROI:
Fundamentally, ABM focuses on select high-value accounts optimizing resource allocation to drive ROI and minimizing the focus on low-potential leads. ABM employs personalization, which ensures that the messaging is tailored for each account in the TAL. This increases the likeliness of prospects to convert into paying customers.
Stronger Working Relationships:
Marketers are able to engage accounts with hyper-personalized, multi-channel outreach via multiple touchpoints. This helps the brand ensure higher recall value. Also, the alignment between sales and marketing enables marketers to address specific pain-points of accounts they are targeting, This helps in gaining credibility and strengthens the relationship with the target account.
Shorter Sales Cycle:
ABM nurtures prospects through multiple touchpoints via custom tailored content and messaging before they enter the sales funnel. This helps reducing the time that is spent on lead qualification, resulting in shorter sales cycles.
Now that we have touched upon the benefits of Account Based Marketing, let us not delve into the challenges that companies and marketers face in implementing a robust ABM program.
Account Based Marketing (ABM) Challenges
Identifying The right Target Account List:
Often companies find it challenging to choose the right target accounts while implementing ABM. It could stem out of either inaccuracy in data, lack of clarity in understanding the criteria in identifying companies to target, last but not the least over-selecting accounts leading in diminished focus.
Solution: Defining your TAL using firmographic, demographic & technographic data. Also, companies should start with a small list of high-potential accounts in order to maintain focus and reap better results in ABM.
Misalignment of Sales and Marketing:
Alignment of sales and marketing is crucial for ABM success. However, there are times when sales and marketing don’t look eye-to-eye due some fundamental differences. For example: Marketing usually focuses on generating leads, while sales teams prioritize closing deals. This results in having different success metrics leading to misaligned endeavors.
Solution: Defining standard operating procedure (SOPs) with interdepartmental service level agreements (SLAs) to define roles, responsibilities & deliverables between teams, along with shared goals between both teams is a great start. Also having regular meetings to discuss ABM strategy helps in optimizing the campaigns, ensuring success.
Tech Stack & Data Integration:
Many companies employ technologies like CRM, automation platforms, etc. and there are times that the integration between these tools/technologies is difficult. This leads to a disruption in the flow of data creating data silos, difficulty in leveraging predictive analytics in order to optimize the ABM strategy, and inconsistencies in tracking real-time account engagement.
Solution: Using a tech stack that can be seamlessly integrated is important, for the flow of data in real-time. When procuring a tool, defining specs explicitly and ensuring that the technology/tool has the capability of integrating with your existing tools is of utmost significance.
Resource Constraints:
While ABM is a highly targeted and successful model, it is resource-intensive; dedicating budget, time and having the expertise to execute ABM programs is crucial. Many medium and small businesses find it hard to allocate, people, technology, budget or time needed to upskill their teams to implement an ABM strategy.
Solution: Businesses that find it hard to allocate resources to run in-house ABM programs can look at outsourcing them to marketing services providers specializing in demand generation.
In conclusion, Account-Based Marketing (ABM) has proven to be a powerful marketing strategy for B2B organizations looking to drive higher engagements and ROI along with building stronger relationships with key accounts. Despite the aforementioned challenges, there are solutions to overcome them and optimize ABM programs. Companies that adopt ABM will find themselves on the side of sustained growth in increasingly competitive markets.
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