Not just a buzzword but a game-changer for top marketers since the mid-2000s, account based makrteing (ABM) has become a staple in today’s marketing endeavors to drive demand and increase ROI. According to Rollworks, “B2B organizations such as Bottomline Technologies, People.ai, and OneNeck IT Solutions are relying on a blend of traditional demand generation tactics with ABM strategies to cater to their audiences and appease senior leadership.”

ABM has picked up more steam in recent times as vendors, bloggers, and market research firms all fuel a resurgence in account based marketing’s popularity. In 2017, only 29% of marketers had found ABM to be effective whereas by 2019, the success of account based marketing shot up to a whopping 97% compared to other marketing tactics.

ABM’s success strongly lies within the enablement of marketing and sales to close their deals in a targeted and coordinated fashion. Plus, personalizing your brand messages never looked this good!

In this article, we’ll breakdown how you can adopt a winning account based marketing strategy for your business with the help of the right tools, team alignment, and process. Let’s go!

What is Account Based Marketing?

Account based marketing is a strategic and targeted marketing strategy, where key business accounts are marketed to directly. It’s a focused approach to B2B marketing where marketing and sales representatives come together to target the best-fit or high-quality accounts and turn them into customers. Top B2B leaders say it’s no longer an option for marketers and sales officials to work separately. According to Alterra Group, marketers achieved a higher ROI of 97% by incorporating ABM initiatives into their marketing initiatives.

Account Based Marketing Vs. Traditional Marketing

Instead of casting a wide net for leads with large-scale marketing campaigns, ABM tactics focuses on high-value accounts to nurture, convert, and retain them over time.

As opposed to traditional marketing tactics, in account based marketing, sales and marketing teams work hand in hand to create a hyper-personalized experience for each target account. Account based marketing is more suitable for pursuing large companies that have longer sales cycles and complex sales needs. Traditional B2B sales on the other hand, is more appropriate for small and medium businesses that tend to be cheaper to acquire and quicker to purchase.

Who Uses Account Based Marketing?

Companies that are seeking to acquire the accurate user intent data to simplify their customer analytics have found the ABM strategy to be the most effective instead of taking a broader approach to their sales and marketing initiatives.

Account based marketing is a strategy and not a technology. There are typically four goals for adopting an account based marketing approach:

Improvement in sales collaboration
Cross-sell/up-sell the existing buyer accounts
Acquire new logos
To break into a new market/vertical

Benefits of Account Based Marketing

The importance of ABM attributions is realised when marketers use it to their true potential. Here are some of the benefits of this strategy.

High return on investment – Effective ABM deployment can achieve higher business ROI. The 2014 ITSMA Account Based Marketing Survey stated that “ABM delivers the highest return on investment of any B2B marketing strategy or tactic.”
Reduced resource waste – The focused nature of ABM strategy allows marketers to nurture their resources efficiently and only run those marketing programs that are highly optimized for the target accounts.
Personalized and optimized – This ABM tactic calls for personalizing your communication and messaging to specific accounts so your campaigns resonate with these target audiences. With an AI-infused ABM strategy the customers are much likely to engage with content that is addressed directly to them and is relevant to their business and stage in the buyer journey.
Clear on tracking goals and measurement – It is easier to draw a clearer conclusion based on the effectiveness of campaigns whether email, ads, web, or events, for a smaller set of target accounts instead of a vast set of metrics.
Sales and marketing alignment – Account based marketing is one of the most effective ways of aligning sales and marketing. This is mainly because a marketer, when running an ABM program, operates with a mindset very close to sales – thinking in terms of accounts and how to best target them.

Successful Account Based Marketing Examples

Here’s an example of how Engagio ran its first ever ABM campaign and saw great results through a unified multichannel approach.

Complex Account Based Everything Bonaza - Engagio

Target accounts: 300
Goal: have 20% of those accounts turn into opportunities (65% Marketing Qualified Accounts per engagement with a 30% meeting rate)
Marketing: owns initial setup and execution of the campaign, delivers MQAs to sales
Sales: owns follow-up to any responses and MQAs, converts engagement into opportunities
Channels utilized: human emails from/to multiple players + Direct mail package + LinkedIn profile views + LinkedIn messages + Phone calls + Account based ads

Below is Engagio’s day-by-day breakdown of how the campaign played out:

Engagio discovered that engagement with the campaign didn’t cluster around a particular channel; it was scattered.

Key takeaway: Multichannel approach is key for maximum engagement. It’s important to hit all the different touchpoints so we can have everyone’s response – and to always deliver value, regardless of the channel.

LiveRamp

In order to engage prospective customers, LiveRamp adopted a multichannel approach that allowed teams to book several meetings with Fortune 500 companies.

LiveRamp credited their success to five main initiatives:

In order to engage prospective customers, LiveRamp adopted a multichannel approach that allowed teams to book several meetings with Fortune 500 companies.
Strong alignment between their marketing and SDR teams
Their high value, regional thought leadership events that emphasize learning and development
Cohesive engagement and messaging via personalized display advertising, marketing email promotions, multi-touch SDR strategies, and direct mail
Automation

The team used a hyper-focused approach to target list creation and took this strategy to come up with 15 high-value clients. That resulted in a 33% conversion rate from cold leads to meetings within just a four-week timeframe. LiveRamp also found that their ABM campaigns performed significantly better than their broad campaigns and generated a 2x increase in previously dormant accounts as well as a 10x increase in year-on-year revenue.

Key takeaway: It takes integration of multiple initiatives in order to create a successful ABM campaign. LiveRamp’s hyper-targeted approach coupled with strong coordination between their teams as well as their high-value offerings that sought to educate and inform their prospects integrated seamlessly, resulting in success. This is one of the many account based marketing examples that has proved to be successful.

Is ABM the Right Approach for Your Business?

Some surefire ways to determine whether account based marketing is the right choice for you is to determine whether:

The sales cycle involves a research or evaluation phase and it often involves multiple stakeholders.
Your sales and marketing teams are looking to make a bigger impact with a more strategic focus.
You’ve noticed that existing buyers who generate the most revenue have distinct characteristics, or you have identified accounts with distinct characteristics that can generate more revenue.
There are organizations with needs that your solution clearly addresses.
Your organization is looking to break into a new segment, territory, or vertical, or going after your competitor’s customers.
Your organization offers several products or services and has set goals to grow buyer lifetime value through up-selling and cross-selling.

How to Create a Winning ABM Strategy for Your Business?

Choosing target accounts will vary for every company as each organization has unique business goals and a personalized strategy that’ll determine its criteria. Before you start putting together a solid plan, there are some account based marketing benchmarks to look into:

Purpose of your ABM program
Accounts you are targeting
Prospects within those accounts that you’re targeting

Identify and Pick Your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)

Before you get started with your ABM efforts, your marketing and sales operations need to do some heavy research to help you make an informed decision about the accounts you select. Determine which industry, company size, location, annual revenue, up-sell opportunity, profit margin, etc. are right for yielding your business the highest long-term profits. This research needs to be both qualitative and quantitative.

If you don’t know which accounts to target or have exhausted your initial list, collaborate with the marketing team to build a predictive model. Predictive analysis takes into account millions of data attributes from both internal and external sources (company’s tech stack, hiring trends, social media activities, funding level, marketing solution, CRM, blog posts, third-party websites, social media channels, etc.), then applies machine learning to understand who is showing the highest propensity to purchase.

Next, prioritize your accounts and decide which ones to go after first. It’s crucial to prioritize the lists in order to demonstrate early success and maximize your ABM ROI.

Map Your Accounts

After you’ve prioritized your target accounts, start mapping personas inside each key account. This will give you a closer look at which buying groups are best to target. You must understand your audiences well – what challenges each persona faces, what impacts their decision, and who makes those decisions.

Have a plan that focuses on the key part of the organization. Consider the

Financial health
Business initiatives
Personnel developments
Technologies
Organizational structure
SWOT analysis
Industry analysis

Successful and effective marketing should start by understanding your audience. This is especially important when the audience makes up an entire buying group, or a specific set of key individuals who decide when, what, and where to make the purchase.

Create the Right Content

You must have relevant content to communicate the value of your solutions to your ABM audiences. To offer custom-tailored brand experience across all channels, consider personalizing content for the contacts at your accounts.

Creating scalable content to support your ABM model across the entire buying cycle might sound a bit overwhelming at first but not impossible. Before you start to make original content from scratch, look at what you already have in your library. You may have a comprehensive list of content with details about its date, audience, and so on that can be put to use or help you find potential gaps.

This way you know which content to update, repurpose, or discard from your repository. Start by building an effective content strategy for your target accounts once you’ve got a clear idea of what content you have, the gaps that exist in the content repository, and who you’re creating the content for. You can use a content/message matrix to map what content you’re going to use to reach your target across the buying journey.

Distribute your content across social, email, websites, etc. and make sure the process is organized so that no target account receives the same content twice, or any irrelevant content for the stage they’re in.

To engage your ABM audiences, your content has to be personal, relevant, and timely.

Measure and Optimize Your Account Based Marketing Results

You can’t gauge the success of any of the strategies without understanding its revenue impact. So, you must make your ABM results actionable, tangible, and available in real time. It is reported that about 60% of CMOs have trouble proving their ROI – one of the main reasons for that is not asking the right questions.

Once your campaign has been running for 30 to 60 days, check to see:

Whether your personalized content proved to be engaging? If so, how?
If the accounts are becoming more engaged with your brand?
Whether you are expanding the number of known stakeholders within these organizations?
Did you move any of these targeted leads down the funnel?
Whether you’ve generated any revenue from these campaigns?
What could you do better going forward?

ABM Tactics and Practices for Your Campaign

Select the Right ABM Technology

Tools designed for ABM offer a lot to companies just adopting the strategies vs. those who’ve been executing ABM for some time. The right account based marketing solution will provide valuable insights all the while reducing the effort for personalizing campaigns and monitoring the results.

Ensure that your software fulfills your business needs and goals throughout the entire lifecycle. From strategy and compiling your list of target accounts to distributing personalized content across channels and measuring the results.

Target Through Multichannel Approach

Having a multichannel approach isn’t just for marketing. Sales development teams could use both online and offline channels to drive outbound marketing opportunities. To quote Marketo, “Based on the accounts that marketing and sales decide to pursue, sales can prioritize its outreach and follow-up on higher account scores that have the propensity to purchase. Sales can use a variety of channels—email, social media, and cold calls—to do research on and target different stakeholders within each account. Informed by data from your marketing automation solution and CRM system, they can ensure that they’re having relevant conversations with their prospects and tracking their progress.”

Whether you’re a novice or a seasoned professional looking to expand your ABM horizon, Deck 7’s account based marketing services can beautifully guide you throughout the journey. That’s because we help companies scale growth and revenue by creating systems that enhance relevant relationships using highly customizable content.

For B2B companies that are looking to generate a higher ROI from their marketing endeavours and create long-lasting relationships with high-quality accounts, ABM may be the right choice for you. But before you proceed, carefully asses, analyze, and determine what changes would have to be implemented within your teams, what tools should be purchased, and what processes to put in place to ensure continued success.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is account based marketing important?

ABM is the ideal approach for marketing and sales teams who are looking to generate higher revenues in a shorter time frame. Marketers adopt ABM to truly gain a competitive advantage by personalizing content and reaching targeted accounts.

What is the goal of ABM?

The main goal of account based marketing is to strengthen client lifetime value by going beyond the traditional lead generation efforts to target high-value prospects and aligning sales and marketing.

What is account based marketing software?

ABM software allows marketers to drive high-quality leads, create personalized buying journeys, boost client lifetime value, and prepare for in-pipeline accounts in the future.

Your Latest Account Based Marketing Guide to B2B Success