Account-based marketing was gaining traction among business-to-business (B2B) brands long before the unprecedented events of 2020. Then, those challenges accelerated the shift to ABM into overdrive.
In 2019, nearly one in four (23%) of B2B businesses had no ABM program. Fast forward a year and that number dropped to just 5.8%. A staggering 94% of B2B companies now leverage account-based marketing.
If your organization decides to follow suit, you can tap into numerous account-based marketing benefits and bolster revenue. Here’s an explanation of some of those benefits, along with tips for incorporating ABM into your marketing mix.
What Is Account-Based Marketing?
Account-based marketing is a reimagining of traditional sales and advertising tactics.
Instead of targeting a broad audience, you identify key accounts within your specific audience segment. This approach enables you to make only high-value connections instead of wasting time marketing to clients who may have no use for or interest in your products and services.
Once you’ve determined which accounts will provide the best value for your business, you align your sales and marketing teams to deliver tailored content to these accounts.
Your marketing staff will develop custom campaigns for each client based on their unique pain points and challenges. These efforts lay a foundation that your sales team can then build on to close more deals.
ABM increases the efficacy of marketing efforts, helps you improve your ROI, and minimizes resource waste. It also allows you to make stronger connections with clients, increasing their lifetime value while generating stable revenue for your business.
7 Reasons Your B2B Brand Should Engage in ABM
Embracing account-based marketing can change the way your organization interacts with clients. ABM client acquisition and nurturing strategies can unlock significant benefits for your business and streamline the customer journey.
Specifically, account-based marketing will help you:
1. Personalize Marketing Content
When you’re marketing to a broad audience, you have to keep your content somewhat vague and generalized. Sure, the content is designed for the types of businesses you serve, but it doesn’t speak to the individualized pain points of any one client.
As a result, your marketing campaigns will rarely — if ever — stand out from the sea of options clients are presented with at any given time, which means engagement will remain low among many audience members.
Account-based marketing, on the other hand, gives you the freedom to develop truly personalized content for your most valuable accounts. You can create infographics, slide shows, email messaging, and other content that addresses the recipient’s specific challenges, hurdles, goals, and objectives.
Consequently, they’ll be significantly more engaged, as it will appear that your solution was purpose-built for their needs. Creating personalized content also helps you develop more meaningful connections and differentiate yourself from other brands in your vertical.
2. Identify Top Accounts
One of the most obvious perks of account-based marketing is that this framework allows you to identify your top accounts. You can pinpoint which clients deliver the most revenue for your business and which buy a minimal amount of services or products.
After you segment your accounts into performance-based tiers, you can create a hierarchy of relationships.
Doing so allows you to devote more time, energy, and effort to the most valuable accounts while reevaluating less productive partnerships. You can also identify similarities between top accounts, then target prospects that share those traits.
3. Improve Your ROI
Account-based marketing improves your return on investment in several ways. First and foremost, an ABM strategy allows you to narrow your focus to high-performance accounts. That means you’ll no longer have to throw away precious marketing dollars on unlikely prospects or poor-quality leads.
Additionally, account-based marketing enables you to derive more value from your existing accounts.
For instance, let’s say that one of your tier-three clients has many of the same attributes as your tier-one accounts. However, the former purchases far fewer services or products from your organization than top performers.
You can use these insights to figure out why, identify market services that would appeal to the tier-three account, and encourage them to purchase additional products or services.
4. Reduce Waste
Have you ever spent hundreds or even thousands of dollars nurturing a lead only to discover that they were never a good fit for your products or services in the first place?
If so, you know just how frustrating the experience can be. Not only did you waste hours of your time and precious resources, but you also shifted your focus away from other, more promising prospects.
An account-based marketing strategy will help you prevent time and resource waste by removing low-quality prospects from your target list. Before you devote a single cent to a potential client, you’ll have already determined what sort of value they can deliver for your business.
5. Align Sales and Marketing
Account-based marketing fosters alignment and collaboration between marketing and sales. When you embrace this strategy, your sales and marketing teams can work together to rank potential accounts, devise impactful advertising campaigns, and generate conversions for your business.
Achieving alignment between these integral departments will also allow you to ensure consistency of messaging throughout the customer journey. Presenting potential clients with high-quality, consistent messaging is essential if you want to promote trust in your brand.
6. Condense the Sales Cycle
Business-to-business sales cycles are notorious for being long and drawn out. While a B2B sales cycle will never be as short as a business-to-consumer journey, you can condense the B2B sales process with account-based marketing.
ABM enables you to identify and market to specific decision-makers that can accelerate the purchasing process.
When you create tailored marketing content that addresses these individuals’ unique pain points, you can help them decide whether your products or services are a good fit for their organization. The result is a more efficient, productive, and cost-effective sales cycle.
7. Boost Customer Lifetime Value
Make no mistake — account-based marketing isn’t just about acquiring new accounts. You can (and should) use ABM to increase the value of existing client accounts and strengthen relationships with current partners. Proactively nurturing and building on current client relationships will help you increase their lifetime value and generate more revenue for your business.
To illustrate this point, imagine you’re preparing to launch a new product or service. You can showcase the new service by creating custom content for existing clients. Since they already use your other services or products, these entities will be more likely to adopt your new solution, especially if you offer them favorable pricing.
Join the ABM Revolution with Insights ABM
Account-based marketing can be a true game-changer for your organization. When leveraged strategically, ABM will empower you to sell more, build lasting relationships, decrease marketing costs, improve ROI, and generate strong revenue.
That said, creating an effective ABM campaign requires finesse, expertise, and careful allocation of time and resources. Without the right partner, you may feel like you’re in over your head. Fortunately, you don’t have to go it alone.
Connect with Insights ABM, an expert account-based marketing agency that will develop a dynamic strategy for your business. Together, we can shatter your growth goals with the power of ABM.
Schedule a consultation with our knowledgeable team today to learn more about our account-based marketing services.
Joe is a digital marketing strategist and media buying/planning leader with 13+ years of expertise in marketing strategy and program management, omnichannel campaign delivery, brand building, data analytics, and customer experience/UX optimization. He has helped drive growth for industry-leading clients, including F500/F100 firms.