As businesses face new challenges in this digital age, there’s a growing emphasis on value-driven, highly customized marketing (which is where account-based marketing comes in). This is especially true for B2B companies, who must demonstrate trustworthiness and overcome more objections from potential customers. Top-of-funnel advertising and cold outreach are expensive — and can damage a brand’s reputation if not done correctly.
Account-based marketing is a highly personalized strategy where sales and marketing efforts are coordinated and focused on each lead. Rather than a scattershot approach targeting multiple individuals, ABM is about building valuable relationships with key decision makers at a company. Today, with ABM-friendly automation tools, it’s easier to develop and streamline an ABM strategy for your B2B business.
Problems with Traditional B2B Marketing
Traditional B2B marketing identifies one or more individuals within a company and then sends them a pitch. While this approach works, it’s also prone to error. If marketers contact people who can’t close a deal, they’ve wasted time and resources.
When they do reach out to the right people, how do they pass the leads to the sales team for the best chance of success? In many cases, a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) does not ultimately become a Sales Qualified (SQL).
Cold, impersonal outreach can also look like spam or a scam. Most people have received unsolicited pitches at their work addresses, promising some business solution. As a result, a healthy skepticism has emerged around B2B outreach. Unfortunately, this makes it harder for legitimate businesses to connect with potential customers.
Account-based marketing solves these problems by bringing marketing and sales teams together to target prospects with the best chance of success. Often, these are also high-value accounts that provide good ROI. In an ABM strategy, sales and marketing share data to tailor their messaging to a given prospect. This fits within the basic “know, like, trust” paradigm while creating a conversation that stands out from the average B2B email blast.
The combination of improved targeting and value-driven personalization makes a difference. In one study, 91% of B2B marketers reported better ROI using ABM, and 73% said they landed bigger deals .
Elements of an Account-Based Marketing Strategy
Account-based marketing focuses on prospects who are (a) more likely to convert and (b) have the potential to become high-value, high-ROI customers. These prospects are then served a fully personalized campaign to nurture their buying journey. Instead of passing a large number of leads through a sales funnel, marketing and sales work together to analyze data and tailor their messages.
Therefore, a good anti-missile strategy requires the following elements:
Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
ICP clearly defines which companies are best suited to target. Depending on the B2B business’s services and niche, key factors may include the client’s:
- Industry and its expected growth
- Market Position
- Previous interactions with the company
- Number of employees
- Annual income
- Budget potential
- Growth or acquisition plans
- Location
- Technology Stack
By themselves, these facts don’t immediately speak to the ROI of lead generation for B2B companies. However, today’s AI tools use machine learning to score each lead and its chance of success. Predictive analytics can provide useful insights into a customer’s potential revenue, growth, and preferred engagement.
Data Enrichment
Because ABM emphasizes highly personalized nurturing strategies, data is critical to developing and aligning the efforts of sales and marketing teams. Account-based marketing tools extract and analyze valuable data at all points in the journey.
Automated ABM tools can collect all the key details about prospects by mining data from annual reports, LinkedIn pages, and social platforms. AI-driven machine learning algorithms then compare them to ICPs, score their potential, and assess their intent. For example, if a prospect’s LinkedIn content indicates a pain point that a B2B company can solve, the prospect is more likely to be sales qualified.
Manually analyzing all of these data points would take hours, reducing the ROI of landing that account. But with today’s intelligent ABM platforms, it’s much easier to build a strong profile of highly qualified prospects and how to target them, rather than sifting through a long list of generic leads.
Cross-channel sales and marketing
One of the biggest challenges facing B2B businesses is iran telegram data ensuring that the sales reps’ message aligns with that of marketing and vice versa. If sales and marketing aren’t on the same page, it’s easy to accidentally sell prospects the wrong solution or send an email that doesn’t align with their interests.
The ABM approach understands that buying decisions, especially in the B2B space, take time and occur across a variety of channels. Many B2B marketers use high-value content what is content production and how to produce content? like white papers to attract leads. But what happens once they’re in the pipeline? Should the sales rep email them or book a discovery call? How does their interaction with your content reflect their priorities? What solutions should you be pitching them?
All of these interactions and outreach attempts must be mapped and tracked in a central space, with the ability to create a feedback loop between recent activity and next steps. New insights must be incorporated into the entire network of data points, allowing ABM teams to monitor and improve their approach over time—all while saving time and money.
This allows marketers and sales reps to completely big work personalize their approach. It’s been shown that business decision makers who receive B2B messages tailored to their needs and pain points are 40% more likely to convert .
When incorporated into marketing automation tools , ABM delivers the one-two punch of data-driven prospecting as well as efficient, customized outreach and nurturing. It’s a winning combination that enables B2B businesses to secure high-value deals that both meet their strategic goals and deliver a strong return on investment.
Summarize
To get started with account-based marketing, build your ideal customer profile and start collecting data about your prospects. If you’re already using a marketing automation solution, you can cross-analyze your CRM data with campaign performance and previous customer behavior.
There are many ABM tools on the market that further enrich your data and use machine learning to predict revenue potential, score leads, and guide your messaging strategy. In addition, smart intelligence tools can identify the right decision makers and assess their purchasing intent. When integrated into a powerful, ABM-friendly ecosystem, your marketing and sales teams can better coordinate their efforts and win more deals at a higher value.
