Account-based marketing is a key, highly effective B2B sales and marketing strategy that requires marketing teams to actively work with specific target accounts that are considered important to the products/services a particular brand is selling. Instead of focusing only on potential opportunities, account-based marketing focuses on the best accounts that have already attracted interest or are considered high-income opportunities. Companies are most successful when they find the right mix of lead-based and account-based marketing strategies. The key tools needed to run successful account-based marketing campaigns are available on site and include marketing automation software, predictive analytics, artificial intelligence, and advanced technologies that collect data on user intent. The content used in ABM needs to be highly personalized for each person who is part of the buyer group for a particular account. ABM is quickly becoming a marketing automation best practice, and the process is easy to do for B2B brands.
What are the benefits of account-based marketing?
Account-based marketing is a key, effective strategy, not necessarily a product or technology. B2B sales teams and marketers collaborate on a common, effective strategy to align the performance of the account-based sales team with the same agreed-upon goals. Choose the best set of accounts to receive orders. Marketing has traditionally focused on inbound strategies such as content marketing and lead marketing, networking, and waiting for people to respond. Account-based marketing targets specific people within your account and aligns your marketing efforts with your sales team. You can actively use the various account-based marketing strategies available when you need or want to target higher-value accounts, get better deals than usual, and increase sales cycles. This is a slow, patient, but more strategically interesting approach to running a successful business, which is especially important in B2B marketing.
How do multiple business environments decide which accounts to target?
The process of deciding which accounts to target depends entirely on your actual business goals. For example, if a company is targeting an existing customer base and has a new product that it wants to sell primarily to existing customers, it will select a few existing customer accounts to sell to. Another example is when a company develops a new product for a new target market. For example, a company that does not yet have corporate customers can develop new corporate products, or certain services that will interest a certain category of target customers of your business. Marketing and sales teams work together on the best accounts, depending on how precisely you want to target your audience to specific products or services that your business environment provides.
What are the key tools needed for successful account-based marketing?
Business environments need marketing automation software to automate and scale their marketing efforts. If you want to target 20 or 50+ accounts, but don’t have enough staff to target them all at once, marketing automation and visitor identification software can help you manage the entire process efficiently and correctly. The technologies of artificial intelligence, identification of anonymous visitors, and automation eliminate the great effort that was previously required to build and launch successful marketing campaigns. Business environments need a CRM that integrates with your automation tools. CRM mainly helps the business side, while automation tools mainly help the marketing side. Other useful tools include predictive analytics and business intent data. Help prioritize. After creating a list of target accounts, targeting data will help you determine which accounts to target first. Targeting data is based on technology that tracks activity on certain websites and determines whether contacts in targeted accounts are interested in your activity. Based on this information, allows sales and marketing teams to recognize that specific contacts are interested in relevant topics, making them candidates for broader outreach and active engagement. In theory, people with these accounts are more likely to buy from you than those who don’t.
There are also special means of promoting the marketing campaigns that your business is running. It’s an end-to-end solution that simplifies your account-based marketing process. These tools mainly focus on paid media and thus help you to advertise to targeted users of online accounts. ABM is one of the two most frequently used marketing strategies in various business organizations. There is traditional inbound marketing and account-based marketing. This can also be done in parallel if it is beneficial for the business. And brands have to find the right combination. For some brands, this ratio is the opposite, and for some, it is 50/50. It depends on the company, its resources, maturity, goals, products, and services being sold. But in general, companies should do both.
Your account-based marketing strategy should help inform your lead-based strategy. For example, if you’re using an account-based marketing strategy, you have a target account that you know will close this year. Marketing and sales work together to achieve this. This does not mean that marketers only create paid media or try to cross channels. The difference is that you manage your strategy in parallel with the main strategy. That’s why you need an ABM solution that instantly identifies when a new lead is part of your target account as it moves through a given sequence within your account-based marketing strategy. If they are not in your target account, they will be included in the lead-based strategy. That’s why ABM has put the account filter before a lead-based marketing strategy. In addition, a successful marketing strategy requires active and comprehensive, sophisticated targeting based on potential customers. With account-based marketing, you target specific people in the context of that account and other people within that account. Business environments need both functions.
How are companies implementing account-based marketing?
A key challenge for brands is to find the right marketing strategy that will work in their niche. Many companies don’t know where to start. It’s best to start with your business goals that are relevant to your business at the current time. What is your business plan for this year? Do you want to sell your product or promote your brand? When you build existing products for your current customer base, it will influence your account-based marketing strategy. Whether you want to create a new product or enter a new market or industry, an ABM strategy can effectively help you get there.
