Quick rule of thumb: If your company is B2B, has a long sales cycle, and relies on those bluebird deals each quarter to make or break your forecast for the year, then Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is a strategy you should consider.
Account-Based Marketing is a good alternative when you have a limited number of prospects to engage, and the final sale will have the highest value and matter the most.
There are many definitions for ABM, and many marketing automation companies will insist that it is technology. However, ABM is more of a philosophy for how you are going to engage targeted companies.
It includes the same elements of the comprehensive marketing plan: inbound marketing, content marketing, earned media, and outbound marketing. The difference between ABM and comprehensive marketing is the size of the net you cast and the degree of personalization you extend. But, let’s simplify it: instead of giving a lead score for a prospect, you can give a composite lead score for a full account with five different decision makers. In the C-Suite, the distinction between who is accountable for a decision, who makes the decision, and who is involved in a decision can become blurry. An ABM program identifies all the relevant players in a company and sets forth a strategy for engaging each one.
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ABM is a collaborative effort that brings sales and marketing together to cooperatively create emotional and intellectual touch points with each key persona in the targeted company.
An ABM is a hyper-personalized strategy that focuses your marketing and sales efforts on a limited set of accounts, rather than trying to market yourself over a broad spectrum of organizations. Personalized marketing campaigns, including customized webinars, landing pages, blogs, and email on topics specifically geared toward the targeted prospects are all key to ABM.
The effort for these limited accounts is all-encompassing. You provide a seamless marketing experience through as many channels and on as many devices as the C-Suite and company influencers use.
No marketing channels are off-limits. It is a metric-driven formula where you test all the channels for each buyer persona and focus on those that deliver results. These channels include all the traditional channels that are in a comprehensive inbound marketing plan, as discussed earlier. Within each company, there will be some buyer personas that are not representative of a group of people, but of a single individual. This allows you to create relevant content that is unique to that particular person.
To ensure that the information is timely and relevant, you need to engage in social intelligence to monitor every challenge, initiative, or success the company or the buyer persona may encounter. Your content department and social media groups need to be prepared to respond as quickly as deemed appropriate. What makes ABM so different is the degree of personalization. We are not talking about just inserting the name of the individual in an email. Instead, consider landing pages or microsites that are geared toward a different account with a personalized URL.
