Account Based Marketing (ABM) 101

If you've been in the B2B marketing world
for a while, you may have come across the term account based marketing or ABM.
It may seem like the trendiest word
on the block, but ABM is more than a fad with an expiry date.
In fact, a survey has found that 97% of marketers said ABM
creates a higher or much higher ROI than any other of their marketing initiatives.
So what is this mysterious ABM and why should you care?
Hi, guys, it's Jack here from Neighbourhood, where we help brands
find, sell and keep their people. Account based marketing,
or ABM is a highly targeted, focused growth strategy that groups
individual buyers with an organisation into an account as a market
for one approach. ABM focuses marketing
and sales forces with the goal of identifying specific prospects
at a company and customises sales programmes and personalised campaigns
to engage those specific individuals when put in place well and with intention, ABM
creates a powerful channel and revenue predictability by allowing you
to streamline your sales and marketing resources and deepen engagement
with a select few group of stakeholders within an account.
If you're unsure whether or not your business should take on an ABM strategy,
consider if one or more of the following are true to you.
Your product is costly.
You have a small number of prospects. You sell to buying committees.
You want to increase your deal size.
You want to align your sales and marketing
teams for better collaborations, or you want to increase your sales
velocity. An ABM approach offers
companies many benefits, which include personalised marketing approach,
instead of a generic approach.
Marketers form personalised messaging for target accounts and tailoring
the creative assets of their campaign to the customer's
specific attributes and needs. Sales and marketing alignment, normally,
an ABM plan is first formalised
in collaboration with marketing and sales teams.
Together, teams choose a set of accounts to follow and work together to create
marketing and sales strategies to attract and select accounts.
Not only is this tactic a timesaver for marketing and sales,
it ensures a consistent buying experience across all accounts. Shorter sales cycles,
major purchase decisions involve multiple stakeholders.
This typically slows down the sales
process because it starts at a lower level in the organisation, and
moves slowly towards the primary decision maker. In ABM because all prospects are
nurtured at once, the length of the cycle is shortened. Clearer ROI. ABM is precise
and measurable, providing the highest ROI of all B2B marketing tactics.
In fact,
85% of marketers who measure ROI describe ABM as
delivering higher returns than any other marketing approach.
Fewer wasted resources. As time
and resources are narrowly focussed on a small number of accounts that are
most likely to close sales, resources that would have been wasted
are freed up. If you've followed us for a while,
you know that we at Neighbourhood are all about inbound marketing,
so you might be surprised that we're mentioning account based marketing.
Don't worry.
Truth is, we see both marketing approaches as essential to your businesses growth.
When it comes to inbound, many think it's only about volume based
marketing techniques that focus primarily on attracting as many users as possible.
This is only one part of the whole story.
Inbound is a business growth method achieved by building relationships
with people and helping them reach their goals.
And to do this, you have to think of your company as a flywheel.
The flywheel model represents how
marketing, sales and service offerings all have attract, engage and delight phases.
The customers move through consistently.
The goal is to ensure your customers have a consistently delightful experience.
In ABM,
you still have to attract, engage and delight stakeholders
in the account that you're targeting and the content marketing search engine
optimisation tactics famously associated with inbound are key to making it happen.
This means that rather than thinking that ABM is at odds with inbound,
you need to build your ABM strategy on top of an inbound foundation.
By doing so, you create a marketing
strategy that goes beyond just lead generation but allows you to up sell
and cross-sell to your select accounts as well.
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Since we've cleared that up, here are five steps to forming your own
ABM and how to integrate some inbound goodness into the mix.
First identify. First task is getting sales and marketing, identifying and selecting
relevant accounts to help decide which accounts are your best targets,
you can weigh up information like prospect industry, organisation size,
employee numbers, location, annual revenue or if they're existing clientele,
how much did they contribute to your revenue?
Moreover, check out accounts market influence, expected profit margin
and likelihood of repeat purchase, then create.
As said before, when it comes to larger businesses buying decisions are made
collectively by numerous individuals within an organisation.
ABM helps form relationships with each
potential buyer and engages them in the purchase decision via kickass
company specific, unique content that interests each buyer.
No matter if your product is
for marketers, operations leaders or anyone else, ensuring that you identify
and engage with everyone in the buying decision is crucial to winning a customer.
Once you know who you are targeting, you need to think about the challenges
each of your stakeholders face in order to create compelling content.
For instance, finance may be concerned with pricing, while operations might be
focussed on user access, usability and security.
With these factors in mind,
you can create targeted content and interactions that match
each individual's concerns and challenges.
Next engage. While content is all but essential, having the right channel
to send that content through is equally vital.
Figure out where your prospects are,
what social or digital spaces they're using to communicate.
For example, if you know one stakeholder
is a sucker for emails then equipping salespeople to reach out to that person
with a helpful and relevant message via email can get a conversation started.
This is also where that sweet,
sweet marketing sales alignment comes into play.
Working together, marketing and sales can help identify the various channels
that their stakeholders are occupying and engage them with the right material.
Then advocate. The advocate stage is all
about nurturing relationships with a few key stakeholders you reckon would most
avidly advocate your brand within their organisation.
The modern buyer can tune out information
they don't want to hear. Up to both marketing and sales to provide value here
while also promoting your brand at the right moment, at the right time.
Next, evaluate and optimise.
And last but not least,
review your ABMs strategy so far, use data at the accounting level to see
what worked, what didn't, and determine what you could improve over time.
So there you have it.
Some insight into account based marketing, how it can benefit you and how to create
an ABM strategy with inbound philosophy in the mix.
Overall, IBM offers a meaningful
and collaborative approach to marketing and sales.
Moreover, what will really knock the ball out of the park in your ABM strategy is
really investing in engaging and communicating with your account
prospects in order to build invaluable relationships that will turn into sales.
If you found this video helpful then feel
free to share it with someone you know needs a hand with account based marketing.
You can also subscribe to our blog where you'll find a bunch more tools,
tips and templates to help you Find Sell & Keep your people,
just like Neighbourhood does. So that's it from me.
Happy marketing.