B2B organizations are constantly looking for ways to improve efficiencies in the sales process. For the most part, organizations are hyper-focused on playing a numbers game.
The more traffic your site gets, the more leads you can generate. The more leads you generate, the more sales you get.
Account-based marketing is shifting the focus of marketing from the numbers game to one number. That’s the number one thing. It’s a unique way to target your prospects and turn them into customers. It moves marketing away from funnels and technology to focus on relationships.
Want to know more about account-based marketing? Read on to find out what it is and why you should implement account-based marketing in your business.
What is Account-Based Marketing?
What exactly is account-based marketing? Account-based marketing (ABM) is similar to relationship marketing.
ABM matches your most likely prospects to buy with your sales team. Your sales team focuses on those key relationships and works with marketing to deliver strategic, individualized messages to those accounts.
ABM is widely used by organizations that are starting up and sell high ticket items. These high-ticket products or services usually require a team to approve the transaction. Instead of dealing with only on stakeholder, you’re dealing with a team of stakeholders.
Account-based marketing allows you to target your messaging to the team of stakeholders, rather than try to create broad strokes of messages that miss the mark.
Would you like to see ABM in action? Take a close look at these account-based marketing examples.
Reasons to Adopt Account-Based Marketing
Account-based marketing has become quite the marketing buzzword in B2B organizations. There are plenty of reasons why you should adopt account-based marketing. Take a look at these 10 reasons.
1. Deliver Personalization
If there’s one thing your customers expect, it’s personalized content. You might think, that’s easy because you can deliver a mass email personalized with their name.
B2B buyers don’t expect that kind of treatment. They can get that anywhere. They expect you to do your research and understand their needs. ABM forces you to do that research and deliver content based on your prospects needs.
2. Return on Investment
Since you’re delivering deeply personalized content to your prospects, they’re likely to respond to that content and become customers. They’ll feel like your sales team understands their unique situation.
That’s why ABM has a much higher-ROI than traditional marketing alone. It’s also why more companies are shifting marketing dollars to ABM.
3. Break Down Silos
Marketing and sales teams are often like trying to mix oil and vinegar. They just don’t seem to blend well. Sales never understood marketing and marketing never understood sales.
ABM forces these two opposing sides to work together. They identify the top accounts that they need to target and work together to determine the best messages for those specific accounts. Marketing develops the messages, delivers the appropriate content, and sales closes the deal.
4. Stronger Reporting
With account-based marketing, you’re focused on fewer accounts in your funnel, which makes it much easier to determine what’s working and what’s not.
You know exactly what messages hit home with your prospects. You also know what your sales team is doing to bring home results.
5. Better Use of Marketing Dollars
Account-based marketing is hyper-focused marketing. Traditional marketing is like using your marketing dollars as if you’re throwing spaghetti at the wall, hoping that something sticks.
With ABM, your marketing spend is focused only on a few accounts. By focusing on a few accounts, you deliver better results. You also reduce the amount of money wasted wishing and hoping for something to happen like throwing spaghetti at the wall.
6. Easy to Scale
Imagine being a small startup. You’re likely to have only a few accounts to work with. You can focus on those few accounts and deliver incredible service. A lot of companies experience growing pains because when they grow, the quality of service decreases.
ABM allows you to go from a successful startup to a major player in your industry. It forces your company to continue to deliver personalized content and messaging to your major accounts.
7. Marketing is More Focused
Every aspect of your marketing efforts is more focused when you use an account-based marketing strategy.
Your research is more focused, your content and messaging are highly targeted. It’s almost like your marketing team is working for a few accounts, rather than trying to gather thousands of low-quality leads.
8. ABM is more Efficient than Traditional Sales and Marketing
As noted earlier, marketing and sales teams would work separately in traditional models. ABM breaks down those silos. When marketing and sales teams collaborate on a few select accounts, it’s much more efficient.
9. ABM Lets You Set Clear Goals
When you’re marketing is focused on a select few customers, it becomes much easier to set key performance indicators (KPIs) for them.
For example, your organization may want to launch a new product or increase revenue from existing customers. Your KPIs become much more focused, clear, and easy to measure.
10. Bottom Line: Account-Based Marketing Works
The main reason why you need to use account-based marketing is that it works. Time and time again, B2B organizations are touting the ROI that ABM brings.
Customers are thrilled because they feel heard and finally understood by a company. That makes your sales and marketing teams the heroes.
Use Account-Based Marketing to Build Business
There are plenty of reasons why large and small businesses should implement account-based marketing.
ABM give your marketing and sales teams a better way to work together, which breaks down the traditional silos. It’s easy to scale, and it gives you a better understanding as to how your marketing works for your business.
If you want to see more ways to shore up your business communications, find out how a unified communication system can benefit your small business.
