Events & WebinarsHow Account Based Marketing Can Drive Revenue for your B2B Business

Account Based Marketing (ABM), today, is becoming the new word in a marketer’s dictionary to boost revenue and growth by generating marketing sourced deals, while also empowering them to retain and expand existing clientele. Not only is ABM useful for account acquisition, but it also helps focus marketing efforts on accounts which have the maximum potential to meet strategic goals and generate higher revenues.

With recent technology advances, ABM is growing in popularity and being adopted on a scale bigger than ever before. The Flip My Funnel conference, in Atlanta on August 11, will prove to be the best learning ground for B2B sales and marketing on how to create demand using ABM.

Here are five facts about ABM:

1) ABM leverages new technology

ABM leverages brand new technology to open up a plethora of marketing possibilities. The combination of IP-based identification and real time ad purchase makes ABM an extremely targeted and a real-time marketing technique.

2) ABM is based on collective decision-making

ABM is based on the collective decision-making process, as majority of B2B purchase decisions are made collectively by a firm’s leadership. A collective viewpoint offers an in-depth understanding about how interested an account really is in the company’s solution. So, to target the set of individuals with relevant ad messaging, it is essential to group people together. This is where ABM’s IP-based targeting can be leveraged to ensure that the organization efficiently markets to the correct group.

3) ABM is a growing market

ABM currently has a few major players. However, just like any other tech sector, this too, is a rapidly growing space wherein new vendors are stepping in quickly. Despite adoption rates being low with ABM, there is a relatively larger adoption with organizations selling to large and mid-market enterprises.

4) ABM delivers outstanding results

With businesses being able to leverage ABM to purchase a single ad impression in real time, target it to the right and most productive account, and have ad triggers dynamically off the accounts’ actions, ABM is the technology that will define the future of B2B. Future marketing will need to find ways to cut through the noise to deliver relevant ads to the right people at the right time, and ABM is the simplest and most effective way to achieve this.

5) Other benefits of ABM

• Easy to implement
• Automated
• Helps create highly targeted programs at lower costs
• Allows real-time ad purchase
• Helps in new account acquisition, account nurturing, and account growth
• Helps to cross-sell more effectively

Here are five simple steps to start your ABM program, along with insights as to why ABM can be a massive revenue driver for B2B businesses in the near future:

1) Identifying high-value accounts

It is essential for organizations to scrutinize their data to understand which exact attributes determine target accounts, and what defines ideal prospects. The key attributes that must be assessed include strategic needs, digital behavior, sales named accounts, and firmographic data.

2) Customized, impactful messaging

Once an organization nails their dream accounts, the next step is to analyze the content they already have, and how the content’s performance has been. Apart from measuring impressions, click-throughs and overall social performance, incorporating advanced segmentation helps add higher value to the asset audit. Mapping content to target accounts helps evaluate what content is most effective at each step of the customer journey, and which accounts respond best to the company’s assets.

Personalization is of utmost importance in ABM. During message construction, prospects must be offered real value in sync with their customer journey, account type, and personas. This will bring to surface personalized engagements that are worthwhile.

3) Identifying optimum channels

It is vital for companies to set up optimized touch points for their lead nurture strategy/plan. Though each targeted persona responds in a different way as per the selected channels, it is still important to deliver consistent messaging across every channel.

Also, intelligently combining traditional avenues such as offline events, magazines, snail mail, etc. with online platforms like social media, blogs, PPC, websites, email, etc. helps create an exhaustive engagement map.

4) Targeted campaigns

Targeted campaigns in ABM offer relevance and speed. Once the most impactful content is discovered, the company needs to identify the perfect timing. After identification of big and meaningful target accounts, the company must effectively engage with them in a limited time period – this can be achieved by offering the right content in real-time to take them further ahead in the sales funnel. Working in tandem with sales helps align messaging appropriately for targeted accounts. This is a vital aspect of full-funnel personalization.

Also, sales teams must remain in the loop, and be able to provide quick responses and valuable feedback for campaigns.

5) Evaluation and optimization

A significant offering of ABM is how it makes measurement/evaluation, learning, and optimization a breeze, since the focus is on a small group of accounts having huge potential value. While evaluating results, the complete sales and marketing funnel must be tracked.

Questions to address are –

• Is the company appealing to the targeted accounts?
• Is there sufficient customer-company engagement?
• Are customers going where the company wants them to?
• And, are all these aspects integrated into the sales process?

All this information gathered must be evaluated along with the feedback received from sales about generated account traction.

Revenue increase, reduction in sales cycle, and customer loyalty must be considered when measuring conversion metrics.

The future of ABM

In the short-term, ABM ensures that targeted accounts successfully generate revenue post conversion. Also, ABM organically links marketing and sales by maintaining a focus on common accounts and objectives; and helps quantify the contribution made by marketing.

In the long-term, cost-per-lead is lowered due to the mastery achieved for spot-on targeting, naturally translating to revenue growth. This extends to website metrics too, due to elevated focus on personalized, targeted online content, which ultimately offers a rich and dynamic online experience.

ABM won’t replace either marketing or marketing automation, but supplement them, says David Raab

No matter what a company’s existing strategy is – Account-Based Marketing must be a definite inclusion in immediate future plans.

If you’d like to learn more about how you can align your sales and marketing teams, don’t miss best-in-class thought leaders and practitioners at the #FlipMyFunnel Conference. Click the banner below and enter promo code MTA50 to save 50% off your ticket price.