How to Succeed in Account-Based Advertising

 Right now, Account-based Marketing (ABM) is the hottest B2B ticket in town — with 87% of marketers stating that it delivers better ROI than other marketing activities.

While for many people it may be a relatively new strategy, it has in fact been around for many years in different guises. In fact, you might've already heard the term as Key Account Management, Key Account Marketing, or Client-centric Marketing.

The objective of ABM is, quite simply, to treat one account as a market of one, i.e. to focus all your energy (and resources) on engaging, winning, and maintaining one named account.

Expanding on this, ABM has four underlying principles:

  1. Client centricity and insight
  2. Partnership between sales and marketing
  3. Focus on reputation, relationships and, ultimately, revenue
  4. Tailored programs and campaigns

Simple right? Well, the reality is that to justify this level of effort and resources the prize must be sufficiently large enough to warrant this expenditure. ABM therefore is best suited to complex, high 'ticket price' solutions with longer life-cycle sales, and where typically multiple stakeholders are involved.

Strategic ABM (one-to-one) and one-to-few (clusters of 15-20 accounts with shared commonality, i.e. vertical, industry, pain, challenge, etc.) have defined ABM for the last few years.

But there is a new ABM kid on the block who is shaking things up: one-to-many ABM.

Free Access: Strategic Account Planning Template

The Rise of the ABM Tech Stack

One of the key reasons why ABM has become so popular and now forms a key part of any B2B marketing and sales playbook is the use of technology to automate and target those accounts (and individuals) you are looking to influence and convert.

The rise of one-to-many ABM programs targeting hundreds (and even thousands) of accounts has been largely possible due to the technological and data advances that are now available to B2B marketers.

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