What is ABM?
Challenge
With the current era of digital marketing, the need to surpass the older forms of marketing is both necessary and a demanding prospect. Understanding this urgency to come up with new strategies of business marketing, expanding companies across the globe had to come up with an answer to this quest for new marketing strategy. Some of the major difficulties that they faced with traditional marketing were:
Lack of Personalization: Traditional marketing often involves a one-size-fits-all approach, leading to poor engagement with high-value accounts because their unique needs and pain points aren't addressed.
Inefficient Resource Allocation: Without a clear focus on target accounts, resources are often spread thin across a broad audience, resulting in wasted time and budget.
Misaligned Sales and Marketing: Discrepancies between sales and marketing teams can lead to conflicting strategies and a failure to prioritize high-value accounts effectively.
Difficulty in Measuring ROI: Traditional marketing metrics may not accurately reflect the impact on key accounts, making it challenging to demonstrate the value of marketing efforts.
Long Sales Cycles: Complex B2B sales often involve long decision-making processes. Traditional marketing methods may not effectively nurture leads through these extended cycles.
Solution
Solution
It is essential to thoroughly plan, set clear objectives and KPIs, and regularly communicate the benefits and progress to key stakeholders. Demonstrating early wins and showcasing how marketing contributes to revenue growth and customer acquisition can help overcome these challenges and gain buy-in from your organization.
Account Based Marketing (ABM) is a business to business (B2B) marketing strategy that focuses sales and marketing resources on target accounts and tailor their marketing efforts to those accounts. The approach involves identifying high-value accounts, researching and understanding their needs and pain points, and creating personalized marketing messages and campaigns to reach them. By implementing different marketing strategies, the company can achieve qualitative and quantitative lead conversions.
ABM uses a strategy that focuses on targeting accounts with specified attributes and needs, rather than focusing on large influx of needs. ABM marketing takes a more focused and personalized approach, rather than casting a wide net and hoping to attract the right customers. With competition always on the rise, it's important to engage with as many stakeholders as possible.
ABM is essentially mad up of strategies that focus on sales and marketing resources on targeted accounts to yield better ROI. Let's look at some of the major solutions offered by ABM.
Hyper-Personalization: ABM enables organizations to create highly personalized content and campaigns tailored to the unique needs and challenges of each target account, leading to increased engagement and conversions.
Efficient Resource Allocation: ABM focuses resources on high-potential accounts, ensuring that marketing efforts are concentrated where they are most likely to generate revenue.
Sales and Marketing Alignment: ABM encourages close collaboration between sales and marketing teams, aligning their strategies and ensuring that both teams are working towards common goals.
Measurable ROI: ABM provides a more accurate measurement of ROI by tracking the progress of targeted accounts through the sales funnel and attributing revenue directly to marketing efforts.
Shortened Sales Cycles: ABM's personalized approach helps nurture leads more effectively, guiding them through the decision-making process and potentially shortening sales cycles.
ABM addresses many of the challenges that organizations face in traditional marketing by providing a more targeted, personalized, and collaborative approach. It not only helps in better engagement and conversions with high-value accounts, but also improves the overall efficiency and effectiveness of marketing and sales efforts.
ABM - As a Concept
Benefits of Using ABM
ABM - As a Concept
ABM marketing strategy focuses on building relationships with a small set of high-value accounts or customers. Instead of targeting a large audience, ABM targets specific companies or individuals with personalized campaigns that address their unique challenges and needs.
The concept of ABM is based on the idea that not all customers are created equal. Some customers are more valuable than others in terms of revenue potential, influence, or other factors. By focusing on these high-value accounts, businesses can allocate their marketing resources more effectively and create a more personalized and engaging experience for these customers.
ABM involves a variety of tactics, such as personalized content, targeted advertising, and account-specific events or experiences. By tailoring the marketing message to the specific needs and interests of each account, businesses can build stronger relationships and drive more revenue from these key customers.
ABM is a customer-centric approach to marketing that recognizes the importance of building strong relationships with high-value accounts. By focusing on quality over quantity, businesses can deliver more value to their most important customers and drive long-term growth and success.
Scope of ABM
Scope of ABM
The cross-functional effect of ABM helps bring all components together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. When you have a clear understanding of your target audience, you can cater to their needs at a granular level. This will help the ABM leader to not only have a full picture of the account but also make informed ABM decisions.
By combining the engagement techniques of the sales team and the CRM data of the marketing team, you can decide the marketing strategy for individual accounts and identify the best-suited journey for these individual accounts. This way, you will not waste your resources on events or activities that do not interest an account. ABM does not stop with just executing a strategy, but also analyzes the effect of the strategy on the account and quantifies it at account level.
Benefits of Using ABM
ABM can offer many benefits to organizations that are trying to sell into large accounts with tenacious sales cycles and large deal sizes. The following are some of the key benefits of using ABM:
- Multiple strategies for specific audience - Marketing strategies that focus on a set of target accounts within a market. This is an increasingly popular approach for B2B companies that target larger accounts.
- Better conversion - With more personalized and targeted messaging, ABM can help sales teams close deals faster and more efficiently.
- Greater ROI - ABM has been shown to deliver higher ROI than traditional marketing methods because it focuses on high-value accounts that are more likely to convert into customers.
- Up-sell and cross-sell to existing customer accounts - This will help maiximize the value of your largest accounts.
- Better alignment between sales and marketing teams - ABM requires close collaboration between sales and marketing teams, which can lead to better alignment and, ultimately, more revenue.
- Increased Customer Retention - By focusing on high-value accounts, ABM can help businesses build stronger relationships with their customers, leading to increased loyalty and retention.
- Improved Marketing Efforts - ABM provides insights into the behaviors and preferences of high-value accounts, which can help inform future marketing efforts and ensure that resources are allocated effectively.
- Personalization - Create individualized campaigns, surveys, emails, and more designed to engage each account based on the specific traits and needs of the account
- Data structure that enables report on campaign efficiency - You can analyze the overall performance of the ABM program, such as the number of target accounts reached, and generate reports that provide insights into the effectiveness of the conversion rates at each stage of the funnel and the ROI of the program.
ABM vs Tradition lead generation — a comparative analysis
Instead of taking a traditional marketing approach of catching as many fish as possible, ABM is a strategic approach similar to spearfishing. It involves careful preparation, precision, and targeting your best catch first. Rather than casting a wide net to customers with varying interests, ABM uses a spearhead approach by knowing what you want to catch, perfecting the pitch, and creating an intense plan of attack. This shift in focus results in a more structured use of marketing expenses, shorter sales cycles, and a better customer experience.
To work with ABM effectively:
- Consider the size of companies you typically sell to
- Product pricing
- The number of decision-makers
- Key purchasing committees within target accounts
The table below gives you a detailed analysis of both ABM and traditional lead generation. You will be able to differentiate the pros and cons of both approaches. It is up to a business lead to decide what approach would best suit their business needs. Though both have been in use in all spheres of industry, equally drawing the intended attention, the key differences in both approaches towards lead conversions is the winning criteria for ABM, as lead conversion is the most crucial phase of any business and is the bread and butter of any customer-based organization.
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ABM lead generation
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Traditional lead generation
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Customer-centric
The focus is on the customer's wants and needs.
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Products and Service centric
Focus is on the products and service
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Target account
ABM follows a targeted and individualized approach to marketing. It focuses on individual accounts or specific companies rather than a broad audience. This leads to higher rate of lead conversion.
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Loosely targeted approach
Reaches out to a larger group of potential customers and therefore lacks focus on key leads.
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B2B
Business to business marketing strategy focuses sales and marketing resources that target larger accounts.
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B2C
Business to customer marketing strategy targets personal consumers.
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Personalized journey
Create a personalized journey for every account in ABM and send relevant content in their customer journey.
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One-size-fit-all concept
You cannot create personalized journeys for every account as the audience is a wide pool of leads.
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Driven by customer data
System requires configuration, computation, and a lot of data to be fed to the system. It is driven by customer data and therefore requires time and effort for the initial setup.
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No customer data
It reaches the generic audience and requires no customer data.
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Direct and focused distribution
The marketing team uses emails, direct mails, social and other direct interactions.
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Organic channels
Marketing team uses organic channels like blogs, articles, social media posts, to reach customers
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Customer success
The personalized approach creates a long-lasting bond between the customer and the brand. Customer happiness is the starting point for a long-term journey for the custome with the business.
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Product or Service success
You cannot understand the emotions of your customers even though you make good profit. The customer happiness ends with their purchase.
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Upsell and Cross-sell
There is scope for upselling or cross-selling your products by analzsing the purchase trends in the customer journey for individual accounts.
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No scope for upselling or cross-selling. You only create brand awareness by providing good products and services. You cannot analyze purchase trends for accounts.
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Time-consuming
A lot of time and effort and additional resources is required to understand your target audience and to come up with a personilzed journey and relevant content for every account.
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Easy and straightforward
Very little time and effort investment is required as it uses only one marketing approach for a larger audience.
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High investment
Requires a lot of investment for the initial setup to get up and running. It is a costly affair to understand your audience and to create personalized journeys.
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Low investment
Does not require as much investment as ABM does. It is figuratively low because it requires little to no cost for a sustainable time. Example - social media ads
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High ROI
ABM leads to greater revenue.
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Low ROI
Return of Investment is comparatively low.
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ABM is a more personalized and targeted approach to lead generation, while traditional lead generation casts a wider net and may rely on more standardized approaches. Both have their strengths and weaknesses, and the right approach depends on the nature of your business and target audience.
ABM Funnel
Traditional marketing entails the process of casting a wide net to capture new leads through various marketing channels and then nurturing these leads until they eventually convert into customers. While this lead generation, nurturing, and conversion process is a fundamental aspect of any business, relying solely on conversion to secure a sale can be an exceedingly time-consuming endeavor. It often results in the loss of leads, unresponsive prospects, and, most significantly, inefficient allocation of marketing resources.
With ABM, the focus shifts to targeting specific, high-value accounts that have a history of contributing to your revenue. These accounts are identified and separated from your broader customer database. Subsequently, all sales and marketing efforts from various departments are concentrated on these accounts. Tailored, exclusive, and personalized business strategies are then meticulously crafted for each of these accounts, creating a genuinely customer-centric business environment.
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