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You want to be looking to partner with an agency that is driven by metrics. If they plug into your team and manage everything on your behalf, within your systems, they will have access to key reporting metrics to review performance.
Top 3 Benefits of Working With an ABM Agency
Building an Account Based Marketing campaign on your own is extremely tough. It needs a team of experts, with a wide range of skills, all working in harmony.
By working with an agency, you can flip the top ABM challenges into benefits:
Strategic and Systematic – With a comprehensive strategy and roadmap process, an agency can ensure your ABM campaigns are sustainable and create long-term revenue generation.
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Look for an agency that is customer-centric. They need to be focused on identifying and understanding target customer profiles and their pain points to ensure the ABM campaign plan will resonate and be visible in the channels they engage with.
MarTech Mastery – An agency can save you all the hassle of finding sales and marketing technology solutions that meet your exact needs - and actually work together with your other pieces of tech – they can advise on the best, tried and tested tools to deliver great results.
More Leads and Sales – A full-funnel approach to marketing (making sure you are appealing to those in awareness, to consideration, through to purchase levels of the sales funnel) helps to increase performance across the customer journey. It means more new customers, renewals and upsells.
Top Tips For Finding Your Account Based Marketing Partner
Here are three tips to help you find a best practice ABM partner:
✅ Make sure you’ve got the media budget to engage, ABM is a high touch activity, you need to drive awareness to make a real impact which means you need to have a dedicated budget used for promotion.
✅ Look at experience - have they worked with businesses in your industry or your target persona? It’s not a must-have but if you’re working with an agency that has run multiple successful campaigns targeting HR leaders for example, you’re going to be in a better place from the offset.
✅ Make sure the agency knows your MarTech stack well and you’ve got everything in place to run a highly orchestrated set of activities - ABM requires multiple touchpoints so measurability is vital - you don’t want to have to report in a really disjointed fashion.
Red Flags
Here are a couple of things we recommend you steer clear of when looking for an ABM partner:
🚩 Finding Genuine ABM - Not Mass Marketing - Specialists
There’s often confusion between inbound marketing (to the masses) and the more direct approach that is ABM marketing.
So here are some things to avoid when looking for an ABM specialist:
- No track history of running ABM campaigns (case studies / testimonials etc).
- Look at the service offering - if they don’t offer sales enablement / outbound campaigns, it’s probably the biggest red flag that they aren’t used to working with sales teams.
🚩 Not Going Too Niche
There are lots of marketing agencies out there. And lots that specialise in elements of ABM.
As a SME, you don’t want to have lots of agencies to manage in siloes. You need to look for a full-service ABM agency that will create a full marketing strategy and plan - not just focusing on one area like ABM-focused LinkedIn ads.
ABM doesn’t work in a silo - it’s usually used in conjunction with other important digital marketing strategies. An in-depth knowledge of digital marketing is necessary for companies that want to make sure that they’re doing things right, and this comes from years of expertise.
Final Word
With so many marketing agencies out there, and ones that specialise in certain elements of ABM, it can be hard to find the right ABM partner for you that can create hyper-personalised communications across all of the channels where your target audience engages.
With the support of a best practice Account Based Marketing agency, the entire marketing plan can be managed - marketing strategy through to execution - by specialists that have experience driving revenue results for B2B companies.
With our checklist of best practice elements to look out for, and red flags to avoid, you can feel more confident in choosing an Account Based Marketing agency that’s fit for purpose.
Take the plunge and book a free assessment with Digital Litmus to see if we’re the right fit.