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Account Based Marketing

Is Your Business Ready for Account Based Marketing (ABM)?

November 8, 2021, by Alex Moore

Is Your Business Ready for Account Based Marketing (ABM)?

Marketers are often criticised for bringing in low-quality leads that don’t fit the ideal customer profile, and don’t convert. To break out of this pattern, sales and marketing need to align their strategy to accommodate today’s B2B buying behaviour.

Account-Based Marketing (ABM) aims to fix this.

Aligning sales and marketing objectives, tactics and results, an ABM campaign allows the two teams to collaborate on target accounts, thus creating a super-efficient strategy that promotes long-term business growth.

For the Ideal Customer that they are targeting, it’s a win-win because it means they experience a new level of hyper-personalisation that truly engages them. For a B2B SME company, this level of engagement is more likely to gain conversion and boost ROI and revenue.

 You may have heard a thing or two about the benefits of Account-Based Marketing, like these stats:

But before jumping into ABM, it’s key to understand if it is right for you, and whether your business is ready?

A Quick Overview of Account Based Marketing

Firstly, what is Account-Based Marketing? ABM is a targeted approach where sales and marketing work together to create hyper-personalised communications for a group of high-value accounts.

There’s often confusion between Inbound Marketing and Account Based Marketing.

The Difference Between Inbound Marketing and ABM

ABM:

Targets predetermined accounts with tailored marketing efforts.
  • Energy and attention are fixed on high-value accounts.
  • Custom content shared on targeted channels where the target engages.
  • Ideal for a business who sells to a niche market.

Inbound Marketing:

  • Attracts a wide range of customers through relevant, high quality content.
  • Qualifies leads through offers, forms, emails etc to move contacts along the conversion funnel (awareness/attract, engage, to conversion).
  • Ideal for a business that has a wide market and broad range of target audiences - enabling them to reach an extended audience and generate interest on a large scale.

Here’s a little more on what ABM is and isn’t...

What Account Based Marketing is - Selling directly to your ideal customer (high value, best fit) - allowing you to go straight to engaging and delighting your target accounts. It saves wasting time on unqualified leads that aren’t the right fit. So it’s super-efficient and therefore very popular among B2B SME companies.

What Account Based Marketing isn’t - Broad brush campaigns to a job title, multiple sectors, or running awareness-level (top of the funnel) campaigns that target a wide audience.

ABM has to be strategically planned in advance - it’s not just an ongoing promotion of activity to your target accounts. Similarly, identifying a type of company you want to sell to isn’t ABM. You need to specifically go through the process of identifying accounts and prioritising them in tiers - then tailor efforts and comms accordingly.

>> Further reading: Find out about the 3 types of ABM that vary from basic to hyper-personalisation.

The Top Benefits of an ABM Campaign:

  • Forces companies to set the criteria for prioritisation - what makes a good customer, who do we really want to work with (your target/Ideal Customers)
  • Tailoring communications, content and campaigns to those specific accounts helps boost engagement, experience and customer loyalty
  • By focusing your resources on winning best-fit, high-value accounts, you stand a better chance of sales conversion - thus improving ROI

The Top Challenges of an ABM Campaign:

For ABM to be successful, B2B SME companies need to deliver a personalised customer experience, know how to choose target accounts and what content to use.

 Often, when companies try to set up these ABM campaigns, they hit these challenges:

  • Biggest challenge for most SMEs: Data sourcing/database build - you need to have contact details for multiple stakeholders across the businesses you are targeting otherwise you can't orchestrate the outbound side effectively.
  • Lack of expertise - to develop the complex ABM strategies and execute them
  • Budget - they can't afford to build an ABM team in-house (they need an affordable, flexible solution)

 

Ready to see real results with your B2B marketing? Let's talk about how our Account-Based Marketing (ABM) services can help you close more deals! Explore our ABM services and how we can help you achieve your goals.

Key Steps to Successfully Execute an Account Based Marketing Campaign

There are seven key steps to successfully run an ABM campaign:

1)     Identify your target accounts - Firstly, you need to decide who you’ll be wanting to capture - including the industry, company size, annual revenue, location etc. At this stage, market research is critical to determine which targets can be best served by your company offering.

2) Map the customer journey - Understanding how your customers buy from you and the journey they go through to become in a purchase-ready state is essential. Typical things to consider include: Where do they find their information? What information do they need? This helps you to alleviate any problems in the buying cycle.

3) Build buyer personas - Now, start to familiarise yourself with your new prospects: Who is making purchasing decisions? What problems are they having? This insight will help to build an understanding of the common persona and use this to tailor communications and content.

4) Create ABM content - Using the insight from the persona work, you now need to create content that addresses these pain points.

5) Identify channels - At this point, you need to establish where you will be sharing your new pieces of content to get them in front of your identified target accounts. We recommend a multi-channel and multi-touchpoint process as its essential prospects are engaged consistently across the several areas they interact.

6) ABM campaign execution - This should be planned in advance to make sure the right messages go out at the right time.

7) ABM measurement - With every campaign, measurement is essential. For ABM, it helps to understand which pieces are working and which need improving.  As there is a smaller volume of accounts, measuring the success of an ABM campaign is much easier. However, you need to ask the right questions: Have there been changes to the way target accounts engage with the content? What revenue has been generated from the target accounts?

Could we be your next strategic marketing partner?

Could we be your next strategic marketing partner?

Our marketing strategy services - We are a B2B marketing agency with a dedicated team of experienced 'CMO-level' strategy experts specialising in strategic roadmaps, persona development and customer journey mapping, along with content and SEO strategy. Find out more about our marketing strategy services

Enjoy this article? We produce blogs like this for our clients as part of our content marketing agency services, and could produce engaging content for you too. 

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