When it comes to marketing and generating sales, it’s crucial to target your potential client base and acquire quantifiable leads. If your only strategy has been to cast your nets out into the wide world, then it’s time to examine a strategy that has the potential to exponentially increase the combined value of your sales and marketing teams.
Here’s what you need to know about Account-Based Marketing:
1.Marketing and Sales Work Hand-In-Hand
Ask your sales team for the top five accounts they’d love to close, and you’ll net the names and positions of key members to pursue. Have your marketing team roll out a hyper-focused campaign across all channels of communication for key accounts, and they’ll give your sales team actionable, quantifiable leads.
Marketing and sales are two concentric circles with target accounts at the center. As your marketing team acquires specific accounts to invest time and energy into, they’ll create specific, client-facing marketing campaigns that address each client’s pain point and problems that need solving. Your sales team will then be ready to dive into leads from those campaigns.
2.Inbound Marketing and ABM Work Together Flawlessly
Inbound marketing and ABM are two sides of the same coin and share the same goal. It’s essential to utilize inbound strategies to grab interested parties in your products and services. To take it one step further, partner your inbound strategy with ABM to offer personalized offers, data, and advertisements.
Take inbound content, including articles, content offers, and social media, to begin drawing in target accounts. Rather than using generic campaigns, use ABM to specialize your campaigns for key accounts.
To appropriately target, conduct a thorough ABM analysis of the key players. Identify the pain points, struggles, and needs for each key account. Speak to those areas directly in your content and use all channels for specific, targeted, combined inbound-ABM strategies.
3.ABM Generates Solid ROI for B2B Companies
The crucial difference between other marketing concepts and ABM is the emphasis on relationship making. The goal of account-based marketing isn’t to keep your target account at a distance while landing a sale. The basis of ABM is to create a relationship by which you demonstrate that your company has a service or product of worth that solves another business’s need and alleviates their pain point.
It’s a well-known fact that converting an interested business into a sale is much harder than converting a sale into a repeat purchase. This is why relationship building is so crucial for your business.
ROI from ABM doesn’t just come in the form of sales but in relationships, as well. With ABM, you’re interested in more than the sale; you’re interested in the business. You want to know their pain points, the problems they need to have solved. You can then offer them hyper-personalized service and gain repeat sales because they benefit from your business.
As you establish yourself as a trustworthy provider and build relationships, you also position your company as an expert in your field. You become a respected player in your industry and become the go-to business for your knowledge and offerings. Not only will the accounts you hold consider your worth and value to grow, but other accounts you have yet to land will see the growth of your company as beneficial.
The most prominent reason why ABM is so popular is that it generates revenue. Across the board, 69% of businesses that employ an ABM strategy report an increase in revenue, with 35% of those reporting significant improvement related to every step of the sales process, from pipeline growth to sales rate.
4.Quantifiable Lead Generations Results from ABM Strategies
ABM utilizes a critical component your business already possesses – target accounts. Your sales team can hand you a list of accounts they’d love to turn into sales.
Because ABM focuses on relationships, take another step, and look beyond the sales list. Ask yourself who among your staff might have a connection to an account. If your head of accounting went to school with the head of accounting at a business you’d love to work with, utilize your staff member to make the connection. And just like that, you have another lead.
Rather than waiting for people to come across your broad-based information, visit your website, and turn into leads, create leads through targeted accounts and key players within your own company. As you pursue these leads with ABM campaigns, you then can measure your success specifically related to:
- Generated Leads
- New Contacts
- Invites to Bid
- Meetings Scheduled
- New Contracts
5.ABM is Growing. Here’s Why.
ABM is rapidly growing among B2B companies because it works. In 2007, Northrop Grumman used Account-Based Marketing to secure a $2 Billion contract with the Virginia Information Technologies Agency. Before Northrop’s specific and strategized ABM marketing effort targeted toward VITA, they were known only as a company that built ships and submarines. By analyzing VITA’s needs and communicating their expertise across all channels, VITA took notice and eventually signed a ten-year contract.
This is one example of many companies that are finding success with ABM strategies. ABM is rapidly gaining followers as 86% of businesses rethink their marketing strategies. A 2017 Account-Based Marketing Study by SiriusDecisions found that, of the companies that employ account-based marketing strategies, 91% report better deals are landed, and 92% see a higher close rate.
Given these statistics, it’s no wonder the same study found that numerous B2B marketers are moving to full-fledged ABM programs for their business – 62% in 2017, up from 40% in 2016.
ABM’s proven value is garnering attention from B2B companies across the board, and it’s not hard to see why.
6.ABM is Measurable
As you run campaigns, measuring your success is crucial in determining what works and what needs to be changed. There are numerous metrics to track for your ABM campaigns, including engagement, impact, and influence.
Measure engagement by determining the degree your target audience spends consuming, reacting to, and interacting with your content. Include time, the quantity of content consumed, channels used, and presence where possible.
Impact will help you measure whether engagement made a difference. Track any resulting phone calls, forms filled out, emails, or demos requested. When sales talks to the key account, was the other business ready to talk? Were they receptive? Do they interact with your follow up emails?
Influence pertains to more than the contract and dollar amount signed. Look at other benchmarks including:
- Sales Cycle: Was it longer or shorter than non-ABM cycles?
- Size of Deal: Was it smaller or larger compared to non-ABM accounts?
- Win Rate: Compare your conversion rate against non-ABM accounts.
Keep close tabs on these metrics, and you’ll form a clear picture of your account-based marketing success.
Amplify Industrial Marketing and Guidance can provide your organization with an account-based marketing strategy for success and growth. View our B2B Content Marketing section to learn more about our services for the industrial sector.