When to Use Account Based Marketing

We’ve talked a little bit about account-based marketing here on the Spherical Strategies blog before. We discussed the difference between inbound and outbound marketing and talked a little about why account-based marketing is an important part of the marketing world. But you’re running a business and you’ve probably been marketing that business for a while now. How do you know when it’s time to incorporate account-based marketing into your mix?

Well, chances are you already have! Most likely you have been using elements of account-based marketing in your efforts for quite a while, if not all along. Most of us long-time marketers started by developing campaigns that have mass appeal and as we grew to know our audiences better, we narrowed down the type of content that would be most relevant. That is the first step! It’s that narrowed-down content that begins a marketing strategy towards inbound marketing.

As you continue to augment an inbound marketing plan and mix it into your strategy, you tend to notice that groups within your audience respond to distinct pieces of content differently. Often these responses can be categorized based on their buyer persona and where in the decision-making journey they are when they interact with your content.

Developing an account-based marketing plan narrows content even further by targeting a single company (and even a single decision maker within that company). Often called a “market of one,” this very specific method allows you to utilize coordinated and high-touch sales and marketing tactics with specific messaging that (hopefully) resonates with your target.

That sounds great, but how do you know when your company is ready to execute an account-based marketing strategy? Isn’t it expensive to invest so much time and money in reaching a single client?

It’s true that your cost per acquisition will be higher when using account-based marketing, but there’s a few things to note. First of all, while ABM does focus on fewer potential clients, these are accounts that have the best chance of boosting your bottom line. This demonstrates that taking the time to create highly targeted messaging intended for specific targeted accounts is important. The second thing to understand is, account-based marketing can still be automated – you just need to have the right data about the right decision makers. Finally, strong communication between your sales and marketing teams is imperative.

Keep in mind that account-based marketing is not intended to replace your current mass marketing initiatives that are geared toward driving awareness and traffic; these are still an important part of your marketing mix.

ROI is one of the most important metrics when you are analyzing your bottom line but when it comes to account-based marketing, you will want to take a deeper dive into this data. Whether it’s a webinar, an email campaign, a physical mailer, or an event, it is only through understanding the effectiveness of each of the individual components that you can continuously improve your ABM strategy. As account-based marketing has increased in popularity as a strategy, more and more tracking software has become available. In fact, in some categories, tracking is available in near real-time: this gives you the ability as a marketer to alter the course of your campaigns as you receive new data.

How does this enhanced tracking help your company? Daily metric tracking saves you both time and budget. The goal with marketing is: connect with your audience and influence them to interact with your brand. To do this, you need the right information and this is where enhanced tracking comes in. By tracking metrics during and after the campaign, you can see what is truly effective for your brand. This lets you make smarter decisions in real-time, and plan better for the next campaign.

84% of businesses surveyed reported that account-based marketing delivers a higher return on investment (ROI) than other types of marketing, according to the Information Technology Services Marketing Association. ABM must be measurable, just as all marketing strategies should be, so utilizing automation and software tools to measure the ROI of all account-based marketing initiatives is crucial for its success.

Account-based marketing requires you to record a baseline of your current statistics, retrieved from whatever strategies you are currently utilizing, to determine the metrics in need of improvement. From there, you can use your current numbers to determine whether or not account-based marketing is a more effective strategy than what you have been using.

When you establish realistic goals based on your abilities and current scores, ABM allows for you to see an initiative’s ROI as well as immediate opportunities for optimization based on the interactions, or lack thereof, with your content. Account-based marketing can involve quite a bit of effort to create and execute, and takes a great deal of data for segmentation. Perhaps these are reasons why measuring and reporting ROI is a constant struggle for some marketing teams.

Several tools are important to include in an ABM stack in order to execute and track a campaign, such as a content management system, an analytical reporting program, an email automation tool, and a CRM platform. If you’ve been utilizing an account-based marketing approach and want to better define your ROI, you may want to focus on tools such as account scoring, account validation, account profiling, and tuning your model. Solutions with AI capabilities are helpful in analyzing millions of data points in order to build account lists ranked by predictive scoring.

After you’ve established your baseline and objectives, next you want to implement a budget by assigning a fixed cost to every content piece that will be included in your strategy. This budget should be realistic, clear, and thorough, including costs for content creation, advertising costs, PPC, platform subscriptions, and any other billable hours that will arise during the campaign. Over time, you will notice consumer trends, from which you can create data-sets to follow and better determine the influence your ABM strategy is having.

It’s important to emphasize: be specific, precise, and realistic in your budgeting – for this will directly impact the accuracy of your ROI. It’s also important to monitor your ROI in real-time with some sort of software that allows you to see each content piece you create and links it to a customer account. Watching for patterns and falling-off points in real-time will let you quickly and effectively make any necessary changes to find the methods that work best for you.

“Marketers doing ABM are about 40% more likely to report alignment with their sales team compared to marketers not doing ABM,” a Bizible’s State of Pipeline Marketing 2016 report found. Account-based marketing unites teams by requiring them to work together rather than independently. ABM strategies require collaboration between sales and marketing teams to identify target accounts, create a communications strategy and outreach tactics, and monitor the progress of the campaign.

Account-based marketing helps you structure your resources and marketing efforts by narrowing your focus on the key accounts that specifically drive more revenue. This enhanced focus optimizes staff time and money, which are your two most valuable resources. You can directly link your marketing team to sales in order to target and create content for the accounts you determine as the most fiscal. This will establish a communication channel between your sales and marketing teams as well as maximize the efficiency of your B2B marketing resources.

Personalized marketing strategies effectively engage potential and current customers. In email introductions, people prefer to be addressed by name rather than a generic and impersonal, “Dear future customer.” By developing content that key decision-makers want and need to move them through the buyer’s journey, account-based marketing takes personalized marketing to the next level. Key decision makers know the kind of research that hyper-personalized content requires. This kind of finely tuned marketing strategy also requires collaboration between sales and marketing to reach targets efficiently, in a way that resonates with them.

Account-based marketing takes a little more work and attention to detail but in the long run, has proven to be more beneficial than not incorporating ABM into your marketing strategies.

Be sure to check back periodically for more helpful marketing information and much more on the Spherical Strategies website and blog at SphericalStrategies.com

About Lisa | Spherical Strategies Content Creator & Copywriter Lisa works with Spherical Strategies as a content creator and copywriter. She brings a deep understanding of human motivation to her mastery of writing by utilizing her education in market psychology. She has worked over the past several years as a private contractor, providing industry-specific content and editing for companies of all sizes. Outside of her work as a content creator, Lisa is passionate about caring for her young son and is only slightly obsessed with gardening.