Account-based marketing

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a strategy where a brand targets valuable accounts and provides each of them with a personalized experience. This helps ensure smooth communication with high-value target accounts, personalize their buyer journey, deliver customized messages, and drive ROI and customer loyalty.

In this article, we’ll unveil the importance, advantages, types, and examples of account-based marketing and figure out how to implement it. Next, we’ll explore the difference between account-based and traditional marketing.

marketing_important">Why is account-based marketing important?

According to statistics, around 70% of marketers implemented ABM in 2021. This highly targeted approach focuses on meeting the needs of valuable accounts (clients with the potential to bring big profits to a business), making the strategy popular in the B2B environment. Still, since business-to-business companies mostly sell to well-established brands, it can be effort-consuming. Account-based marketing helps keep this process under control and make it more targeted and personalized. It ensures a close-knit collaboration of sales and marketing teams to bring relevant content, tailored product info, and customized campaigns to high-value accounts.

A seamless experience is critical to deal success and business-to-business communication. To approach large accounts, account-based marketing offers companies to make use of personalized messaging, relevant email campaigns, and offers. Besides, this allows entrepreneurs to track and measure the efforts they invest in specific accounts and the ROI they get in return.

One more benefit of this targeted strategy is the optimization of your sales cycle. With its help, companies can focus their efforts on highly valuable accounts to stay efficient and save time and money. This approach helps entrepreneurs not waste time on unqualified leads and build relationships with ideal customers.

The reasons for implementing the strategy are clear now, so it’s time to jump to its benefits.

marketing">Benefits of Account-Based Marketing

ABM is gaining popularity among B2B companies since it helps establish an excellent reputation and strong relationship with each customer and boost revenue. Although many great strategies exist for business-to-business marketing, companies still choose account-based marketing. Why? It brings actual results:

• close-knit collaboration of sales and marketing teams;
• smooth sales cycle;
• personalized messaging;
• high ROI;
• client-centricity;
• efficient use of resources;
• trusting relationships with customers;
• qualified accounts;
• sales cycle optimization;
• consistent customer experience;
• relevant content;
• seamless communication.

Now that you know the benefits your business can reap, let’s proceed to the next section to unveil the types.

marketing">Types of Account-Based Marketing

Depending on how many accounts you plan to target, there are different account-based marketing types you might want to consider. Let’s have a closer look at each of them.

• Strategic for individual accounts. This account-based marketing type runs on the one-to-one principle and is used for highly valued accounts. Sales and marketing teams need to find unique approaches to establish solid relationships with clients and prospects. Marketers create highly targeted campaigns to reach these customers and develop strong connections. This way, they show that they understand clients’ problems and are ready to solve them. Entrepreneurs create a unique value proposition and personalized marketing campaigns and initiatives, tailoring their communication approaches to strengthen relationships with customers.
• Lite for groups of accounts. This account-based marketing type is suitable for strategic account groups and runs on a one-to-few basis. It helps enlarge the success achieved with the help of strategic account-based marketing or switch to a customized way of reaching accounts. When implementing this type of ABM, companies approach groups of accounts consisting of 5-10 clients. Marketers cooperate with the sales department to make decisions on their target accounts, challenges, and initiatives. Technology plays a significant role in lite ABM — it helps automate campaign development and reporting.
• Programmatic for many strategic accounts. This account-based marketing type supports upselling, cross-selling, and customer success. The approach relies on technology and tools like social listening, reverse IP lookup, and cookies, allowing a marketer to manage more accounts. This way, brands can reach hundreds of specific audience segments or groups of accounts.

Now that you know more about the types of this marketing approach, it’ll be easier for you to decide which one suits your business purpose. In the next section, we’ll clear up the difference between account-based marketing and traditional marketing to avoid any confusion that might arise when you hear these two terms.

marketing_traditional_marketing">Account-Based Marketing vs. Traditional Marketing

All the confusion around account-based and traditional marketing encouraged us to explain the key difference. Comparing them will help you navigate the two marketing approaches and determine which one is better for your advertising needs and preferences.

Account-based marketing is a strategy based on one-to-one communication with customers. Sales and marketing departments work hand-in-hand to provide highly targeted accounts with personalized experiences. In ABM, teams work on ensuring relevant content and offers. Unlike traditional marketing, ABM does not require you to reach as many customers as possible. ABM focuses on the individual needs of each prospect and addressing and solving their issues one-to-one, meaning that these marketers’ first order of business is to identify their target companies. Then, they develop personalized campaigns to provide each customer with a unique proposition.

Traditional marketing is a marketing approach that focuses on lead generation. With this strategy, marketers try to capture as many prospects and customers as possible via various channels — blog articles, guest blogging, link building, and ads help reach a wide audience. In traditional marketing, brands ask users who land on their sites to fill in a subscription form. Afterward, companies send automated email campaigns to all of their subscribers.

Now that the difference between these terms is clear, let’s discover how to leverage an ABM strategy for your business.

How do you implement an account-based marketing strategy?

Let’s walk you through the process of implementing an account-based marketing strategy so that you can nail it on the first try.

1. Single out the highly valuable accounts you want to target. Valuable accounts will bring your company the most profit, so you need to provide excellent service. Focus on your key accounts and their needs.
2. Analyze each of your target accounts. To implement ABM successfully, make sure to capture each customer’s pain points and needs and identify the stage of each account’s buyer journey.
3. Create personalized campaigns. Once you learn about each potential customer in detail, it’s time to create content to hook the attention of your target accounts. Develop personalized campaigns that will resonate with your key accounts’ needs.
4. Launch your customized campaigns. You can run your campaigns if the content you’ve created for each account is ready. Strive to solve customers’ issues and provide consistent experiences.
5. Evaluate the success of your campaigns. Use analytics to evaluate the performance of each campaign and gain insights into your strategy. Analyze the provided data to figure out what should and shouldn’t be done in the following campaigns.

Now that the strategy implementation process is clear, we will review some examples — perhaps they will inspire you to get started with ABM right away.

Examples of Account-Based Marketing Campaigns

ABM is a process that starts with identifying customer segments and developing personalized experiences for them. Luckily, there are plenty of ways to reach out to each account individually.

Paid advertising

Reaching out to potential customers via the internet is a must for every company. Since more and more people shop online, be ready to provide them with a consistent experience digitally. PPC ads and sponsored content are in trend now, and companies use social media to reach their target customers. For instance, you can reach out to your target accounts with the help of Facebook and LinkedIn. Other than that, IP targeting and retargeting can enable you to drive your key accounts' interest.

Email campaigns

4 billion email users make email marketing one of the most effective communication channels and a valuable source of customer acquisition. Companies use different platforms to schedule email send-outs and deliver the necessary content to their subscribers. To do it, make use of personalization, segmentation, and filters — SendPulse can help you with that. Its bulk email service allows you to personalize your emails and craft them based on customers’ needs and preferences.

Webinars

Webinars are educational events brands conduct online and are in high demand among online audiences. You can use them to provide high-value accounts with unique solutions to their problems. The goal of each webinar is to provide a solution to problems, so companies tailor their content based on what they know about their target accounts.

In a nutshell, account-based marketing is gaining popularity because of the benefits it brings to companies. Keeping in mind all the principles of this approach will help you successfully go through the long sales cycle of your B2B deals and close them.