B2B marketers use content marketing as one of the primary demand creation techniques. According to a recent eMarketer study, marketers create content mainly to increase sales, among other key marketing goals.
For B2C marketing, creating and delivering content to your target audience on significant platforms is effective; however, it might fall short when meeting B2B marketing objectives. Because you are ultimately targeting a business rather than specific employees, your content should be relevant to all essential players along with the consumer experience. Account-based marketing (ABM) is what helps B2B companies solve this problem.
B2B marketing aims to contribute significantly to revenue. Account-based marketing (ABM), too many, is a focused and scalable way to build the sales funnel that allows marketing teams to align with B2B companies’ financial objectives and growth ambitions.
ABM is a technique for systematically engaging your most potential prospects. Many people often misconstrue it as solely a one-on-one strategy, which undervalues its effectiveness. It might be argued that this is not a marketing strategy, but rather a strategy for establishing a revenue-impact marketing function.
What is Account-Based Marketing, and how does it work?
Account-based marketing is a marketing approach that focuses on the success of the whole customer experience, both before and after the transaction. It is easier to grasp the difference by comparing it to conventional inbound marketing. Inbound marketing entails directing the bulk of a budget’s resources and creating leads via attractive offerings. It emphasizes large driving quantities of relevant traffic to a landing page, where just 1-2 percent of visitors will convert into paying clients.
Instead, ABM devotes more time, money, and effort to various customer journey phases, such as lead generation, acquisition, aftersales, and success. Businesses that use account-based marketing invest more in accounts with higher potential for converting rather than a bit of money on a broad range of leads that are unlikely to convert into sales. They also use methods that enable them to form long-term relationships with their customers, which leads to additional sales possibilities and higher customer lifetime value.
Account-based marketing may be a powerful tool for achieving company objectives but wasn’t always a choice before now. Businesses must utilize large quantities of relevant behavioral and business data that were just not accessible five to ten years ago to find the appropriate accounts and successfully target them. To effectively decide which accounts to target, you will need access to high-quality data sources and analyze all relevant data.
How to scale ABM
Personalization — providing personalized messaging, offers, and value to a particular audience with a distinct business need – is the fundamental principle of account-based marketing. ABM was first used to target a limited number of top customers, with each account getting a tailored marketing campaign. ABM can now be done among groups of accounts and personas with similar business issues. When you conceive ABM in this light, it provides the perfect balance of customization and scalability, allowing demand generation-focused offers to outperform conventional digital marketing in terms of reaction and engagement.
Consider ABM and sales when creating lists.
The account target list is the bedrock of scalable ABM. Without a thorough knowledge of your total addressable market (TAM) and serviceable addressable market (SAM), it is impossible to implement an ABM strategy. TAM and SAM both aid in identifying ideal prospect qualities and creating a list of target accounts that fit those profiles. This account list is where ABM may be used by marketing and sales. Additional personal information of the main primary buyers and influencers in each specified accounts may then be added to an individual contact list.
List building should be a collaborative effort between marketing and sales since ABM directs marketing on preparing the path for revenue-generating sales results. They will target specific accounts that both parties believe are the best fit for your solution.
Focus ABM objectives around consumer pain points
When the marketing and sales team have agreed on which accounts to target, the net step is to divide them into “targeting clusters,” which are segregated groups built around particular business pain points or problems that your product or service effectively addresses. You can map pain points to sectors, regions, current technological footprints, or recent major events like a merger. B2B marketers may use these targeting clusters to provide customized content and offers that strike the right chord and result in more conversions.
Group ABM targets around pipeline phases
It is also possible to group accounts based on their position in the pipeline. While you may be putting in more work to get pipeline accounts to the final decision, this also enables you to customize your methods of managing unengaged accounts, nurturing new leads, converting pipeline accounts to customers, and growing current customers via cross-selling/up-sell possibilities.
Considering a disparity between the respondents and the desired client profile can cause the drop-off between website leads and leads converted to sales to be as high as 90% for certain companies, this comprehensive targeting approach becomes a major B2B marketing tool in boosting the rate of conversion. The quality of responses and leads improves substantially when marketing works within the limits of these lists. You may move from marketing to everyone to revenue-impacting ABM by using messaging and offers targeted to particular pain areas and paying attention to account clusters.
How the components of ABM align for effectiveness
Building a solid structure for your list is important, but that is just the starting point. You will need the appropriate combination of ABM components to build a long-term ABM engine that amplifies demand generation efforts and generates revenue goals.
Build and deploy ABM campaigns
You will need content to market after creating and clustering the list. Begin with ones that present the least hassle, such as bigger clusters or places where you already have material that might be readily changed or repackaged (commonly referred to as content atomization) to address the cluster’s specific pain points.
Content items like whitepapers and eBooks may offer the greatest value if your cluster is a top-of-funnel (unengaged) audience. A case study or webinar recording may be used to engage a mid-funnel (engaged) audience. For clusters at the C-level, consider an infographic or a bite-sized piece of information. You need to tailor your message and the kind of content for each cluster.
If you are worried about overusing email, do not be. Email is still a viable strategy for new-age ABM, regardless of the channels’ maturity. Emails can penetrate inbox congestion if you can customize them to the prospect’s pain points and personalizing to the cluster.
Consider the advertising channels that are the most optimal way to reach your target audience. You can promote to a particular list and just that list using audience-based advertising, accessible on numerous social media platforms, including LinkedIn. Instead of a set of criteria, prioritize advertising channels that enable you to specify the list of accounts and/or contacts to advertise to.
Finally, you will need a foundational CRM to handle effective lead routing and lead scoring and allow the marketing team to transfer engaged accounts and contacts to sales for follow-up and help sales nurture and accelerate these prospects and provide details of the pipeline and revenue contribution from those combined efforts.
Use content syndication and intent data to improve and expand your ABM.
When you have shown initial impact and confirmed that your clusters appreciate the focused message, you can improve the quality of your previous approaches by experimenting with various message angles and segments in your email and ad campaigns to discover what works best. Alternatively, you can expand your content library and atomize it by asset type (including eBooks, webinars, blogs, 1-pagers) and message (which includes cluster, persona, or buyer journey stage).
Now, you are set to include some intent data and content syndication. Unlike conventional sponsored marketing methods, content syndication may concentrate only on your clusters, guaranteeing that only people on your target list are reached. First-party intent technologies may help you figure out which accounts and contacts are engaging with your brand and digital assets anonymously. Third-party intent technologies let you determine whose accounts and contacts are engaging with the content themes you sponsor on other companies and websites. Many content syndication platforms now allow advertisers to rank ads based on their intent levels.
Optimize and grow your business by using specialist ABM technologies and reporting
ABM systems that are operated effectively allows a self-funded marketing budget. Early initiatives provide revenue increases, which allows for greater marketing expenditure to boost impact. After establishing a successful baseline ABM engine, you can speed things up even more by using ABM-specific martech platforms to integrate all of these methods, automate additional ABM activities at scale, and improve reporting granularity.
Final note
Although not all B2B businesses are ready for ABM platforms and specialized tools right once, the implementation allows for more successful and responsible ABM. They may help show the link between marketing effort, pipeline creation, and faster revenue at an advanced level with strong reporting and analytics.