It’s so frustrating when you know that your content has done its job brilliantly – persuading an individual that their organisation should invest in your goods or services – and yet still you don’t get their business.
This happens when the individual can’t convince the rest of the decision-makers in their business to invest in your offerings.
The solution is to target ALL the decision-makers within an enterprise with your content, so that you don’t have to rely on individuals to make the case for your business. That’s account-based marketing (ABM).
ABM involves identifying specific companies that you want as customers – then trying to engage all of the individuals within that enterprise, so that when it comes to making a case for a new supplier, they are all in agreement that they would be best
served by your business.
Accent Technologies sums up AMB rather nicely:
“Essentially, ABM focuses on creating content and strategies that are hyper-focused to be relevant and engaging to specific companies that you believe would be ideal customers.”
Or, as ITSMA puts it: “Treating individual accounts as a market in their own right.”
Got it?
Drawbacks of ABM
You would be forgiven for immediately thinking about the potential drawbacks of ABM – most obviously, putting all your eggs in one basket. If you concentrate on a few key accounts, which don’t go anywhere, you have nothing to show for your investment.
Then there’s the missed opportunities – those prospects that were keen, but dropped their interest in your business when you stopped marketing to them.
Also, ABM requires you to be ultra-targeted with your marketing messages – if you sway slightly and misjudge your readers’ needs, there’s a chance nobody will engage with your content. At least in more widespread marketing campaigns somebody will engage with your content.
Benefits of ABM
However, most marketers seem to agree that the pros of ABM fair outweigh the cons. According to a survey from last year by SiriusDecisions, 92% of companies recognise the value in ABM, going as far as calling it a B2B marketing must-have.
On that basis, 60% of organisations said they plan to invest in technology for ABM to better align sales and marketing in the near future.
Which brings us nicely on to the first obvious benefit of ABM: it acts as a platform for sales and marketing teams to work together to win deals through consistent and targeted messaging.
It won’t be long before all businesses have combined sales and marketing departments, if trends are anything to go by.
Having both departments deicide upon which accounts to go after stands you in better stead for enjoying some success with your ABM efforts. Focussing on companies that the sales department has already qualified as good opportunities should, in theory, mean the odds of marketing-based leads becoming sales-qualified leads increase significantly.
A third and final benefit (although we’re only just grazing the surfacing here) is that you will do away with that horrible, generic content that gets churned out to ‘keep the flow of content going’.
ABM doesn’t allow it. If you’re going after an account, content has to be highly individualised, which requires you going deep into the data that’s available on your target company.
However, discussion on the technical make-up of ABM is for another day. Our aim here was to pique your interest in AMB and to point out the tremendous results that are possible by focusing on attracting, engaging, converting and measuring the accounts that are most likely to buy.
Who are your ‘dream’ clients?