A common misconception among B2B marketers is that marketing automation is all you need to do account-based marketing (ABM).
In reality, marketing automation platforms (MAPs) weren’t designed with an account-first approach in mind. Still, they are an important part of the ABM ecosystem, and many marketing automation providers are starting to release new features that take ABM into consideration.
So, what makes marketing automation great for ABM — and what gaps can digital advertising fill?
Marketing automation provides the engine to collect information about an individual’s engagement with your website and is the primary source for managing landing pages and email campaigns, two key channels used in ABM. Many marketing automation platforms also provide social media, blogging, and lead scoring capabilities. However, marketing automation is reactive, limiting your audience to identified prospects — in other words, individuals who have opted in to your communications.
That’s why B2B companies are turning to industry-leading ABM platforms like Terminus, which allows sales and marketing teams to proactively engage the entire buying committee at best-fit accounts using targeted advertising. Unlike marketing automation and traditional digital advertising, Terminus enables you to target people who aren’t in your database and who haven’t visited your website.
Let’s say you want to sell to a highly coveted company like Amazon. If you wait around for someone from their corporate office to fill out a form on your website, you’ll be waiting forever. If someone from your sales development team hustles hard enough, they might be able to get someone from Amazon on the phone. But if that phone call doesn’t result in a meeting, you’re back to square one. Sure, maybe you’ll get one or two Amazon employees to opt in to your mailing list, but even the best email nurture strategy and SDR outreach are unlikely to turn a company like Amazon into a sales opportunity.
That’s where account-based marketing tools like Terminus come in. Let’s take a look at how B2B marketing automation and account-based advertising work together.
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Benefits of Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is a powerful tool that, along with your CRM, functions as the backbone to an account-based marketing program.
By integrating your MAP with your CRM and selecting complementary ABM tools, you can have a comprehensive single source of truth for your sales and marketing teams.
TIP: Check out the Terminus Cloud for Account-Based Marketing to discover the best account-based marketing software that integrates with Salesforce’s CRM.
Marketing automation platforms provide a wealth of benefits, allowing you to:
- Capture contact information from inbound activities like content downloads.
- Engage contacts through email campaigns and other automated activities to generate demand.
- Integrate your MAP with other marketing technology. Marketing automation integrates with your CRM and other software applications to help you create multichannel marketing campaigns.
How Account-Based Digital Advertising Enhances MAPs
While marketing automation is a great foundation for account-based marketing, you need supplemental tools to engage your audience on multiple channels and expand your reach to additional contacts at your target accounts.
Terminus account-based advertising will take your ABM program to the next level by allowing you to:
- Be proactive. Go beyond one contact or lead to expand reach into the account helping to engage the entire buying committee.
- Engage net-new contacts. Reach contacts through a new channel, digital advertising, by surrounding them with your message even if they aren’t yet in your database.
- Close the loop on your marketing campaigns. Prospects can click on a digital ad, driving them to a landing page from your MAP, and the account engagement data will flow back into your CRM for full-funnel reporting.
Build a Best-in-Class ABM Tech Stack with Terminus + Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is essential for B2B marketers, but MAPs alone can’t do ABM. Adding Terminus into your existing MarTech stack allows you to do ABM at scale.
With Terminus’ hypertargeted display, mobile, video, and social media ads, you can proactively reach the right people at the right companies as part of a multichannel account-based marketing program. Schedule a time to see Terminus ABM in action.
