In our first post in our Account-based Marketing 101 series, we discussed some of the basics of account-based marketing, including the history of ABM and how it works. However, that still doesn’t answer the following question: why is implementing an ABM strategy beneficial to your business?
The major benefits of account-based marketing can be boiled down to four main categories: a more focused sales and marketing strategy, a better customer experience, an improved sales-marketing relationship, and, of course, more revenue. Let’s take a look at each of these in more detail.
- A Focused Sales and Marketing Strategy
As we discussed in our previous post in this series, an account-based marketing strategy starts by identifying a set of target accounts that your sales team would like to penetrate, and developing personalized messaging and creative to reach them.
Instead of starting with a list of channels to run your marketing campaigns on — which may or may not reach your target audience — an account-based marketing strategy allows you to focus in on the precise accounts that you would like to target. This hyper-targeting increases the effectiveness of your marketing messages without increasing the resources needed to run more targeted campaigns.
[Tweet “An #ABM strategy allows you to focus on the precise accounts you would like to target.”]
- A More Tightly Aligned Sales and Marketing Team
Before you can begin targeting your account-based marketing campaigns, a conversation needs to occur between sales and marketing to identify those target accounts (more on this in our next blog post in the series!). This allows marketing to have a better understanding of sales’ goals, and reinforces marketing’s position as an important part of the selling process in the eyes of the sales team.
When marketing is running programs on the account level, sales sees that marketing can deliver on their target accounts. This can help patch up tensions that the two teams may have experienced over lead quality, while simultaneously bolstering marketing and sales effectiveness.
[Tweet “Use #ABM to drive critical #Marketing and #Sales alignment in your company.”]
- A Better Customer Experience
At the most basic level, account-based marketing is all about the customer. In a time when B2B buyers are craving more personalized selling experiences, ABM has risen to the forefront of marketing strategies as a way to improve the relevancy of sales and marketing messages. Buyers are no longer looking for a sales call or a marketing email to kick of their research process.
What they do want is relevant outreach that’s personalized to meet their needs — which is exactly what ABM offers. Using targeted advertising, marketers can reach their buyers in an unobtrusive way on the channels that their buyers are already using, so that buyers can choose to engage with marketing messaging on their terms, not on the companies’.
[Tweet “77 percent of #B2B marketers believe real-time personalization is crucial. — @CMO_com”]
By using account-based marketing and advertising to reach target sales accounts, marketing is setting sales up for more successful conversations with their buyers down the line. By the time sales is reaching out to target accounts, buyers have already been exposed to their company’s messaging.
This speeds up the sales process by cutting down on unnecessary sales introductions and sets the stage for a more personalized buying experience, increasing the likelihood that a lead will turn into a closed deal. Not only that, but ABM ensures that you’re focusing on the right leads from the start, so time and money aren’t wasted chasing down dead-ends.
Ready to start putting account-based marketing into action? Our next post will discuss how sales and marketing can put a process in place to start targeting key accounts.
