Account Based Marketing (ABM) 101

(00:00) If you’ve been in the B2B marketing world for a while, you may have come across the term account based marketing or ABM. It may seem like the trendiest word on the block, but ABM is more than a fad with an expiry date. In fact, a survey has found that 97% of marketers said ABM creates a higher or much higher ROI than any other of their marketing initiatives.
(00:20) So what is this mysterious ABM and why should you care? Hi, guys, it’s Jack here from Neighbourhood, where we help brands find, sell and keep their people. Account based marketing, or ABM is a highly targeted, focused growth strategy that groups individual buyers with an organisation into an account as a market for one approach.
(00:45) ABM focuses marketing and sales forces with the goal of identifying specific prospects at a company and customises sales programmes and personalised campaigns to engage those specific individuals when put in place well and with intention, ABM creates a powerful channel and revenue predictability by allowing you to streamline your sales and marketing resources and deepen engagement with a select few group of stakeholders within an account.
(01:06) If you’re unsure whether or not your business should take on an ABM strategy, consider if one or more of the following are true to you. Your product is costly. You have a small number of prospects. You sell to buying committees. You want to increase your deal size. You want to align your sales and marketing teams for better collaborations, or you want to increase your sales velocity.
(01:29) An ABM approach offers companies many benefits, which include personalised marketing approach, instead of a generic approach. Marketers form personalised messaging for target accounts and tailoring the creative assets of their campaign to the customer’s specific attributes and needs. Sales and marketing alignment, normally, an ABM plan is first formalised in collaboration with marketing and sales teams.
(01:49) Together, teams choose a set of accounts to follow and work together to create marketing and sales strategies to attract and select accounts. Not only is this tactic a timesaver for marketing and sales, it ensures a consistent buying experience across all accounts. Shorter sales cycles, major purchase decisions involve multiple stakeholders.
(02:07) This typically slows down the sales process because it starts at a lower level in the organisation, and moves slowly towards the primary decision maker. In ABM because all prospects are nurtured at once, the length of the cycle is shortened. Clearer ROI. ABM is precise and measurable, providing the highest ROI of all B2B marketing tactics.
(02:27) In fact, 85% of marketers who measure ROI describe ABM as delivering higher returns than any other marketing approach. Fewer wasted resources. As time and resources are narrowly focussed on a small number of accounts that are most likely to close sales, resources that would have been wasted are freed up.
(02:46) If you’ve followed us for a while, you know that we at Neighbourhood are all about inbound marketing, so you might be surprised that we’re mentioning account based marketing. Don’t worry. Truth is, we see both marketing approaches as essential to your businesses growth. When it comes to inbound, many think it’s only about volume based marketing techniques that focus primarily on attracting as many users as possible.
(03:05) This is only one part of the whole story. Inbound is a business growth method achieved by building relationships with people and helping them reach their goals. And to do this, you have to think of your company as a flywheel. The flywheel model represents how marketing, sales and service offerings all have attract, engage and delight phases.
(03:23) The customers move through consistently. The goal is to ensure your customers have a consistently delightful experience. In ABM, you still have to attract, engage and delight stakeholders in the account that you’re targeting and the content marketing search engine optimisation tactics famously associated with inbound are key to making it happen.
(03:41) This means that rather than thinking that ABM is at odds with inbound, you need to build your ABM strategy on top of an inbound foundation. By doing so, you create a marketing strategy that goes beyond just lead generation but allows you to up sell and cross-sell to your select accounts as well. If you enjoy this video, be sure to subscribe and leave a like.
(04:01) And if you’re on YouTube, be sure to hit that bell, so you stay up to date with all of our latest videos delivered every week to your inbox. Since we’ve cleared that up, here are five steps to forming your own ABM and how to integrate some inbound goodness into the mix. First identify.
(04:20) First task is getting sales and marketing, identifying and selecting relevant accounts to help decide which accounts are your best targets, you can weigh up information like prospect industry, organisation size, employee numbers, location, annual revenue or if they’re existing clientele, how much did they contribute to your revenue? Moreover, check out accounts market influence, expected profit margin and likelihood of repeat purchase, then create.
(04:42) As said before, when it comes to larger businesses buying decisions are made collectively by numerous individuals within an organisation. ABM helps form relationships with each potential buyer and engages them in the purchase decision via kickass company specific, unique content that interests each buyer.
(04:59) No matter if your product is for marketers, operations leaders or anyone else, ensuring that you identify and engage with everyone in the buying decision is crucial to winning a customer. Once you know who you are targeting, you need to think about the challenges each of your stakeholders face in order to create compelling content.
(05:16) For instance, finance may be concerned with pricing, while operations might be focussed on user access, usability and security. With these factors in mind, you can create targeted content and interactions that match each individual’s concerns and challenges. Next engage.
(05:33) While content is all but essential, having the right channel to send that content through is equally vital. Figure out where your prospects are, what social or digital spaces they’re using to communicate. For example, if you know one stakeholder is a sucker for emails then equipping salespeople to reach out to that person with a helpful and relevant message via email can get a conversation started.
(05:51) This is also where that sweet, sweet marketing sales alignment comes into play. Working together, marketing and sales can help identify the various channels that their stakeholders are occupying and engage them with the right material. Then advocate. The advocate stage is all about nurturing relationships with a few key stakeholders you reckon would most avidly advocate your brand within their organisation.
(06:12) The modern buyer can tune out information they don’t want to hear. Up to both marketing and sales to provide value here while also promoting your brand at the right moment, at the right time. Next, evaluate and optimise. And last but not least, review your ABMs strategy so far, use data at the accounting level to see what worked, what didn’t, and determine what you could improve over time.
(06:33) So there you have it. Some insight into account based marketing, how it can benefit you and how to create an ABM strategy with inbound philosophy in the mix. Overall, IBM offers a meaningful and collaborative approach to marketing and sales. Moreover, what will really knock the ball out of the park in your ABM strategy is really investing in engaging and communicating with your account prospects in order to build invaluable relationships that will turn into sales.
(06:58) If you found this video helpful then feel free to share it with someone you know needs a hand with account based marketing. You can also subscribe to our blog where you’ll find a bunch more tools, tips and templates to help you Find Sell & Keep your people, just like Neighbourhood does. So that’s it from me.
(07:12) Happy marketing.