How Account-Based Marketing Can Benefit Your Business

In this day and age, marketing has gone far beyond simply raising brand awareness. There’s a wider focus on building and maintaining a relationship with your target audience—something traditional advertising mediums can’t always do effectively. Consumers expect engagement from their brands of choice—and vice versa. Many mainstream marketers make the mistake of focusing on the promotion of the product and its price. Account-based marketing has a different approach; it focuses entirely on people.

We’ll explore the intricacies and benefits of account-based marketing below.

Account-Based Marketing and Traditional Marketing

Before hiring an account-based marketing agency, you probably want to know what account-based marketing actually is. Basically, this is an approach to marketing that most religiously follows the old adage about the customers needing to come first for any business to succeed.

With that simple premise in mind, account-based marketing efforts focus on specific customers—or, the accounts—compared to the traditional product-centric marketing. In the days of yore, a company would use multiple advertising avenues to make a customer interested in the product and/or the wider company brand. Then, the potentially promising prospects would be singled out.

On the other hand, account-based marketing takes that process and turns it on its head. With ABM, a business begins their marketing efforts by singling out the most promising targets. Then, a much more personal approach is taken to market products or services to those specific accounts.

This can be an extremely effective growth strategy for a small business that can’t afford to spend huge amounts of money on their marketing budgets. For instance, there is no obsession with traffic generation to your website—out of thousands of people who visit, only a small percentage would turn out to be potential leads. With ABM, you won’t be crafting automated email campaigns that hope to appeal to the broadest possible target audience.

Account-based marketing can benefit your business by making it seem more organic and original; you see who your most promising targets are first, and then use your resources with a lot more precision.

The content you use in account-based marketing, regardless of the medium and format, is always very specifically tailored for individual accounts. That not only makes your customer feel wanted like never before, but the process also takes the chasing of cold leads out of the equation.

Of course, while ABM is a fresh perspective on marketing, it still uses many of the tools and processes you’d see in more conservative types of marketing. You still have to test your content and messaging, perform data segmentation, and sift through consumer insights. However, all of this is taken down to a ground-level approach.

Even if some prospects don’t convert to customers in the end, your brand has still gained value through sheer word of mouth. Every prospective lead who’s a target of ABM feels like they’re incredibly important to a company.

The Pros of Account-Based Marketing

There are plenty of ways account-based marketing can benefit your business. Unlike common digital marketing strategies that are popular these days, this type of marketing is extremely well-suited for B2B marketing. That’s only logical, as B2B marketers generally deal with a smaller number of higher-value clients compared to the mass-media B2C approach.

Keeping that in mind, many estimates claim account-based marketing provides the biggest return on investment in comparison to all other B2B marketing techniques. This cost-effectiveness comes from the fact that waste reduction is another crucial trait of ABM. Seeing as precise targeting is performed before you deploy the first step in your sales funnel, resource waste is cut down to a bare minimum; you’ll have far fewer missed leads.

Furthermore, the management and tracking of the results of account-based marketing campaigns are easier than with any other marketing strategy. Again, this is due to the small number of accounts that can easily be dissected in huge detail.

ABM Is Not That New

While new digital marketing technologies are constantly transforming modern businesses and changing the landscape in every niche, many business owners are still wary of marketing strategies they’re not familiar with or they don’t wholly understand.

On that note, we must point out that account-based marketing is not that nascent. In fact, the strategy has only recently come into the forefront of B2B marketing—but it’s been in existence for more than 10 years. And even before the term itself was coined to describe that specific kind of approach to marketing, companies dealing with high-value transactions and clients have long used that technique to avoid spending resources on prospects that aren’t lucrative or viable.

On that note, we should also discuss the misconception that ABM is a marketing technique solely used for netting huge accounts. Certainly, ABM shines through the best when it comes to a smaller number of prospects that promise a heftier payday. However, much like all other successful marketing strategies, ABM is prone to scaling. You won’t hurt your earning potential by increasing the number of prospects that you’re targeting—if you do it the right way.

As you might have gathered already, ABM leans on hypertargeting tactics quite a lot. Targeting is obviously crucial because the best approach to ABM in the beginning is to avoid starting big. A majority of companies that heavily rely on ABM don’t start using this kind of marketing strategy with more than a hundred prospects. This first set of interactions with a smaller number of prospects will provide you with the insights needed to branch out and expand.

Conclusion

Account-based marketing is hugely beneficial to any B2B-oriented business because it allows companies to form personal connections with high-value prospects. This results in a bigger return on investment compared to more traditional approaches.