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5 Lucrative Benefits of Account-Based Marketing Blog Feature
Skye Snayd

By: Skye Snayd on August 24th, 2017

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5 Lucrative Benefits of Account-Based Marketing

Personalization at Scale

In an effort to attract as much business as possible, marketers often try to run campaigns that cast a very wide net. Their hopes are to appeal to as many prospects within their target market as possible. But especially for B2B marketers, this “strategy” is rarely effective.

Rather than throwing the proverbial kitchen sink at anyone and everyone, the smartest businesses concentrate their sales and marketing resources on specific, lucrative accounts. This is called account-based marketing, or ABM, for short.

ABM is a strategic approach with which you cater your marketing message to the specific attributes and needs of the account you’re targeting, hence the name.

What is Account-Based Marketing?

With account-based marketing, marketers use their resources to attract and nurture a defined set of targeted accounts. With the most valuable prospects identified, marketers create and run personalized campaigns tailored to each individual. Each account is treated as its own market.

ABM has been most successful within B2B marketing because it’s geared toward marketing very specific or customized services to specific clients with specific needs. Specificity is key. That being said, ABM can work in B2C industries – but more often than not, business in these lines of work tend to sell pretty uniform products.

So why should you start using ABM? The following are the five greatest benefits of ABM.

Learn how hyper-personalized direct mail converts offline prospects to online customers: 

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1) Thrive in This Era of Personalization

A whopping 75% of B2B customers prefer offers that are tailored to their individual needs and goals. This is why many traditional advertising channels haven’t had the same success and value as email marketing – one of the better sources for qualified leads. It’s also why personalized outbound marketing efforts like direct mail have returned increasingly substantial ROI in recent years. In fact, the response rate of direct mail is exponentially greater than even email.

Using direct mail as a part of your ABM strategy is a great way to implement hyper-personalization. With direct mail personalization tools, you can tailor your efforts to each unique prospect.

Because ABM is implemented with the needs of a specific target prospects in mind, it takes a significant amount of persona research. It’s the basis of the effectiveness of personalization. Many prospects recognize when you’ve done your homework to pique their interest – and they often appreciate it.

2) Make the Most of Your Marketing Budget

On the surface, it may seem that account-based marketing isn’t the most scalable strategy. But ABM allows B2B marketers to do twice as much with half the effort.

Rather than hiring new account managers to attract more business, a sound ABM strategy helps current managers target, market, convert, and sell to a much greater number of qualified leads. It also helps you keep your pipeline full, helping you replace any lost clients with prospects who are far more likely to become clients or customers.

You can also use different ABM strategies to amplify your efficiency.

60% of the buyer’s journey occurs before a prospect even talks to your sales team. So why would you waste your time trying to sell to a prospect not ready to talk? With automated marketing efforts, you can tailor a strategy to nurture specific accounts until they’re ready to talk. And that includes direct mail.

Eliminating the efforts once wasted on selling prospects not yet at the consideration or decision stage, you’ll save your account managers a ton of time, helping them focus on accounts actually looking for their help.

3) A Clear and Significant Boost to Your ROI

With personalized strategies and a better use of your time and resources, ABM helps you maximize your ROI.

ITSMA’s Account-Based Marketing Survey found that ABM delivers the highest ROI of any other B2B strategy or tactic. The Alterra Group also discovered that 65% of B2B marketers felt that ABM provided significant benefits for attracting new clients.

The precision of ABM allows B2B marketers to more accurately personalize their efforts. And that’s also showed in the response rates of prospects. SiriusDecisions showed that account-based marketing yields response rates of 47%. They also found that ABM increases:

  • Online activity
  • The number of new contacts
  • Overall marketing engagement

4) Take Advantage of Tangible Metrics and Analytics

When you analyze a campaign’s effectiveness, you need metrics at all stages of your cycle. And it’s easier to draw more accurate conclusions with account-based marketing campaigns.

With a smaller set of targeted accounts, you can spend more time assessing each aspect of your efforts – especially on an account-by-account basis. Certain efforts will resonate better with some prospects, and not as much for others. When you can identify the kinds of content or mediums that are working more effectively for a prospect, you’re equipped to adjust your efforts moving forward.

And with well-documented plans for each of your accounts, you can easily compare each segment to your goals at the end of the quarter.

5) Smarketing Maximizes Your Effectiveness and Efficiency

An ABM strategy isn’t without dependence on your sales team – just like any marketing approach. When your marketing and sales teams are aligned, they have the same prospect knowledge and speak the same language.

ABM requires that your sales and marketing teams coordinate to identify the best accounts to target – which prospects are most likely to sign the dotted line, and which are most likely to spend the most on your products or services.

When working together, as a unified “smarketing” team, you can better predict how your marketing and sales efforts will resonate. And with collaboration from both parties, you’ll optimize your company’s resources – including your time, money, and sweat equity.

ABM: Best-Suited for the Golden Age of Personalization

There are millions of marketers who find comfort in marketing to the broadest group of prospects. But there are hardly two prospects with the exact same needs and interests, especially within B2B industries.

While this approach may seem easiest, it’s far from optimal. Rather than spinning your wheels in hopes of attracting leads with a general message, take advantage of account-based marketing. ABM doesn’t have to be the sole strategy you use, either. You can still run broader campaigns while investing more into your most fruitful accounts.

Either way, you want to personalize your efforts to engage your prospects. And we have a guide to help.

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