What sales or marketing professional doesn’t understand the importance of nurturing leads? Anyone with experience knows that the days of a quick close are long gone. Modern marketing and sales is about trust and connection – and that always takes time. The modern consumer spends plenty of their own time researching their options. They’re not willing to part with their hard-earned cash without first feeling comfortable that they’re making the right purchase decision.

If you’ve read any of our previous blogs and the statistics within them, you know that direct mail marketing is back and here to stay. Many marketers are already reaping the incredible ROI of modern direct mail. But with higher upfront costs, direct mail can stand be even more lucrative (couldn’t any marketing effort?). So the question is: how can you help it perform even better?

In an age when we get correspondence anywhere and everywhere, email has become the fastest, least expensive, and most wide-reaching marketing channel. In the opinions of many marketers, across all industries, email is the medium of choice. Once thought for dead, direct mail marketing has made a dramatic comeback – and in some minds, surpassed the effectiveness of email marketing.

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.

Consumers hardly make purchases on a whim. Especially for bigger purchases, they undergo a multi-step decision process – a process called the Buyer’s Journey. People advance through stages of decision making by conducting research and considering their options before ultimately choosing the best product for their unique situation and budget.

As a marketer, you’re constantly looking for new and innovative ways to bolster your lead generation efforts. And you should be looking to help your sales team turn more of those leads into new business, too. Over the past couple of years, account-based marketing has become increasingly popular. With a laser focus on specific target audiences, ABM (as it’s also known) has helped many marketers increase their leads and close more business. What is account-based marketing, exactly?