Account-Based Marketing (ABM): All You Have To Know

Digital marketing is huge and dynamic. For this reason, even the latest professionals in the market may not be aware of the unconventional strategy — but it’s still important, Account-Based Marketing (ABM).

Although the concept is gaining popularity among companies because of its efficiency, some companies still don’t know the strategy. In this way, they may miss the opportunity to benefit from this approach.

If the subject catches your eye, continue reading. This post will explain what ABM is, its advantages, and how to put it into practice in your company.

What is Account-Based Marketing (ABM)?

Account-based marketing or account-based marketing, in its translation, is a marketing and sales strategy with a personalized approach. Instead of using techniques that capture a broad range of prospects, there is a directing of action and effort to a specific account.

Therefore, ABM aims to select a list of leads based on personas — the company’s ideal customer profile — to increase sales conversion opportunities. That’s because, by focusing on the account, comes the opportunity to demonstrate the true value of a brand based on customer realities.

How Does Account-Based Marketing (ABM) Work?

Now that you know what ABM is, you should learn how it works. In practice, you choose the company or person you want to have as a customer, for example, and focus on designing a marketing campaign aimed at them. For this reason, personalization is the keyword in this approach.

Therefore, all communications and content produced to capture prospects are based on the persona’s needs. Knowing this, you may be interested in understanding the difference between account-based marketing and inbound marketing.

While the former is aimed at quality, the latter also focuses on volume. On the other hand, in inbound, there is an effort to attract as many leads as possible and then select prospects who are genuinely interested in the business.

At AMB, the strategy is tailored to attract selected prospects compatible with your company. For that, you need to invest more time and money. On the other hand, the return on investment is greater when successful.

As a result, this approach tends to be more suitable for B2B companies, although it can also be adapted to businesses with a B2C focus. After all, this type of business involves more people in purchasing decisions and has higher tickets.

What are the Advantages of Account-Based Marketing (ABM)?

By better understanding what ABM is and how it works, you’ve seen that this strategy may suit companies that offer more complex products and services. However, it is interesting to know the advantages of this approach. Follow up!

Better use of resources

Despite the higher costs of AMB, the investment tends to be better spent, minimizing loss of resources. The marketing team can become more efficient, directing resources towards campaigns with a greater chance of converting sales.

Better quality and increased sales

Focusing on a specific account makes the marketing team’s content production more in tune with the target audience. Therefore, the strategy increases the chances of attracting the desired customer.

At the same time, the quality of the prospects captured has also improved. As a result, it is possible to see increased sales opportunities.

How to start using ABM in your company?

Now that you know what ABM is and what it’s good for, it’s interesting to know how to get started with strategy in your company. Check out the main tips:

Determine the desired persona and account

First, you must define your business persona. Having this ideal customer profile is the basis for identifying target accounts. To find personas, it’s important to look for real data from your customers who are most involved with your solution.

For example, when focusing on the company as the ideal customer, collect information such as:

• – operating segment;
• – Number of employees;
• – office;
• – income;
• – company location.

From this data, you can select an account for the ABM strategy. You can find them in your current lead base or by contracting these types of services with other specialized organizations.

Search target account

Once you’ve identified your target personas and accounts, it’s time to start doing in-depth research on these customers. If the list of accounts is very extensive, it’s interesting that you set up companies with similar characteristics — such as areas of operation.

Due to the resources required for research, it may be interesting to start the strategy piecemeal, implementing AMB with greater customization. Thus, it is possible to identify the difficulties and needs of the account more effectively to develop campaigns that lead to greater engagement.

Set goals and indicators

To understand whether AMB is on the right track, setting goals and key performance indicators is important. Through them, you will have the parameters to understand whether the action produces positive results or identify points for improvement.

Plan actions and campaigns

The next step is to plan personalized actions and campaigns to attract accounts, engage them, and start your company’s relationship with them. Therefore, it is necessary to know these companies to produce personalized content for them.

In addition to content, it’s important to define channels for personalized strategies, such as email marketing, events, programmatic media, remarketing campaigns, and more.

Remember that building trust is critical in complex and high ticket sales. So don’t forget this when designing a campaign whose goal is relationships.

track Account-Based Marketing (ABM) performance

An often overlooked step is tracking results. But this is a mistake when it comes to the success of any strategy. Constant analysis of campaign performance makes it possible to find bottlenecks in the process and develop solutions for them.

In addition, this is a good opportunity to generate insight into remedial measures that can be implemented. For example, it is at this stage that objectives and indicators can be used.

Finally, be sure to measure results and document the entire process. After all, even if ABM is customized, it can be reproduced and automated within certain limits.

As you can see, account-based marketing is a strategy that focuses on customizing campaigns to reach the desired customers. Thus, it allows the marketing team to be more precise in their actions, increasing the conversion of leads into customers.