Marketing is an ever-evolving space. As things evolve, you need to adapt. It’s the same with marketing, more specifically B2B marketing. Just because something worked in the past doesn’t mean it will work today. It is why the modern B2B marketers and sales leaders are on a constant hunt for new, evolved growth tactics. The B2B account-based marketing is one such growth tactic. If you look at the traditional B2B marketing practice, it’s an expansive approach targeting a broad set of prospects for generating leads and consequently driving the revenue charts towards an upward trajectory. On the contrary, modern account-based marketing (ABM) takes a much more focused approach or growth strategy, as the marketing leaders like to call it.
The focus, though, for ABM primarily is on right leads, as opposed to more leads. The prospect-centric approach of ABM requires the marketing and sales function to work together, with growth being the sole objective. While there’s a widespread belief in the B2B marketing fraternity that account-based marketing predominantly is used by businesses chasing after accounts with high annual contractual value (ACV), the fact is, it can be tailored to suit any B2B model. In this post, we discuss how you can leverage account-based marketing to cultivate meaningful relationships with your prospects and consequently fuel your lead generation strategy.
Inbound marketing vs. account-based marketing
Excuse the heading for a little while. In no way, we are trying to establish that you should either focus on inbound marketing or ABM. In reality, they both are complementary to each other in many ways. While both the marketing approaches revolve around the fictional “persona” of your prospects, ABM goes one step further to find the real person behind that persona. The process to identify, target, and build a relationship with that person essentially is account-based marketing.
It is for this reason, why your targeting is of paramount importance in account-based marketing. Organizations need to make sure they have the key insights on their Targeted Accounts List (TAL). Here are some of the factors that you need to take into consideration when building your TAL:
- Previous relationship with your firm/competitor
- Previous purchase history
- Position of the account within your sales funnel
- Potential buyer information— like name, email, company name, job title, and so on
Let data drive your ABM
Data-driven marketing is not an alien concept as it once was in the B2B marketing space. Businesses are widely leveraging their customer data to boost their marketing efforts. However, just having customer data will do no good to your business. It is for this reason, why you need to mine your customer data for actionable insights. Using predictive analytics, AI, or machine learning, you can segregate your customer database based on social liking, buyer intent, industry, interests, and so on.
Each of those metrics puts you ahead of your prospect right from the beginning of your marketing campaign. You can now run programmatic campaigns, which not only will cater to the demographic of your prospect, but to what they are researching, what they like, and so on. Based on the data sets you have, you can even run multiple ABM campaigns (one-to-one, one-to-few, and one-to-many), allowing you to prioritize your lead generation strategy.
Use content syndication to diversify your ABM
It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that cold outreach is part of almost all account-based marketing campaigns. Knowingly or unknowingly, we are all guilty of it. And while it has delivered mixed results in the past, we wouldn’t recommend using it in the future. When you have such an advanced data analytics tool to help you compartmentalize your prospects, it’s only fair to use tactics like content syndication to capitalize on all that technology.
Simply put, content syndication is a process of distributing your content through different channels, making sure it reaches your audience. With content syndication, you get to combine the creative aspect of content marketing (creating great blogs, infographics, podcasts, and more) with a more proactive marketing tactic such as emails or even cold calling. Content syndication can have a significant return on investment (ROI) of your content and could fuel up your lead generation strategy.
Some of the more popular B2B Content Syndication methods are –
- Guest blogging
- PPC promotion on social media channels like Facebook and LinkedIn
- Joint whitepaper with your partner
- Joint webinar
- Starting a weekly podcast addressing your customers’ pain points
ABM is moving fast, and so should you
The world of account-based marketing is evolving fast. What works today might become obsolete tomorrow. And as a business, you must act promptly. While inbound marketing has been the go-to strategy to capture leads for long and is still going strong, the modern customers like a personalized, tailored approach. And ABM is an effective way of doing so for your valued prospects. A combination of inbound and ABM will give you a lot broader reach in your target market.
While the world of account-based marketing might look overwhelming with the amalgamation of content marketing, data analytics, and traditional marketing approaches, remember it’s a strategy – not just a tactic. It will need you to align the collaboration between your marketing and sales teams to see your dreams’ results. And finally, “personalization” is the key to a successful ABM model. Here’s our 5 step approach towards a successful ABM implementation program, for you.
