Account-Based Marketing 101: ABM Strategy, ABM Campaigns, Advantages & Pitfalls

13th Nov 2018 –
Let’s understand some better…
So here’s a primer on account-based marketing to help you understand what it is, how it’s done, if you should do it, and the tools you’ll need.
Pipeline acceleration: Because account-based marketing engages a bunch of decision makers in an account simultaneously, the speed at which accounts move forward in the sales cycle increases significantly.
DocuSign — Boosting sales pipeline by 22% with ABM

What is Account-Based Marketing?

Ultimately, you’ll measure the number of the Trial/Demo requests you could generate and the resulting revenue and ROI from your account-based marketing campaigns.

In this step, you also need to learn as much as you can about all these accounts. This is also called as account “coverage.”

These leads are then passed on to the sales team, and the work of the sales team begins.
Results:
After you’ve identified these “target” accounts, you focus all your sales and marketing efforts on winning some percent of these 100 companies.
For analyzing your account-based marketing campaigns, you can use an end-to-end account-based marketing solution like Terminus, Engagio, or DemandBase.
Resource-intensive: According to the ABM Benchmark Survey Report, 35% of marketers interested in ABM do not take the first step because of the lack of internal resources and budget.
If you can’t create a complete account-based marketing program right away (because of budget constraints or limited resources), you should still offer your key target accounts with personalized website experiences.
Now, you might think you already do all this as part of your inbound marketing process…
Once you’ve stopped your account-based marketing campaign — for example, when you’ve reached your campaign’s target like converting, say, 20% of your target accounts into opportunities — it’s time to analyze its performance.
ICT services provider, O2 used ABM to boost its brand awareness and break into C-level audiences of its enterprise-level targets.
O2 — Winning 325% of the target business
All these actions create a series of touchpoints between your company and the contacts from the target account.
Here, you’re basically gathering intelligence about how to target these accounts at the industry-, company-, and decision-making levels. So you need to follow their industry news, market dynamics, growth drivers, competitors, etc.
Here, you’re basically gathering intelligence about how to target these accounts at the industry-, company-, and decision-making levels. So you need to follow their industry news, market dynamics, growth drivers, competitors, etc.
Instead, they begin with narrowly scoped “pilot” programs. It’s only when their pilot programs succeed that they roll out full-blown ABM systems.
You get the idea, right?
92% of B2B marketers find account-based marketing (or ABM) “extremely important in their overall marketing efforts.“
As you can tell, just setting up an infrastructure for account-based marketing is very expensive. You need tools and custom development and integrations, and whatnot.
eSignature transaction management solution provider, DocuSign used ABM to market to targeted accounts across six different industries.
In the second step of account-based marketing, you need to identify the right contacts from each account you’ll be targeting.

3 Inspiring Account-Based Marketing Examples

Features like identifying a company with IP detection, serving AI enhanced personalization that fits your website to a T and results in native experiences and a lot more are on the horizon.
In addition to this high-level data, you must also learn about would could convince the CEO to work with you (if the CEO decides) or what would your best approach be to target the CIO (if the CIO, too, is involved in the buying decision) and so on.
Well, it means that in account-based marketing, you select a few companies, say a 100 companies, who are the “ideal” or most profitable customers you could ever have.
While these benefits make a very convincing case for trying account-based marketing, a few cons clamp it down:
For running your account-based marketing campaigns, you need a bunch of tools such as:
Enterprise agile management software provider, VersionOne used AMB to 2X its sales opportunities. It switched from solely pursuing inbound marketing to ABM because it couldn’t “outspend” its competitors in the inbound game.
Enterprise agile management software provider, VersionOne used AMB to 2X its sales opportunities. It switched from solely pursuing inbound marketing to ABM because it couldn’t “outspend” its competitors in the inbound game.
Enterprise agile management software provider, VersionOne used AMB to 2X its sales opportunities. It switched from solely pursuing inbound marketing to ABM because it couldn’t “outspend” its competitors in the inbound game.
Costly: Even basic account-based marketing needs a decent tech stack (like a sophisticated CRM, a robust marketing automation system, a complex integrations engine and more). You also need to spend a good deal of money to buy data for fueling your drive and for running advertising campaigns.
Sales/marketing alignment: Account-based marketing gets the sales and marketing people of a company to make “orchestrated” efforts toward winning business. When these two teams work in sync, businesses perform much better.

Setting up a Pilot Program

If you’ve a small sales team with just a few “selling hours’ with each resource, you might not be able to put in the level of effort meaningful account-based marketing needs.
New contacts to enter your sales funnel: This metric shows how well you could break into the decision-making circle of your target account.
Once you’ve created your ideal customer profile, use these four data points (as recommended by ABM solution Engagio) to find the accounts that match your ICP:
Results:
So to really get account-based marketing, you should know how it differs from inbound or traditional marketing.

Wrapping It Up …The Future Beckons

You might also try advanced AI-powered tools to run your ABM. AI-based tools won’t just help you identify your target accounts but can also tell you which account to approach first. They can also help with more precise account profiling and intent monitoring and tons of other things. These inputs can dramatically improve your campaign’s performance.
Let’s now see how sales and marketing teams actually do account-based marketing.
But sometimes ABM becomes its own victim too. Quite a few ABM campaigns aren’t planned or executed right resulting in a huge loss of time, efforts, and resources.
In traditional inbound marketing, marketers use channels like SEO, content, social media, pay-per-click and more to bring a LOT of “relevant” traffic to a website.
Accounts targeted (till 2017): 40
You might also consider working with a data vendor like LeadGenius to support your account selection efforts.