Over the past 12 months, one of the hottest buzzwords in the B2B marketing space has been Account-Based Marketing (ABM). While there’s a lot of debate about what the term actually includes, the consensus is that ABM is a strategic approach to marketing in which marketing and sales coordinate joint efforts to focus on a handful of major accounts.
According to the latest data from DemandBase, 96 percent of B2B marketers report that an Account-Based Marketing (ABM) strategy helps to drive positive ROI in their marketing efforts. If you haven’t already embraced ABM, there are three very good reasons why ABM makes sense:
(1) It’s easier to target specific accounts, rather than wasting time pursuing a large number of leads;
(2) It helps organizations deepen their relationships with accounts, turning them into “strategic accounts”;
(3) It requires the coordination of sales and marketing, which means a much more seamless and integrated sales and marketing cycle.
In many ways, ABM represents the triumph of quality over quantity. You can think of it this way – instead of trying to figure out ways to get hundreds, or maybe thousands, of leads into your sales funnel, you only have to worry about targeting the highest-quality leads and then figuring out a way to steadily nurture those leads over a period of time.
Ultimately, that requires an entirely new approach to marketing and a whole new set of metrics. For that reason, many B2B companies are now searching out new vendors who can help them make their ABM strategies more effective. For example, DemandBase is an ABM vendor that helps B2B companies focus on developing strategic relationships with prospects and customers.
DemandBase can also help companies develop the new metrics required to track success in ABM marketing. Remember – since ABM is all about quality, not quantity, it’s important that the right metrics are being used. Instead of tracking, for example, the absolute number of leads, the focus should be much more on how engaged the accounts are with the content that you create.
What’s clear is that an ABM-based marketing approach is really all about engagement and client interaction. As a result, it’s easy to see that B2B companies with the best marketing content – not just generic marketing content, but content that’s specifically customized and tailored for different industries and verticals – are the ones that are most likely to succeed.
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Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.