Sometimes it’s hard to do justice to a major marketing approach in a single blog post. Bear with me; I’m going to try.
Account-based marketing (ABM) is kind of hot these days, although it’s not necessary new. In the past it’s sometimes been called key account marketing, or something similar. You can use it to close and grow specific larger accounts.
ABM is like fishing with a spear instead of a vast, inbound net. It requires a lot of cooperation between marketing and sales.
ABM starts with sales and marketing jointly creating a profile of their ideal accounts, identifying the accounts that they way to pursue together, combining their research and developing the approach for each account. You need to identify all of the influencers and decision-makers at an account and target them with information – the more personalized, the better. (Competitive analysis? ROi calculations? What can you do?) Sometimes it will take several pieces of information, and several sales follow ups, to get the meeting. Using the latest adtech you can even target ads to just the company’s IP address, or specific people within the company.
Marketing is always going to be more effective (and cost-efficient) in growing existing accounts than landing new ones, and ABM can be used for both.
ABM is welcome in many companies because it really syncs with the account-centric approach of most companies and sales, who are not as focused on the contacts and leads as many in marketing. Short of the revenue from actually closing or growing accounts, interim metrics can include how many different people from the account are engaging with your website and content, and the growth of the total time that they spend on it.
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