84% of marketers say ABM provides significant benefits to
expanding customer relationships.
Account-Based Marketing
Account-Based Marketing
Traditionally, marketers capture as
many leads as possible but don’t
qualify those leads until they are
well into the sales funnel.
Intro
Intro
It’s a numbers game: the more leads you generate up front, the more eventually convert into paying customers. But while this kind of lead generation is incredibly powerful, it’s also true that (according to MarketingSherpa) 79% of marketing leads
never convert into sales.
By adding account-based marketing (ABM) tactics to your repertoire, you amplify your lead generation results. ABM is a strategic approach to lead generation in which your time and resources target a key group of specific accounts. Lead generation draws in the numbers, and ABM qualifies and targets those leads before you market to them.
In other words, by inverting the traditional early-stage marketing process, you target your campaigns to specific customers the moment they enter your funnel, and you do it with real-time, personalized content. You not only zero in on your conversion process, making it easier to measure, you also align your marketing efforts more closely with your sales goals.
of prospects prefer content targeted to their specific industries.
82%
of executives say they would read unsolicited marketingmaterials containing ideas relevant to
their business.
75%
The results that ABM delivers are
particularly valuable in Top-of-Funnel
(TOFU) marketing, where at least 98%
of your web visitors are anonymous.
How ABM Solves
the TOFU Paradox
How ABM Solves
the TOFU Paradox
You can certainly employ seed nurturing to share valuable content and build your reputation with these unknown prospects. But wouldn’t
you also like insight into who your visitors are, right off the bat?
Identifying visitors is a huge opportunity to nurture brand affinity. It can also help you avoid a potential deal breaker: irrelevant marketing messages and badly timed pop-up chat boxes can easily seem like spam to your prospects. If a visitor clicks on an ad or searches for you specifically, shouldn’t you be able to welcome him with a message that appeals specifically to his intentions?
Flip the
Lead-Gen Process with ABM
Using ABM, you identify strategic accounts — the ones most likely to create revenue or meet other high-level
goals of your business — and make them the focus of your early-stage marketing efforts. In other words, you
generate leads that are already qualified.
“The brilliance of account-based marketing
is that it reverses the typical process. Instead of
marketing to a broad audience and then filtering your leads, you’re filtering in advance
and then marketing to a more defined audience.”
–Mike Telem, Co-founder of Insightera
To get started with account-based marketing, you first create a wish list of strategic accounts you’d like to land — also known as “named accounts” — then craft dynamic marketing messages to target each specific audience. This is the key to ABM. Here’s how real-time personalization tools take ABM to the next level:
TOFU Gets
Real-Time & Personal
TOFU Gets
Real-Time & Personal
1) The reverse-IP-lookup functionality of personalization software automatically identifies a prospect’s organization — and by extension you can deduce her industry, the size of her company, and some technology specifics.
2) If the prospect’s organization is on your list of named accounts, you can personalize her experience with appropriate content and CTAs (calls-to-action).
3) You can also follow the prospect throughout her engagement with your content, offering dynamic, real-time information that matches her place in the buying cycle, visit by visit.
Voilà! You can now turn previously anonymous prospects into qualified leads during the TOFU stage, targeting high-yield accounts right from the get-go. And you’ll drive higher engagement with named accounts by offering personalized, real-time content designed to educate, nurture, and accelerate velocity through your funnel.
With real-time personalization tools
now at your disposal, account-based
marketing is a powerful new addition
to your marketing arsenal.
Empirical Alignment
with Your Existing Practices
Empirical Alignment
with Your Existing Practices
Sales
Sales
Analytics
Analytics
Executives, to whom sales numbers are paramount, are often more inclined to buy into a marketing plan that is closely aligned with sales goals. Account-based marketing gets marketers talking and thinking like the sales team, which makes it easier to communicate with leadership about real-time personalization.
When your ABM campaigns are aligned with sales goals, you drive the deals everyone talks about. Say your company has a strategic sales goal to land one or two major healthcare clients. Using personalization software, marketing can identify healthcare visitors from your named accounts while they’re still in the Top-of-Funnel stage. Next, you feed those visitors strategic messaging that explains how perfect your product is for their exact healthcare needs.
Of course, this is a simplified description of how ABM works, but it demonstrates the principle: with new real-time personalization tools, you can dial your message down to a very specific audience. The precision of your content strategy is limited only by your imagination.
With real-time personalization tools, you can optimize your
marketing budget by measuring the performance of your campaigns against those accounts. How are visitors from your named accounts behaving? What are the campaigns and channels driving them in? When they arrive at your website, what do they click on?
Most organizations are account-centric:
they measure and monitor opportunities
based on accounts and revenue from
those accounts.
Marketing Automation
Marketing Automation
Account-based marketing aligns with your existing marketing automation strategy — both in terms of your philosophy and technology. Philosophically, you can set up your ABM strategy to segue smoothly into your overall marketing automation strategy.
And technologically, real-time personalization software works in tandem with your marketing automation solution, so the
content you’re feeding prospects during the Top-of-Funnel stage aligns with the content they receive throughout their buyer journey. With ABM amplifying your marketing automation solution, you can sync your email marketing campaigns to your web and mobile content seamlessly. You can also track customer behavior across all of these channels, creating ubiquitous, synchronized web marketing. Real-time personalization tools multiply your return on investment in marketing automation.
Take the example of Panaya, a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution. Panaya’s product reduces the cost and risk of change for Enterprise Resource-Planning (ERP) systems. The organization wanted to expand into new markets and was specifically looking to generate more revenue from a list of target accounts. To do so, they created a full-funnel content stream aimed at attracting,
engaging, and converting named accounts with Marketo’s real-time personalization tools, using the five-step approach outlined on the right.
The results of Panaya’s use of ABM were definitive. In their first month, the organization identified 215 web visitors from named accounts. They honed in on the most effective
Panaya’s 5 Steps to
Account-Based Marketing Mastery
1) Identified named accounts fitting a certain criteria, then created personas based on these accounts. 2) Arranged their library of content into buckets: case studies, videos, landing pages, and calls-to-action Next, they assigned content from each bucket to a target segment.
3) Defined top- and mid-funnel content campaigns for each persona and used real- time personalization to feed visitors relevant content.
84% of marketers say ABM provides significant benefits to
expanding customer relationships.
WHO:
Create your list of target accounts.
WHAT:
Define content that fits each account group
or persona at each stage of the customer lifecycle.
WHERE: Present the targeted message to each visitor,
based on where she is in your marketing funnel.
Once you’ve established your goals, named your accounts, and selected your content, personalization tools take over. Working in conjunction with your marketing automation solution, personalization tools automatically feed visitors dynamic content based on their origin, behavior, and place in your buying cycle. From the prospect’s point of view, you’re showing her exactly what she’s looking for every single time she visits your site. But your experience is the opposite of labor-intensive. Now, instead of spending all your time qualifying anonymous leads, you’re focused on testing and refining your ABM strategy. Over time, it’s easy to make ABM marketing a precise — and profitable! — science.
Getting Started
Getting Started
The first step to launching an
You Become a Thought Leader.When you personalize content for an individual visitor, he is more likely to return to your website when he needs reliable information about a specific topic or product. This type of fine-tuning makes your content more effective across the board, from your website to your mobile app to your email marketing campaigns to your social media updates.
A timely, personalized message means you are always relevant to your reader. You engage your current customers on a deeper level, and you become their trusted source of the latest, most relevant information about your type of product — not just your specific product. You’re also more likely to engage C-level visitors, who don’t have time to sort through extraneous content.
Your Marketing Attribution Gets Precise. You can measure your campaigns more effectively because you focus your initiatives so precisely. This makes it easy to calculate marketing results against sales goals, bringing marketing and sales into tight alignment.
Your Sales Get Truly Strategic. The biggest payoff for ABM
What to Expect
(Hint: a Lot)
What to Expect
(Hint: a Lot)
With the right tools,
you can now use marketing automation to
launch personalized ABM campaigns, driving your prospects straight
to the point. When you give visitors exactly what they are looking for
(even if they don’t know they are looking for it), you become the
go-to expert in your industry. And all of this traffic ultimately leads
Marketing Software. Easy, Powerful, Complete.
