Business marketers often try to reach as wide an audience as possible with their marketing campaigns. With account-based marketing, often abbreviated as ABM and known as key account marketing, business marketers tend to focus their resources on a much narrow audience and implement personalized campaigns designed specifically to engage each individual prospect or account.
Put simply, account-based marketing is a smarter and more focused approach in business to business marketing. It aims for quality over quantity. It combines a range of activities from sales, advertising, email, and content to identify needs and employ the most efficient solutions to increase value and boost engagement among prospects. Account-based marketing doesn’t speak in vague generalities. It calls a prospect by name, addresses their specific concerns and then provides specific solutions.
According to Marketo, the top 5 benefits of account-based marketing for business are:
- It has a clear ROI
- It’s personal and optimized
- Sales alignment is easier
- Resource waste is reduced
- Tracking goals and measurement is clear
Additionally, research from the Altera Group shows that account-based marketing has a much higher return on investment than other marketing initiatives. Sam Balter, a senior marketing manager at HubSpot, says part of the goal of account-based marketing “is to address the needs of an organization by connecting with all of the stakeholders within it. That’s one reason why it works so well in B2B – oftentimes you have to work with five or more stakeholders in a given sale.”
Since account-based marketing yields such significant results, consider ten best practices to use within the marketing industry.
