A Smart Guide To Account-Based Marketing
A long time ago, in “the 2000s,” marketing professionals were obsessed with casting these super-wide nets in the hopes of pulling in as many leads as possible. Blogs became content farms, covering various aspects that were meant to attract anyone and everyone. As far as marketers were concerned, the more traffic they could attract to their sites, the better.
Their underlying philosophy at that time was to attract enough fish into the net, and you were bound to have some keepers in there somewhere with your crossed fingers!
Over the years, an alternative philosophy, known as Account-Based Marketing (ABM) started evolving, one that gets rid of the net and gives marketers a spear to target appropriately.
Account-based marketing (ABM) is getting serious attention at the present time. Bloggers, vendors, and market research companies are fueling a resurgence in ABM’s popularity. In 2004, ITSMA coined the phrase, but B2B vendors have been doing this type of marketing for years, without calling it account-based marketing. For the past few years, sales and marketing teams have been trying to redesign demand generation, understand technologies like marketing automation, wrap themselves around inbound marketing, and have now realized that they sell to businesses so they need to build their sales and marketing machines accordingly.
Let’s dive into a smart guide to Account-Based Marketing.
What is Account-Based Marketing?
In its simplest form, Account-based Marketing is a strategy that directs marketing resources to engage a particular set of target accounts. ABM not only calls for alignment between marketing and sales teams, but it also forces teams to align because personalization at the account level requires sales and marketing to be in sync on account-specific messaging. Higher revenues in a shorter time frame act as a motivator for them.
Rather than casting a net with their lead-generation efforts, marketers utilizing account-based marketing works closely with sales teams to recognize key potential customers and then tailor customized programs and messages to the purchasing team within target accounts.
How It can help Advertisers get the rightful publishers?
Contextual advertising
You can run advertisements on websites that are relevant to the content base of the publishers on keyword targeting for contextual advertising. One of the most popular examples is Google Ads, where the Google Display Network automatically serves ads that are relevant to the users on the basis of contextual targeting.
Contextual or keyword advertising is good for reaching the audience with an interest in your products or services, but the biggest issue is that if you fail to target particular accounts, you might waste most of your ad spend on non-target accounts.
Direct Publishers B2B Ads
Buying ads directly from business and trade publications has numerous benefits vs. programmatic advertising, involving exclusive inventory and access to the first-party data of the publisher that sometimes includes company name and job titles and keyword searches.
Unfortunately, the first-party data with direct deals are generally very stale and too limited in volume to make any significant impact on your target accounts. Most direct publisher advertisements deals end up targeting all readers, including non-target accounts leading to wastage and sub-optimal ROI. Moreover, direct publisher advertising is difficult to scale because each publisher offers different audience selection criteria and each publisher needs to be contacted individually for optimizations.
Why ABM Enhances the Proficiency of Intent Data?
Intent data can play an important role in making your ABM program more effective and efficient. In recent times, ABM has gained traction among B2B marketers. A survey by Sirius Decisions shows that over 90% of B2B marketers consider it an important part of the marketing strategy of their company.
For B2B businesses that embrace the ABM approach, intent data is the most critical tool they have at their disposal.
Sales and marketing teams utilize intent data to prioritize target accounts based on actual data showing which accounts are researching their products and services.
Prioritizing accounts in this way is far more effective than simply keeping account selection on a sales wish-list. From these insights come the efficiency, precision, and effectiveness that ABM strategies promise to provide.
Understanding the online behavior of the target accounts enables you to tailor how you interact with them online. Utilizing targeted advertising and personalized content means you are targeting the businesses you care about, in the spaces they care about, with the information you know they are looking for.
Conclusion
In the complex business environment of today, data enables businesses to make informed decisions. When it comes to marketing, intent data serves as one of the most powerful tools that fuel the growth of ABM programs in B2B marketers.
By helping B2B marketers in understanding their potential customers, intent data makes it possible for businesses to identify high-value accounts and nurture them through personalized content and campaigns.