ABM, also known as key-account marketing, is at its heart a strategic approach to business marketing. As markets such as IT become more and more commoditised, customers see less difference between suppliers and their competitors and price becomes the only obvious differentiator. ABM enables suppliers to differentiate and stand out more powerfully across a wider range of factors beyond price alone.
There are significant benefits from bringing a more focused, account-based approach to B2B marketing. Whilst it can take time to adopt and embed a more strategic approach, it ultimately enhances prospect and customer experiences and builds the value and returns from your marketing.
Its key values lie in:
1. Maximising your business relevance among high-value accounts
ABM requires you to personalise everything from content and product information to communications and campaigns. Your content and interactions are tailored in a way that shows prospects and customers how your specific products, services and other offerings are what they need to solve their problems and how they are different and better than those of competitors.
2. Personalising and humanising your marketing
Instead of marketing simply by sector and job title, an ABM approach requires a deep commitment to understanding the individuals you’re targeting before marketing to them. Desk research or interviews with individuals – directly or via sales colleagues – builds much more in-depth understanding of targets and their ambitions and motivations. This is developed into a ‘persona’ describing multiple characteristics both directly and indirectly related to a target’s job role, from their education and background to their personal goals and challenges. Here is an example:
3. Delivering consistent customer experiences
For an ABM strategy to work, each target account should feel as though they’re your business’ ‘market of one’. This is achieved by offering a key pillar of branding – consistency. In ABM’s case. consistent customer experiences.
Much of this is enabled by alignment between your sales and marketing people. Once all team members are aware of where an account has progressed in the overall buying journey, personalised and timely communications can be delivered - whether campaigns, product information, content or pricing details – via an appropriate, marketing platform.
Your customer’s experience of you, especially in high value opportunities, is likely to be shared between a number of personas across multiple touchpoints. Champions of your proposition, influencers and ultimate decision-makers are typical personas to address.
4. Increasing ROI relative to conventional prospecting
By focusing on the accounts that are likely to convert, you can minimise time wasting, save costs and lower risks. As a result, with ABM, there is generally a shorter sales cycle. Furthermore, these accounts can be nurtured over the long-term to retain them and similar accounts can then be targeted in future.
5. Expanding business through stronger account relationships.
The ABM process requires that you invest time and resources in engaging and delighting a group of carefully chosen, high-value accounts versus trying to close deals with less-qualified leads which may not be the best fit for your company.
By taking the time to build these trusting relationships with accounts, you can expand and diversify business by retaining valuable customers for longer. And considering it costs more to obtain new customers than retain them, this will positively impact your bottom line.
6. Developing brand advocates
Loyal customers in turn become your best marketers and advocates. Your accounts will help you expand your business among their networks (e.g. partners, customers) through referrals, word-of-mouth marketing and testimonials.
Fire NBM assists clients to adopt an ABM approach and realise the benefits outlined above.
Do get in touch via the form below if you’d like to explore ABM in your business.
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