Account-Based Marketing (ABM) has become a widely accepted marketing practice among B2B companies that work with larger target accounts. Over 55% of ABM practitioners consider their ABM strategy as ‘sophisticated.’ This is one reason B2B Marketing teams look for best practices for various sales-focused activities across industries.
With the influx of data analytics and marketing insights from Data Management Platforms (DMPs), ABM best practices continue to evolve. A large percentage of VP Sales and CMOs have started working together to embrace ABM best practices to align sales and marketing.
Here are the ABM best practices that lead B2B companies to advocate for sales and marketing alignment.
Building ABM strategy around people and experiences
Experts believe that most ABM campaigns tend to fizzle out before showing good result because of short-term insights. One of the most significant challenges to overcome in ABM campaigns is the shift from short-term gains to long term to avoid losing lifetime customers. ABM has become the core of functional Marketing Automation, making it crucial to build ABM capabilities alongside traditional lead-based capabilities. Person-based marketing provides a competitive edge if employed well. Experts suggest that personal advertising can be used to build relationships with ‘always-busy’ decision-makers. Since the engagement can be tracked at the person-by-person level, it helps in continuing the dialogues with the ones who show interest.
Hunting with a Spear
ABM best practices utilize the basics of inbound marketing with a relevant and yet utterly personalized marketing messaging campaign. According to experts, uniquely crafted messages, especially for accounts, make this the ‘hunting with spear’ approach. While this term was coined in 2017, not much has changed in the last two years when scaling ABM returns are concerned. The ‘spear’ approach allows B2B marketing teams to target any account using automated demand generation campaigns.
Adopting Zero Waste Marketing
The concept of Zero Waste Marketing is advocated by experts to fulfill ABM’s promises. According to a report, over 2 million marketing blogs are written every day. Interestingly, 75% of them do not get marketing traction, leading to wasted time and resources to produce them. This makes content the key to purposefully target each account with relevant context and messages, especially in long sales cycles. ABM best practices expand account growth using repurposed content with a zero-waste approach for an optimized and efficient marketing campaign.
Moving from Data to Insights
Experts suggest ABM teams rethink their data wrangling strategies. Since ABM runs on real-time intent data, which is collected from Omnichannel sources, 2019 is witnessing a rise in programmatic advertising that boosts ABM returns. Almost 50% of B2B Marketing teams defy conventional marketing tactics by using ad personalization. This not just limits to content delivery, but also website personalization. Experts stress the importance of continuity and orchestration between advertising strategies with all other channels, to nurture accounts through the buyer’s journey.
The best practices for ABM always reinvent themselves with newer and shinier insights designed to make ABM marketing-friendly for analysis, adoption, and execution on large scales. Experts believe that larger B2B groups will adopt ABM for not just their core marketing campaigns but also for webinars, events, video promotions, social media advertising, and sales meetings.
