Account-based marketing, or ABM, is becoming more popular as marketing and sales try to bridge the gap between their teams and boost ROI. According to eMarketer, 92% of marketers said ABM was “very” or “extremely” important for their overall marketing efforts.
Here’s a quick refresher. In our Beginner’s Guide to ABM and Account Scoring, we broke down ABM this way:
“ABM brings sales and marketing together to focus resources on a set of target accounts. It starts by using attributes you know about a specific account—that they’ve engaged with a specific piece of content or have a certain configuration in their infrastructure, for example—and enables the marketing organization to deliver highly personalized, precise messages to the right prospect.”
In case you haven’t already jumped on the ABM train, let’s run through six of ABM’s biggest benefits in the current marketing landscape.
The top 6 benefits of account-based marketing
1. Personalized marketing
With ABM, your team can directly personalize marketing touchpoints to key contacts in target accounts. It’s no surprise that this approach makes prospects feel valued while also enabling you to deliver content that is actually valuable to the specific person or team.
Personalizing marketing with ABM helps you empathize with your prospects and shows them you understand their problems and can provide a solution. It’s a cycle—you can then use those insights to continue creating content that is relevant to them.
The data proves that personalizing works: A study by CEB found that individual stakeholders who perceived a vendor’s content was tailored to their needs were 40% more willing to buy from that vendor than stakeholders who did not.
2. Build & nurture customer relationships
ABM isn’t only for prospects—it’s also helpful to build and nurture ongoing relationships with your customers. Establishing a good relationship with contacts at key accounts builds trust and increases the odds that they will look to you as an expert on the markets you operate in.
As time goes on, personalized marketing through ABM will give you better insight into the customer, their behavior, and where their needs might be heading.
3. Align marketing & sales teams
As mentioned above, aligning marketing and sales teams is one of the biggest benefits of ABM. Marketing and sales can work together to develop scoring and targeting based on the technologies currently in use by a company along with how much they are spending in your area of business.
This enables messaging consistency through a shared understanding of: 1) Why targets were selected; and 2) The best approach to engage with them.
(Tip: HG Insights enables sales and marketing alignment by helping teams aim all motions at the right accounts. Learn more here.)
4. Accelerate sales cycles
Since ABM helps target key contacts at high-potential accounts, it can start to influence decision-makers before they even talk to sales for the first time (it also boosts conversions and ROI, but we’ll talk about that in a moment).
By involving marketing in the sales funnel, prioritizing resources based on account scoring, and personalizing marketing through ABM, we can significantly shorten sales cycles . In fact, according to Salesforce’s State of Marketing report, using ABM increased the frequency of sales and marketing teams sharing common goals and metrics from 52% to 87%.
5. Straightforward results
While every marketing campaign should be trackable, it’s likely you’ll gain even clearer results with ABM. Since you’ll have specific goals for each account, it’s much more straightforward to ascertain whether your initiatives paid off. After identifying the results of your ABM campaign, you can easily take a look at the ROI.
6. Higher ROI
When ABM is done properly, it enables a highly targeted marketing approach and fewer wasted resources. This can lead to a multitude of positive ROI effects, including increased conversions, lower customer acquisition costs, faster sales growth, and more.
According to research performed by the ABM Leadership Alliance and ITSMA, 76% of marketers achieved higher ROI with ABM than with any other marketing strategy in 2020.
Gaining all the benefits of ABM with HG Insights
Whether your team struggles to find the best fit accounts and close sales or you have plenty of leads but don’t know how to prioritize them, ABM might be a good solution. To optimize account scoring and build effective ABM campaigns, organizations need an intelligent technology platform that helps them deliver the right message to the right prospect at the right moment.
HG Insights provides business decision-makers with actionable insights they can use to identify and prioritize their best prospects and opportunities. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help support you and your organization.
