Current Changes to Account Based Marketing Practices

B2B marketing and sales has changed dramatically over the past couple of years. For many B2B companies, account based marketing or ABM has emerged as a critical go to market strategy.  As ABM continues to grow, marketers are trying to determine how to best add ABM into their program mix and existing tech stack to quickly demonstrate value and results.

Many ABM vendors today offer an all-in-one ABM platform however this approach carries some significant risks. These platforms are often overkill, overpriced or go a mile wide an inch deep in critical functional areas. They often force a rip and replace of your existing marketing, sales and advertising tech infrastructure that disrupts your current process. There is a better way to add ABM capabilities that are best-in-class and have key functional areas and capabilities to fit seamlessly into your existing technology platform as well as the tools.

Best practices suggest that ABM should enable B2B marketers to do four things:

1. adapt their current market and sales process
2. use existing data and programs and adapt ABM, thereby protecting their existing technology investment
3. add only the best-in-class ABM capabilities needed
4. all marketers to achieve global account scale

ABM should provide three core best-in-class solutions. ABM advertising website analytics and ABM sales insights solutions should help answer key ABM questions for your brand team’s, demand teams, and sales teams. ABM advertising should be used in a cost-effective manner to highly target and engage individual buyers and entire buying groups at target accounts who either have never ever engaged with your brand or reach target prospects that unable to be reached through traditional channels such as marketing, sales emails, and phone calls.

ABM advertising, if done right, allows you to target specific companies across global regions and GEOs. Find an ABM vendor to help you deliver global account reach (if global ABM is in the strategy), and coverage.  In that way the vendor can source data from all major data providers and serve ads to all major media buying platform or DSPs globally.  Another key area is to get your message in front of exactly the right buyers at your target accounts.

Once your ABM campaigns are launched, you can view the insights and include your sales teams on engaged buying groups from your global target accounts. You can also assess the efficiencies of the ABM campaigns in terms of measuring  finally unlike your competition we don’t charge a premium on your media costs that gives you a lower of cost per account reached, and cost per engaged buyer.

Many brands start with two primary ABM advertising programs. ABM with cookie based targeting, which helps you engage buyers at target accounts using their buyer personas such as seniority and job function. Second, ABM with IP targeting which allows you to engage accounts in markets such as the specific territory or countries where data privacy regulations do not allow targeting of individual buyers.

It’s also important to optimize your ABM campaigns. Check your analytics for unique information on incoming buyers to can see what specific ad messages or website pages caught the buyer interests and which products or a solution was of interest to them.  Identify and report on accounts beyond typical IP based approaches and deliver actionable information to your SDR and sales teams on a periodic basis of how the buyer committees or contacts are performing in the funnel.  This will allow your SDRs to better prioritize their sales outreach and understand which buyers to target and know the specific product or solution of interest to them before reaching out to them and using that precious outreach time and quota.

There are three key outcomes you can expect from deploying well thought out ABM solutions.

1. Your sales team will know exactly which accounts to focus on every week
2. You should see faster movement of your existing pipeline
3. You will be under consideration at companies that have not even heard of your brand before.

Now is the time to complement your traditional demand generation and develop an ABM strategy that is sure to put your revenue on track to perform better and meet KPIs faster.