It is very common within an organization to have tension between the Marketing and Sales teams. However, to succeed, your business must be a well-aligned machine with all parts moving and working together. There is a strategic approach that Marketing can take that is focused on supporting the Sales team, which greatly improves the relationship between the two – as well as business success. This method is called account-based marketing (ABM).
Curious to learn more? This blog will explain what ABM is and why account-based marketing could help solve the headaches in your lead generation funnel.
What is Account-Based Marketing?
B2B marketing typically takes a broad approach to capture as many leads as possible. Though this sounds great (more leads!), many of these leads do not turn into actual customers, thereby wasting your efforts. In fact, a Forrester report recently stated that less than 1% of B2B leads end up in converting to actual customers! Account-based marketing is a marketing and organizational growth strategy where the marketing and sales teams work together to target and nurture accounts and convert them to customers.
ABM spins the narrative where marketing and sales work together to target desirable accounts with the most potential. It allows you to filter less-valuable accounts early on. Once your marketing and sales teams are on the same page, they can start nurturing those accounts.
Some reactions that would be thrilling to hear from your sales team are, “I actually like following up on marketing leads because they are my strong leads” or, “When I spoke to my prospect, they said they have been seeing us everywhere, and they have been wanting to speak with us.” Positive feedback from your sales team is proof that account-based marketing is working.
Some benefits of account-based marketing include:
- Cohesive Marketing and Sales Teams – When these teams are aligned and working towards the same goals, they can generate more sales revenue.
- Improved Sales Conversions – By advertising to your target accounts, your sales team will be more successful at conversions.
- Cost Efficient – Marketing directly to best-fitting accounts can be cost efficient because they are more likely to be successful.
- Enhanced Customer Experience – Customers will be drawn to you through your account-based marketing efforts. The personalized marketing tactics are tailored to them rather than a broad group, so they will gain more trust in you.
- Shorter Sales Cycles – By removing unqualified accounts early on, sales and marketing can focus on accounts that are more likely to convert to sales.
How to Use Account-Based Marketing
To start with ABM, you need to align with who your target accounts or customers are—not only on a demographic level but the actual company and customer names. You need to be clear as to why these companies would buy from you as well as clear on the value you can bring them with your products and services.
With these things in mind, you can structure your digital marketing account-based marketing strategy. Here are three steps to using an account-based marketing program.
1. Choose a Target
You will not be able to employ account-based marketing tactics until you define your target accounts. This is the perfect time to get your sales team involved. Once you work out what type of organization you want to market to, you can dig deeper to define exactly who they are.
When you label the target businesses, you need to determine who is making the decisions in the organization. Find out who the key stakeholders are and figure out how to influence them. This can be done through thorough research. Read up all you can about the organizations and the people involved, including their social media. You want to be as educated as you can be.
2. Develop Valuable Content
Creating meaty, valuable cornerstone content is key to advertising to your best-fit accounts. Types of content include eBooks, webinars, infographics, etc.
Using the target audience list that has been developed, devise an advertising plan to share this content with your audience with the goal of them visiting your website to register for this content.
Also make sure this content is optimized for SEO so it can get found by search engines.
3. Remain Interesting
Once someone showed they were interested in what you had to say, it is vital now to remain interesting. They determine their timeline for when they’ll be ready for your service or product, so you must be consistent and continue to produce interesting content until they are ready to convert.
This continual bite-size content should be promoted to those who have engaged previously via ads and emails. These places are also excellent organic traffic drivers that can help bring in additional marketing qualified leads (MQLs).
4. Leverage Data
Lastly, once someone becomes a customer, you can leverage their customer data to determine if there are other products or services that they could benefit from. The data can also conclude if there are natural reorder times. This allows you to use B2B marketing strategy to encourage those repeat purchases.
Take Advantage of ABM
Account-based marketing is a surefire way to sales conversion. Because you know who you are marketing to, you can tailor your marketing strategy instead of broadly advertising and just hoping a lead will follow suit.
With the right people on your side, ABM can be easier than it may sound. If you would like to learn more about the essentials to account-based marketing, we at Enilon can help. We invite you to contact us today to learn more about our digital marketing solutions.
