Date
12th September 2024
If you’re involved in marketing in 2024, the chances are you know what account-based marketing (ABM) is.
It’s now one of the most popular strategies for generating leads, giving you the power of personalization and allowing you to target prospects with high accuracy.
According to Momentum ITSMA’s latest annual report, ABM is the biggest priority for B2B marketers for the third year running, with 66% of marketers planning to increase ABM spending in 2024.
And it’s popular because it works: the same study found that 85% of account-based marketing programs see active engagement with selected accounts, and 74% see revenue growth.
In fact, at Headley Media, the majority of the content syndication campaigns we run for our B2B tech clients are enhanced with account-based marketing.
Read on to find out:
- What is account-based marketing?
- How does it work?
- ABM strategies
- Using Gen AI in your account-based marketing
- Benefits and potential pitfalls of ABM
A Quick ABM Definition: What is Account-Based Marketing?
Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is a simple concept. It's a focused approach to B2B marketing that directs marketing resources towards targeting those prospective customers who are the best fit for a given product or service.
It’s called ‘account-based’ because the targets of your marketing are the businesses you want to work with: within each business, or account, you learn who are the members of the buying committee you need to reach, and how to engage them with your brand, eventually nurturing them towards a purchase.
When creating ABM campaigns, marketing and sales teams should work closely together as part of an overall ABM strategy, to identify the right accounts to target.
Furthermore, aligning your sales and marketing teams will also help you generate account-specific messaging that will appeal to your chosen prospects.
Once you've generated your leads using account-based marketing, both teams should continue to work together to nurture your leads through the buyer's journey.
Why Does ABM Work So Well?
Instead of trying many different messages and channels aimed at a broad market, ABM enables you to focus on specific accounts. As a result, you can research the challenges your product or service solves for these accounts, find out what stage of the marketing funnel they are in, and develop clear messaging that will resonate more deeply.
You can also uncover which marketing channels are likely to be most effective for targeting these accounts. This allows you to concentrate your marketing budget to get the best results.
Account-based marketing prioritizes your most relevant targets, helping you cut through the noise.
In 2024, when most technology businesses are using content marketing to compete for the same audiences, getting the attention of decision-makers and busy executives is more challenging than ever. With so many marketing channels and digital devices, information overload can be a real barrier to getting your message across. That's where ABM comes in.
How to Create a Target Account List
At the center of your account-based marketing strategy is your Target Account List (TAL).
This is a list of all the businesses you would like to reach through your lead generation. By building your TAL at the start of your ABM campaign, you can personalize your targeting and messaging from the beginning, as opposed to the scattergun approach of traditional marketing.
So how do you build your TAL?
First of all, you need to set your initial thresholds for target accounts – including company size, revenue, head count, job titles and locations. But be prepared to expand your criteria if your lists are too small.
The ideal size of a TAL for lead generation is 400-500 accounts – enough to continually generate new business, but not too many that you can no longer personalize your approach.
Next you need to identify likely accounts. Use your full team for this process – your marketing, sales and customer success teams will all be able to input, and even your development teams.
To grow your TAL, you can use an ABM provider – good suppliers can expand your list with ‘lookalike’ audiences. Make sure you know what their methods are, though, and where their data comes from. The “garbage in, garbage out” concept applies here: if you don't use quality data sources, you won't get quality results!
Chloe Addis Head of Marketing @ Headley Media
How ABM Campaigns Work
Most ABM campaigns will follow the same steps:
Step One: Define your target account list. You can consider several different criteria for this, depending on your company’s strategic priorities. Commonly used criteria include highest potential value, best fit for your product or service, and those accounts you think could convert the fastest.
Step Two: Research accounts and identifies key influencers or decision-makers.
Step Three: Uncover your target accounts’ most significant challenges and work out messaging that will resonate with them. Then, think about how your messaging and content will focus on solving their challenges.
Step Four: Figure out which channels work best to reach them. First, try all the channels where you think your target market spends time. Then, focus your efforts on them once you’ve worked out which channel(s) work best.
Step Five: Execute targeted campaigns. Align efforts across your sales and marketing teams — and coordinate messaging across your channels if using more than one.
Step Six: Work with a specialist ABM supplier. This will help you create a highly targeted campaign, helping you reach the prospects on your target account list more effectively and often on a cost-per-lead basis (CPL) so you know how far your budget will stretch. Take a look at our ABM lead generation services as an example.
Step Seven: Test, measure, and optimize. The secret to successful ABM is maximizing your return on investment (ROI). To do this, you need to analyze your results both for individual accounts and across campaigns so you can do more of what works and drop what doesn’t.
Benefits of ABM
There are several benefits to account-based marketing.
Firstly, you can maximize your appeal and relevance to high-value accounts. Secondly, you can deliver consistent customer experiences by aligning Sales and Marketing efforts. And finally, you can retain a genuine customer focus by thinking customer-first when designing your content and messaging – and tailoring that messaging.
In turn, an ABM strategy helps you to grow your business by building deeper relationships with prospects even before they become customers.
You can streamline your marketing efforts and the sales cycle by cutting down on what doesn’t work. This also optimizes your budget. And, of course, doing all of this – while also targeting specific accounts – will increase your ROI.
What’s the Impact of AI on Account-Based Marketing?
AI raises exciting potential for ABM marketers.
As it’s still largely in its infancy, marketers are cautious with adopting generative AI techniques for their ABM programs, but Momentum ITSMA’s annual ABM benchmarking survey highlights the possibilities: building TALs; delivering account insights; drafting and polishing content; and personalizing messaging.
AI is new technology and a big trend, so as always, be careful who your supplier is and ensure the data is high-quality and accurate.
Overall, most programs are just testing the water and the risks and challenges of getting it wrong loom almost as large as the potential value of getting it right. Rethinking ABM: Outperforming the Market in the World of AI Momentum ITSMA & ABMLA
Effective B2B ABM Strategies
You can use many tactics to maximize your account-based marketing effectiveness. In fact, there are so many that it can become easy to get overwhelmed!
Some B2B marketers try too many different tactics at once, diluting their efforts and losing the focus that is key to success.
Because of this, we recommend researching the various ABM strategies available, such as ABM lead generation. Think about what might fit your organization and your prospective client base best. We also suggest focusing on just one or two tactics at a time and testing their effectiveness before moving on to the next.
Content syndication works particularly well as an ABM strategy: it directly focuses on generating high-quality leads, using your target account list (TAL) of priority companies.
Content syndication works by publishing your content – for example, a white paper, eBook, research study, or report – on platforms you don’t own. In B2B marketing, the content is usually gated, so readers must enter their professional details to access it. Once they enter their information, they will become a marketing lead you can nurture, typically via email.
Partnering with a trusted lead generation provider works particularly well when they own their content syndication platforms because they can effectively target your content to audiences on your ABM target account list (TAL), using transparent methods to generate high-quality leads.
You can maximize the number of relevant leads generated, who will be more likely to engage with your content, and enhance your ABM lead generation campaign with complementary tactics - such as:
- Nurture Track lead generation, ensuring your leads become familiar with your brand and products.
- SoftBANT lead generation, ensuring each lead you generate in your ABM campaign meets at least two of the BANT criteria.
- Intent data targeting, to gain more insight on your leads' buying signals.
- Audience intelligence strategies, to get direct answers to profiling questions.
- Display advertising, for a surround-sound messaging effect.
Common ABM Pitfalls to Avoid
As with any marketing strategy, account-based marketing comes with its own set of potential pitfalls.
When using ABM to enhance your lead generation, scoping out the accounts you want to target and why is the first step to success. However, one of the common pitfalls we see is when marketers find themselves without a suitable target account list or one at all.
For example, your TAL may be too small to be effective, or the quality of your data may be unreliable or out of date.
An expert in ABM lead generation will be able to expand your pool of target accounts and help you create a suitable TAL based on your targeting requirements and campaign objectives.
For example, one common way to enhance your TAL is by creating 'lookalike' audiences to expand your list further. Plus, working with a trusted supplier will also give you confidence in the reliability of your TAL’s data, as they will be able to show you where the data has come from and how your lists have been created.
Our eBook, 5 Account-Based Marketing Pitfalls All B2B Tech Marketers Should Avoid, explores the common ABM mistakes we've seen over the years and gives you tips on how to avoid them and strategies for success.
