Every business has to innovate to survive in the fast-paced corporate world. Every business does marketing in its capacity. How effective those strategies are would be a discussion for another day about. The marketing companies were creating blanket strategies applied to all their clients until now. Although many strategies work, those may not be optimal for each client account. There was a dire need to personalise every marketing strategy based on individual client needs. That is when account-based marketing came into the picture.
So, what is account based marketing? If this question keeps lingering in your mind, you came to the right place. Account-based marketing (ABM) is a personalised marketing approach that emphasises developing highly targeted marketing strategies based on the needs of each account. In simple words, this marketing approach tells the marketers to focus on each account and create targeted marketing campaigns. If you think it is a one-time marketing strategy, you would be mistaken. ABM is not a marketing strategy but a marketing approach that brings other marketing strategies under one umbrella. If you are still sceptical about AMB, here are the top five reasons you need to switch to account-based marketing.
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- Highly Personalised Marketing
It’s an open secret that personalisation can marginally improve the effectiveness of any marketing strategy. Personalisation is a way to know your customer from up close. Instead of stopping yourself at just creating customer segments, ABM focuses on learning the pain points of each customer segment, understanding their needs, and creating personalised strategies to reach them. Many companies often mistake focusing on one customer segment while ignoring other segments that have equal or more potential to bring more profits. For example, a shampoo company can expand its business by selling its products to high-end salons and not just its direct customers, and it will help them multiply their profits. AMB ensures the shampoo company creates personalised strategies to target salons rather than using the same strategy for targeting direct customers.
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- Targeted Messaging
Messaging plays a vital role in any marketing strategy, and it ensures the effectiveness and relevance of the marketing messages. When the brand has a clear idea and valuable insights into their different audience segments, they create highly targeted messages for each stakeholder. If you take the example from the last section, you can understand this better. A shampoo company that wants to reach salons has to create a targeted messaging for salon owners, franchisers, and investors. The messaging can revolve around keywords like “shampoos for salons” and “B2b hair care products”.
On the other hand, the same brand has to create different messaging for their direct customers. The messaging would contain keywords like “anti-dandruff shampoo” and “shampoo conditioner combo”. AMB ensures that the business uses different marketing messaging for each target audience.
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- Measurable Results
Measuring the results of marketing campaigns can be difficult, especially in offline marketing. As all the resources are poured into all the existing clients, it can be challenging to figure out which campaign had the best returns in the investment. Thankfully, account-based marketing changes that.
ABM focuses on allocating specific resources to each account or industry. That generated revenue can be traced back to the resources spent on that particular account. However, many CRM applications provide great insights into different accounts, but they are not account-centric. In AMB, accounts are the most important entities. That means the companies can analyse how each resource performs and thoroughly understand the performance of each account. With the continuous implementation of ABM methodologies, any company would measure their results based on the used resources.
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- Lesser Resource Wastage
Lack of control over the business processes can lead to misuse and wastage of resources. Unfortunately, this happens when the marketers have poor knowledge of how their resources are utilised and how they can improve the utilisation of their resources. Whether it’s the marketing budget or the human resources like writers, designers, and marketers, the company should have deep insights into their resources’ capabilities to assign only the needed resources instead of randomly assigning them to different accounts. The team leaders need to understand the account’s needs, industry, and work culture to allocate the most effective resources to work such accounts.
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- The Synergy Between Marketing and Sales
The most important aspect of ABM is that it integrates the efforts of your marketing and sales team. AMB encourages the marketing and sales teams to come together and work on targeting different accounts and help each other process the account into the further pipeline even after the lead is processed from marketing to sales. The sales can provide the feedback and sales experience back to the marketing team to improve their approach in further campaigns.
Account-based marketing would re-energise your current marketing efforts with a boost of clarity and effectiveness. Now that you know what is account based marketing, you can make a better decision. It would be safe to say these reasons are enough to convince you why your company needs to incorporate account-based marketing in your current marketing scene.