It can be frustrating… working day and night on creating the perfect inbound marketing strategy, or crafting endless ad copy and creative, only to find you’re drawing in prospects that are totally wrong for your company.
B2B marketing has a greater challenge than B2C. Often, our clients are in very specific industries or need very specific services. A scattershot, one-size-fits-all marketing strategy won’t work.
If you’ve been pumping marketing funds into inbound marketing and not getting the quality of leads you need, Account Based Marketing is the solution.
Spoiler Alert: yes, account based marketing is effective for B2B in 2021. According to ITSMA, 87% of account-based marketers say that ABM efforts outperform other marketing efforts.
In fact, it is especially effective for hard-to-reach decision makers, such as C-suite executives.
Let’s talk about what exactly account based marketing is, how it benefits B2B, and what types of B2B companies have found success with taking an account based marketing approach.
Account Based marketing is the practice of pursuing prospects on an individual basis, integrating sales and marketing to focus on accounts rather than more scattershot inbound marketing tactics.
Instead of creating content and hoping your perfect prospects come to you, you reach out to them with relevant and personalized insights, cultivating towards a lifelong partnership.
For B2C, this style of marketing can be too expensive and time-consuming. It’s simpler to focus on a demographic and use inbound marketing to bring in customers. But for B2B, when your clients are specific, hard-to-reach, and often worth a large return for your company, pursuing decision makers and influencers on an account-level basis can improve your marketing ROI.
For instance, if you’re selling lipstick to the general consumer, facebook ads and other social media efforts are your best bet, because you need to bring in as many possible lipstick buyers as possible.
But if you’re a B2B company who provides manufacturing services for makeup companies, you need to reach makeup executives looking to speed up production. This is a very specific audience, and you likely know which companies in the industry could use your services.
In that case, Account Based Marketing will help you reach those specific decision makers that need your service.
Account Based Marketing is especially effective for B2B. Pursuing individuals on an account-level and converting them into clients will provide the following benefits:
Because you are pursuing fewer opportunities with more focus, you can personalize your outreach, making it more likely to get past gatekeepers and into the hearts and minds of the decision-makers you need to reach. Even if your target accounts are not in market, you can create top of mind awareness, so that when the timing is right to make a decision, you’ll have a leg up over the competition.
Plus, Account Based Marketing is ultimately a more human approach. It takes a certain mindset, focus and determination to do whatever possible to meet your future client where they are and where they want to go. This shows up in the way you communicate, orchestrate your effort within your organization and ultimately reach your intended audience.
Though we’ve discussed the logical reasons that Account Based Marketing works great in theory, how do we know for sure? As they say, the proof is in the profit.
Check out these stories of B2B companies using Account Based Marketing to improve both ROI and greater relationships with prospective clients.
Account Based Marketing is one of our main areas of expertise. Read more about our partner’s successes with ABM here.
Now that we know what Account Based Marketing is and why it works so well for B2B, next week we’ll dive into specific tactics that you can implement with your team to generate better results.
By combining the powers of marketing and sales, you can connect more meaningfully with your perfect prospects and drive greater returns. Account based marketing is the best of both worlds: more human, and more profitable.
