Hopefully, you’ve got your Inbound Marketing engine chugging along, bringing you leads that convert into customers. As you’ve built this, adding blog articles, developing personas, and measuring your efforts, you’ve probably started wondering, “exactly how specific can targeting go?”
Account-Based Marketing’s answer? Right down to the individual. It’s made possible by the Sales and Marketing alignments we’ve already talked about, and it’s potential for B2B marketing is huge.
Who does Account-Based Marketing Target?
B2B sales can take a long time to accomplish, even when you’ve got a fantastic inbound process in place.
What Account-Based Marketing can do is increase your success rate by really taking control of the targeting phase of the process. You’re choosing the key accounts that you want to win, and you’re coordinating your Sales and Marketing departments to engage with these companies on a tactical basis.
It’s not just creating a persona and waiting for your assets to attract them — it’s understanding companies on individual levels and working to earn their business specifically.
Account-Based Marketing means Understanding the Company
If all else is equal, is a customer going to pick the company that has shown interest in what they do and how they do it and has specific advice tailored to all that — or the other one that's just there?
Understanding your customers and your leads is of course, a key part of Inbound Marketing. Account-Based Marketing amps this up. From the first stages, you’re not targeting personas that describe generally the type of person and the types of companies you’re looking to attract: you’re just going straight for the account.
So, now you’ve got a host of specific questions you can ask yourself. What does the company do? What do you suspect their actual problems are? How can you solve these problems? And that’s just the high level.
You can drill down on each using everything available to you, just as researching customers investigate their own potential vendors. You’ve got their company website to explore. You can check out what their own customers are saying in reviews — does there seem to be a trend of dissatisfaction in an area where you can directly help them please their customers?
Turn the Usual Methods Upside-Down
In many ways, Account-Based Marketing is turning the usual routine on its head. You’re doing the research on your prospects rather than your prospects researching you. Instead of looking to attract and filter down your leads through a tunnel, you’re deciding who your leads are and aggressively pursuing them.
You’re building that incredibly personalised approach that we advise you do for your customers, for your potential clients.
Why Does Account-Based Marketing Work?
It works for all the reasons stated above. It’s creating the personal experience that customers respond to, and it’s addressing specific concerns and showing you’ve done your research.
Rather than Sales placing clumsy cold calls that go nowhere, it’s imbuing Sales with the full power of Marketing to, over time, approach an account in a smart, measured, targeted, tactical manner to ultimately win them. You’re not wasting your time on leads that are unlikely to pan out. You’re pre-qualifying who would be a good fit, and you’re focusing your efforts where you’ve got the most chance of discovering a mutually beneficial, productive relationship.
Work with an ABM Partner to Accelerate Results
If all of this is enticing but you need a hand getting started, Flawless Inbound is ready to guide you through. We've got a free eBook for anyone looking to get a great overview of how to implement an inbound marketing strategy. We’ve helped more than 60 B2B organisations across Canada and the US get going with Inbound and Account-Based Marketing and are always happy to meet for a quick advisory call.