What is Account Based Marketing?

What is ABM?

Account based marketing (ABM) is a concept that has been around for over 10 years. It is a marketing strategy that focuses on targeting accounts or individuals within an organisation. Marketers do this by finding out who their target customer is and then tailoring their message to this group. This type of targeted marketing and selling has also been used in traditional marketing and selling. They focused on specific organizations, over time developing a relationship with the decision makers within the organization, supporting them with personalized information based on their needs until they were ready to make a buying decision. The modern ABM approach makes this even easier with the help of data and technologies.

Account based marketing (ABM) is a customer-centric approach to digital marketing that focuses on the individual needs of potential customers.

A key component of ABM is the use of data to identify, segment and target specific accounts. This includes both customer data within your CRM system as well as external data sources such as social media platforms or other websites.

The goal of Account Based Marketing is to develop relationships with potential and current customers by developing personalised experiences for each account, leading to increased engagement and conversion rates.

Benefits of ABM

ABM is a type of marketing where the focus is on maximising value for each customer. This type of marketing is also known as "customer-centric" or "one-to-one" marketing.

There are many advantages to ABM, such as:

1. It can be a very cost-effective way to acquire customers
2. It is more relevant and leads to a better customer experience
3. It can be more effective than other types of marketing
4. Increased customer satisfaction
5. More qualified leads

Challenges of ABM

ABM is a powerful and effective marketing strategy, but it can be difficult to implement and execute.

Here are some examples of challenges with ABM:

• Lack of time and/or resources
• Lack of budget 
• Lack of skills
• Lack of access to data or poor quality data
• Insufficient knowledge of the customer 

Some examples of the use of ABM:

Personalised and customised content on the website

Personalised and customised content allows you to provide a tailored content experience for individual target accounts. For example, it can be used to educate your target audience based on what stage they are in the customer journey. In this way, you can respond to needs, questions, educate, build credibility, trust and drive conversions. 

ABM technologies (or Marketing Automation/CRM systems with these features) can be used to create a segment, e.g. for visitors from a specific company, and send them to a landing page where there is customised content based on their specific challenges and circumstances.

Targeted ads

Targeted ads can be used on both "regular" ad platforms and social media. This means you can achieve an omnichannel experience to your potential customers.

The most important thing about targeted advertising and ABM is to be relevant. Your ABM list may have your top 15 accounts, but that doesn't mean you've identified any kind of shared need that those accounts have. But if you can tap into some key challenges that your buyers face and tie them to your value proposition, you'll see warmer prospects when they reach your landing page. 

Segmented email campaigns

Similar to the methods above, it is important that you create relevant content for your chosen accounts.

Keep in mind that not all accounts selected will necessarily have the same needs and issues. It is important to start from the challenges and needs of the specific target group and adapt the content of different channels to them and how you can help them solve their challenges.

Once you've created your content and segment, you can then decide which content is best suited to the different channels such as social channels, website, email or perhaps even direct contact via a sales rep.