Account Based Marketing isn’t just a form of strategic business marketing – when implemented properly, it can also be a perfect opportunity for self-reflection.
The founding principles of ABM require a business to take individual prospects or customer accounts into careful consideration, treating each one like its very own market.
It’s commonly employed in B2B efforts as a way to guarantee maximum engagement in all stakeholders in a given sale. One of the keys to properly implementing Account Based Marketing involves learning how it varies from other marketing strategies.
Account Based Marketing vs. Inbound Marketing – The Difference
Though Inbound Marketing and Account Based Marketing seem similar, they’re both striking at two subtly different goals.
Inbound marketing for example focuses on creating the engaging, informative content needed to bring prospects directly to you.
ABM allows you to put a deeper, more organic emphasis on individual prospects or existing accounts, putting you in a better position to service those very specific needs.
In many ways, Inbound Marketing hands off to Account Based Marketing efforts in a perfect world.
This is a large part of the reason why, over the past year alone, there has been a 21% increase in the number of organizations that have taken steps to implement full Account Based Marketing programs within their own organizations.
The Core Pillars of Account Based Marketing
Much like all marketing and outreach efforts, the process of Account Based Marketing begins by first identifying your target.
Who are you trying to reach? This gives you a starting point to research your account, identifying which people need to see or hear at which times.
Remember that you can’t effectively connect with someone if you don’t know where they’re coming from in the first place.
Next, you can create content to help appeal to the account you’re currently targeting in a way that aligns with both your goals.
Choosing your channels (be it in the form of content-based outreach like white papers, social media and more) helps you identify the platform you can use to communicate your message, which then leaves the road open to run your campaign.
Finally, the only thing left to do is to measure your results.
Pay attention to how these efforts are increasing metrics like customer lifetime value. Take inventory of what has been work and how you can repeat that process with other account efforts.
Understand That ABM is Always Evolving
Though the core steps of Account Based Marketing don’t change, the specifics of how they’re executed are often in flux.
Participating in events like the 2017 Content Marketing Conference is a great way to learn about breakthroughs in terms of Account Based Marketing directly from leading content marketing experts like Brian Halligan (CEO of inbound innovator HubSpot) and more.
Account Based Marketing is critical for working directly with the stakeholders within a given sale and the needs of those stakeholders will always vary depending on the unique situation you find yourself in.