You may have thought that good old-fashioned relationship building belonged to the last millennium? In light of new cookie tracking rules and iOS updates, it's actually become more important than ever!
What is ABM?
Account Based Marketing (ABM) is a B2B strategy where you focus one-on-one on building relationships with your prospects and customers (accounts) to personally guide them through your sales process.
Who is ABM for?
ABM is for you if you:
- Selling products or services to businesses (B2B).
- Have an active business relationship with your customers.
- Solves a specific problem for an industry, company role or business growth stage.
- Have a high value of your products and/or services (NOK 100,000+)
- Have long sales cycles (4 weeks+)
Traditionally, the goal of many companies is to run broad campaigns that reach the largest possible audience. For B2B, this isn't always the best option and in some cases it's better to focus on person-to-person communication to sell your products. ABM is based on just that.
If you don't feel your business fits into these categories, we recommend you take a closer look at Inbound Marketing and how you can create value for the customer at every stage of the customer journey.
You probably already work with ABM
In fact, most already use several methods that are common in ABM. You know your customer well and know about their biggest customers, their problems and growth opportunities, what customizations they need, etc. These are customer relationships that develop naturally when you have a product that solves a problem. The challenge is not to build relationships, but how to systemize them.
The most important thing you can do for your customer is to take what you already do to the next level. By moving from letting relationships develop more or less randomly, to seeking out potential customers with the aim of building good relationships and lasting customer relationships, you will quickly notice a difference.
Get started
But how should you get started with ABM? An important goal is to identify who in a company is:
- Researching products and services
- Influences purchase decisions
- Making buying decisions
This used to be an expensive, labor-intensive and manual process. Today, any business with access to systems that automate marketing and marketing communications can easily eliminate much of the manual work involved in searching for data on potential customers. Such systems are often referred to as CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and CLM (Customer Lifecycle Management) systems. HubSpot, webCRM, Salesforce, etc. are examples of such systems.
Email automation is where these services are strongest. In addition to traditional email marketing, a good ABM strategy also involves a good Content Marketing strategy. In this part of the process, you produce information that is relevant to the potential customer's business and map out where they are in the buying process.
Elements of an ABM campaign
An ABM campaign will be different for every customer. Everyone has unique needs and challenges that require unique approaches, but there is one overarching process that will be the same for everyone:
- Align sales and marketing departments
- It is important for the flow of communication to the customer that the sales team and the marketing team are on the same page. Intersecting communication can easily put an end to sales
- Collect data to identify potential customers
- Finding decision makers and decision influencers
- Personalize your message while focusing on your business challenges and needs
- Identify which communication channels you will use to reach your business
- Evaluate the impact of your efforts through the sales process
If you want to read more about ABM and learn about interesting cases, check out this page.