What you’ve heard is true: Account-based marketing is the gold-standard for B2B marketing in 2020. If you’re not already going after specific, high-value accounts with personalized messaging, there’s no way you’re getting a competitive ROI from your marketing department.
The biggest strength of ABM is the ability to unite your marketing and sales by providing them with always-on reporting technologies, letting your higher-ups spend much more time managing campaigns and closing deals, and less time sending emails. This makes it one of the most scalable, modern digital marketing tactics available to enterprise-level businesses in the B2B sector.
Why B2B companies are gravitating toward ABM
To make a long story short, ABM strategies have been the leading way to create sales opportunities for over 10 years, and, as a result, the number of ABM platforms and technologies dedicated to the practice is on the rise. According to a 2014 ITSMA survey, ABM delivers the highest ROI of any other B2B marketing strategy, and that was six years ago. More recently, Engagio found companies that utilize ABM often allocate the greatest portion of their budget to the strategy—around 29% on average. Marketing is a lot like investing: The smartest individuals put their money where it’s bound to multiply, and that’s why the best marketers in North America are putting all the money they can into ABM. 87% of account-based marketers report their ABM strategies significantly outperform their other marketing investments, so what’s keeping your business from getting that same stellar return on investment?
Getting Your B2B Marketing Team On Board
Even though ABM makes a promise to increase ROI and reduce inter-departmental headaches, it will always take convincing to bring five, 10, or 25 people on-board with a strategy they’re unfamiliar with. Any time a new business strategy becomes popular, some of the most skeptical adopters will always be the ones who are doing just fine. As ABM requires participation from everyone—from sales to the C-suite—it will only be adopted if every level of employment and management understands exactly which pain points it’s going to address for their business.
B2B marketers, specifically, face a unique set of challenges that can be solved by utilizing the SEO My Business ABM tactics:
Disconnects with the sales team: One company, two different teams trying to achieve the same goal—ABM will unite their efforts inherently, by providing them with the same data in real-time.
Pressure to produce quality sales opportunities:Targeting leads who will never convert is a waste of time—ABM can pinpoint a smaller number of leads that are more likely to engage and concert.
Lack of man-hours for planning deals:There are only 24 hours in a day and anywhere between 40 to 50 hours in the workweek. ABM automatically pushes accounts down the funnel more rapidly, and it works at any time of day, without anyone on your sales or marketing team having to intervene.
ABM Strategies for Solving B2B Marketing Woes
The first B2B challenge that can be solved by ABM is getting your sales and marketing teams on the same page. In many organizations, marketing and sales departments lack transparency—leaving room for wasted effort when targeting and chasing accounts.
The ABM model promotes synergy between marketing and sales divisions by having them link up at the start of the endeavor: Marketers work closely with sales professionals to target accounts, and then use their input to create a schedule of content syndication and engagement opportunities. Once it’s time to close a sale, your sales team will have a history of client engagement that’s detailed on a level they’ve probably never seen before, because it’s pretty much impossible to provide without an ABM campaign up and running.
The second challenge confronted by business-facing enterprises is creating a steady pipeline of quality leads. For the most part, B2B models can’t rely on most lead-generation marketing tactics because there isn’t an audience large enough to make lead-gen-based spends a good return on investment. B2B companies often make 10 to 100 times less total revenue transactions than B2C companies do—and that’s exactly why you should be 10 to 100 times more specific about who your marketing content reaches. Expect to see the same channels active— content marketing, paid search, SEO, and programmatic will all be big players used to move accounts through the sales funnel, but your scale (and thus your total spend) will always be scaled down to the smaller audience comprised of players qualified to do business with you.
The last challenge ABM can fix: not enough time. Time is money, and who knows how many marketers you’re paying to source leads, create assets, manage reporting, and make cold-calls. With a switch to ABM, your brand new data stack will do plenty of these tasks for you, leaving your marketing team with fewer tasks to do per day, and your sales team completely focused on only one thing: closing deals.
The ABM model promotes synergy between marketing and sales divisions by having them link up at the start…
Calculating the ABM ROI for B2B Companies
So you’re interested in ABM, but where do you start? We suggest heading to our ROI Calculator to measure how much a modern ABM strategy would benefit your company. If you’re impressed with that number, get in touch with our full-stack ABM team to learn more.
