The world of B2B marketing has been completely taken over by ABM initiatives.
Some people have referred to it as a "magic bullet" that can solve all of the problems that exist in marketing. Others have a muddled understanding of what it is and how one might begin participating in it.
The reality is that there is no secret to success in account-based marketing for technology companies.
It is neither a gimmick nor a panacea for all marketing ills that may befall a business. It is a procedure, the same as any other process in business-to-business marketing.
ABM requires a significant investment of time, expertise, and effort on top of its potential to bring many benefits to a company.
In this article, we will delve a little deeper into how to run an effective ABM for your B2B tech company.
B2B marketing has changed
There has been a huge increase in the cost of lead generation thanks to the increasingly competitive digital landscape.
The chief financial officer of Meta - stated that the average prices of Facebook ads have gone up as much as 24% year over year, with industry experts seeing this trend continuing on platforms such as Meta and TikTok.
source: Meta Reports Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2021 Results
Not only are increasing costs something businesses have to deal with, but gaining the attention of your ideal customers is getting harder.
Our lives are busier than ever and a study by Microsoft found that the average attention span of a website visitor, whether B2B OR B2C, is just eight seconds.
source: Microsoft
If you don’t grab that potential client in that time, it’s game over.
Last, but not least, traditional lead generation campaigns are of poor quality and the leads that do come through are unqualified.
According to Salesforce, in order to develop a viable sales lead, it requires anywhere from six to eight "touches".
"Today’s marketing and sales landscape looks vastly different from that of just a few decades ago. With the advent of the Internet, blogging, social media, and a myriad of digital communications channels, the path to purchase is not a simple, straight line, but a complex and varied web of twists and turns – and touch points."
source: Salesforce
So, as you can see, marketing has undergone big changes over the past few years, and your B2B tech company really has to step up to compete.
Why are B2B tech companies adopting ABM as part of their sales and marketing efforts?
Thanks to the technology that is available, ABM can be more precise and measurable than traditional approaches.
This makes the return on investment (ROI) more clear and makes the marketing and sales teams work better.
A study by the Alterra Group found that 97% of marketers got a better return on investment (ROI) from ABM than from any other type of marketing.
ABM also results in increased income; in businesses that have successfully integrated their sales and marketing teams, the marketing department earns revenue that is 208% higher.
source: Alterra
ABM is also a good idea for marketers because the amount they spend on marketing as a share of their revenue is at its lowest point in over a decade.
This is the case because marketing expenses have been steadily decreasing. Marketers are looking for solutions that would allow them to accomplish more with fewer resources.
Because it is both efficient and focused as a type of outreach, it results in significantly less waste than both traditional mass advertising and digital techniques that are less targeted.
How does ABM facilitate sales and marketing alignment in B2B tech?
Account-based marketing gives your company the chance to align its sales and marketing efforts in a more strategic and consistent way.
This is one of its biggest benefits. This is because ABM requires close collaboration between your sales and marketing teams, starting with the selection of target accounts and ending with an agreement on the metrics that will be used to measure the success of each campaign.
How to run an effective ABM Campaign for your B2B tech company
- Identify your TAL: Your Target Account List, also known as a TAL, is a list of the accounts that will be the focus of your company's marketing and sales activities.
Your Target Account List will include all of the information you have learned about your ideal customer, and the accounts on this list It should be a good match for the product or service that you are trying to sell.
When you have a complete TAL, it will be easier to target your advertising efforts, build new content marketing initiatives, and determine who in your sales force should send cold emails or make cold phone calls.
- Define your ICP: You also need to define your ideal customer profile, or ICP. In a survey done by Forrester, 56 percent of marketers said that giving customers content that is tailored to them is important to the success of ABM campaigns.
source: Forrester
Determining your ICP is one way to accomplish this goal. The ICP is usually made by combining firmographic, technological, and demographic factors.
It is an important way to figure out if you should target a certain account or not.
- Plan touchpoints and triggers: Now that you know exactly who you are targeting in your ABM campaign, you need to outline the buyer's journey with content that provides each stage of the marketing funnel with its own foolproof plan and binds the stages together.
We recommend doing this with a tool like LucidChart or Miro.
- Sales & Marketing Alignment: Both sales and marketing are involved in this process, albeit through distinct routes. Pushing out information on the website, social networks, email, etc. will most likely fall under the purview of marketing, which will have a larger share of this pie.
However, sales will continue to incorporate material into personal communications such as emails, phone calls, and meetings.
A sophisticated marketing automation platform and customer relationship management system are required to maintain this organization in such a way that no target account is sent the same material twice or content that is unrelated to their stage.
- Air Cover: This is a marketing play where you ensure that the buying committee is seeing relevant ads throughout the buyer’s journey.
Air Cover is designed to ensure you are omnipresent and to influence multiple people at your target accounts.
- Measure and Optimise: Advertising at the account level gives you the ability to optimize your campaigns on the fly using A/B testing, whereas many traditional marketing strategies do not permit you to optimize until after a campaign has run its course.
Look at the following:
- Interaction with ads
- Conversion metrics
- Overall engagement
- Reach
- ROI
- Sales cycle length
- Customer retention
This lets you see, as the campaign is running, which advertising ideas and marketing messages aren't getting through to your target audience.
This gives you the chance to quickly replace any copy or ads that aren't doing as well as you had hoped.
Final thoughts
ABM initiatives are built on the foundation of personalised content.
But your firm must still be managed on a large scale. Products, marketing campaigns, and customer service must all be customised for each individual client and lead. With account-based marketing, sales teams, and marketing teams can create a dynamic duo that has defined rules on who to target.
It has the potential to bring about an orderly restoration of your lead-generating activities, bring in things that are both new and highly relevant, and increase your bottom line.
