The 2020 ABM Benchmark Survey shows that 98% of companies surveyed are currently using or plan to adopt B2B account based marketing as a strategy. More than half (57%) are already using ABM solutions and B2B demand generation strategies.
For many companies, ABM has proven somewhat difficult to execute at scale. This is usually because of one of four reasons:
- They don’t have buy-in from top leadership.
- They don’t have alignment between marketing and sales.
- They are not leveraging the data throughout the entire customer journey.
- They are using the wrong ABM platform.
You already know that to get any B2B marketing platform to produce the results you need, you need buy-in and alignment between sales and marketing. Yet, we’re always surprised how often businesses fail to take these two critical steps.
Here’s one example. 59% of marketers say they know the kind of content sales needs to engage customers. However, only 35% of sales reps agree. There are still major disconnects in the sales/marketing relationship in many companies. You’ve got to fix that first. The marketing team must have a solid understanding of what sales needs to engage customers and drive deals.
Really, account-based marketing should be called account based marketing AND SALES.
If you haven’t done those two steps and aligned your sales and marketing efforts, get to it!
For now, we’re going to assume you’ve got the buy-in and alignment. So, let’s focus on how to grow and retain your customer base.
Leveraging Your Data
Growing your engagement requires more than just traditional personalized marketing. Aim for micro-targeted experiences by leveraging analytics. Analytics provide the deep insight required to hone in the type of content your prospects engage with so you can tailor future experiences to help drive them through the customer journey.
This is all part of intelligent sales orchestration using a closed-loop process to combine targeting, activation, personalization, and insights. By delivering these micro-targeted campaigns as part of your account based marketing execution, you can deliver the right content and take the right actions to help nurture prospects and close pipeline opportunities.
Working together, sales and marketing teams can use data to identify the content that is needed at various stages of the buyer’s journey. Marketing can then create the materials, allowing for personalization at scale, and leverage data to deliver it at exactly the right time.
By analyzing the data, marketing teams can also find the exact point in the buyer's journey when it’s time for the sales team to engage for optimal results.
Using the Right ABM Platform
The right B2B account based marketing platform will gather and analyze data in several different ways. Besides gathering first-party data from prospect interactions, your ABM platform should also incorporate third-party data, including cookies, identity matching, and IP matching to help you narrow your targets.
This rich data framework provides better context and indicates intent to help you form a more personalized marketing strategy.
At Folloze, for example, we use artificial intelligence (AI) to sift through a vast amount of data to create intelligent content nomination. Not only do we focus on the next logical step in the customer journey, but our predictive analysis engine shows you the most relevant and highest-performing content to deliver to specific accounts at the exact right time. It happens in real-time and includes dynamic messaging and imagery.
When you deliver the right content at the right stage of the customer journey – enhanced by personalization and intent – you can count on increased engagement.
When prospects take specific actions, this triggers a series of events to drive them forward. That takes us right back to leveraging the data. As B2B buyers move through the customer journey, you are gathering more data at every stage. The AI continuously optimizing performance by measuring what moved customers from one stage to the next or what failed to produce the desired results. This increases performance as more data is gathered.
Your B2B marketing platform should also aggregate engagement activities across multiple touchpoints and by account. This lets you more easily measure the ROI of your ABM solutions.
Target Prospects and Existing Customers
In sales, we are always focused on finding new customers and building our revenue base. It’s important to continue to grow. However, this shouldn’t be done at the expense of your current customers. Even if you grow new business, as existing customer churn, you won’t increase your overall revenue.
Nurturing existing customers also leads to more sales. In the book, Marketing Metrics: The Definitive Guide to Measuring Marketing Performance, research shows that the probability of selling to a new prospect is between 5% and 20%, while the odds of selling to existing customers are 60-70%.
Your current customers have already purchased your goods or services. There is an established level of trust that already exists. This allows you to shortcut so much of the sales process.
The same B2B demand generation and ABM solutions can help you market to existing customers to grow strategic accounts. By creating content that is relevant to your existing customers and continuing to nurture them after the sale, you can keep them engaged and build better relationships.
Grow and Retain Your Customer Base
These strategies help you grow and retain your customer base.
There are good reasons to adopt B2B account based marketing. Effective ABM solutions outperform other types of marketing in terms of ROI according to 87% of B2B marketers surveyed by ITSMA. When customers are more engaged, ABM provides measurable improvements in reputation, relationship, and revenue.
- Reputation: helps drive top-of-mind awareness, name recognition, and trust
- Relationship: helps engage key targets and deepens relationships
- Revenue: helps grow and improve pipeline development, improves win rates, and increases deal size.
Improve the Buyer Experience
Trusted by top brands, Folloze has powered more than 300,000 B2B marketing campaigns, engaged with millions of buyers, and delivered more than $10 billion into sales pipelines. To learn more about the Folloze platform and how you can improve the Buyer Experience, contact the B2B marketing experts at Folloze today to request a demo.
