Aligning sales and marketing teams helps B2B companies reach higher customer lifetime value and sustained revenue growth. That’s why implementing a well-laid account-based marketing (ABM) strategy is a must. In contrast to mass marketing, ABM focuses specifically on high-value customers to build a more personalized approach to their needs for long-term retention.
That said, to make your account-based marketing rewarding and worth the effort, there’s a need for fresh and accurate B2B audience data. So let’s dive into the key factors for building a top-performing ABM strategy.
Key Benefits of Account-Based Marketing
It’s common knowledge that the acquisition of B2B customers is more pricey than that of B2C customers. So, the profitability of your overall marketing and sales efforts largely depends on whether you can increase the customer lifetime value of each account. Account-based marketing does just that as it allows you to:
- Identify the most promising accounts that might need additional services.
- Generate higher revenue since converting qualified prospects into buyers demand fewer resources.
- Retain high-value customers by personalizing your sales offers.
- Build long-term relationships, and turn them into advocates and referrals.
How to Build an Actionable ABM Campaign
Account-based marketing is an ICP-centered approach. So the starting point of it is defying your ideal buyer persona. Next, do the following:
1) Pinpoint the highest-value accounts. Aggregate first, second, and third-party data and match them with your ICP using martech tools.
2) Target your offers for key accounts. Whether you plan to serve B2B Facebook ads, reach through personalized emails, or warm calls, you’ll need a tailored approach. Design marketing materials that will appeal to your key accounts and work best for the ad format.
3) Define what KPIs you wish to track. When running an ABM campaign, in addition to conversion rate, it’s also important to measure the engagement, e.g., ad CTR, email open rate, and average time spent on a landing page.
4) Launch the campaign and track its results. Conversion and sales rates are fairly essential metrics. But you can also gauge the number of repeated deals and measure the impact of ABM on churn rate and pipeline acceleration.
Pros and Cons of Commonly Used AMB Martech
Although ABM automation platforms can assist you by bringing visibility across marketing and sales databases and automating B2B third-party data scraping, there are several limitations to be aware of.
The benefits of these tools are that they:
- Keep first-party data from marketing and sales updated and organized.
- Provide access to paid ads and email marketing automation.
- Provide keyword/IP traffic data to measure the potential of intent-based and local marketing.
On the other hand, the shortcomings of ABM automation tools are:
- Intent data origin is typically a black box. You can only wonder whether the intent data is relevant and up-to-date or not.
- Hard-to-attain сompleteness of coverage. It takes a whole stack of data providers to build a comprehensive ICP, and the main challenge is to find a way to cross-match their data.
- Closed ecosystem for data management. Most B2B customer data resources don’t have open API access. So marketers have to either deal with tons of CSV exports to append one data array to another or request custom data processing engines.
Merge ABM Data using B2B Audience Builders
It’s crucial to go beyond the native targeting functionality of data platforms to make the most out of your ABM campaigns. Audience-building tools like Primer enable you to enrich your CRM-based audiences with intent signals from 12+ data providers. So if you aim to win every benefit of account-based marketing and reach high-value customers with high match rates, you should definitely try such tools.
