In a world where every customer and every prospect has their own unique needs and requirements, traditional marketing content produced with broad strokes at a high level doesn’t always have the powerful impact that it should. Every customer is different and will respond differently to different messaging depending on the industry and size of their company, point in the sales cycle, or even their role within the company. The fact of the matter is, while your marketing team wants to get the attention of any and all potential buyers, a disproportionate share of most companies’ revenues come from just the top handful of clients. So why not focus a portion of your marketing efforts on just this group?
What is account-based marketing?
Nearly ten years ago, ITSMA coined the term “account-based marketing” to define a strategy for marketers to hyper-focus marketing efforts on key accounts. Account-based marketing is a tactic used jointly by sales and marketing teams in order to create extremely focused and relevant content for important customers and optimize their experience. Whether geared towards existing customers, prospects, or a combination of both, account-based marketing allows marketers to identify a customer’s specific needs and create directed communications strategies that address them explicitly.
How does account-based marketing work?
These programs can be as deeply concentrated as your team sees fit. For example, some account-based marketing programs are designed to create a series of content customized towards the largest handful of companies in a given industry, while others go as far as to utilize IP tracking technology to create a unique and personalized experience for when an individual prospect visits your website. An essential piece of account-based marketing is for sales and marketing teams to align their efforts to define who the program should target and how concentrated it should be.
Account-based programs can target accounts by several different categories, whether by revenue potential, industry, size of the company, strategic significance, or even point in the sales cycle. Sales has a list of target accounts they are trying to penetrate and marketing wants to ensure its messaging and content is helping support sales achieve revenue goals. It is vital in account-based marketing to unite these efforts early to first define which accounts or which segment of accounts should be targeted. Once the segment of accounts is defined, sales and marketing must work together to define messaging that will be curated to engage the chosen group most effectively.
Why is it significant?
Account-based marketing allows sales to use its own information on customers (who has responded to certain outreach in the past and which unique points of pain are experienced by them) to gain a competitive advantage. Marketing can then use these insights in tandem with their already-defined messaging to create modified content tailored directly to the needs of a specific type of customer.
In executing account-based marketing programs, the goal is for marketing to identify hyper-relevant propositions through content in order to optimize engagement and drive sales. Once such programs have been executed it is important to consistently evaluate its effectiveness in order to learn and adapt the messaging as needed.
Overall, while there is a significant amount of time, planning and effort involved in executing an effective account-based marketing strategy, the response from your customers that result from it is substantial. The high degree of personalization impresses customers and allows you to demonstrate how well you understand their needs and how you can help. These types of interactions with customers not only result in higher revenue streams, but happier customers as well.
