Account based marketing (ABM) lets you focus efforts on individual accounts and individuals within those accounts to deliver personalization at scale. ABM is a significant improvement from cold calls, inbound marketing, and B2B demand generation strategies to target high-value customers.
By targeting the right buyers with the right strategy, it minimizes wasteful spending on customers who aren’t a good fit for our products and services while engaging those customers who are a good fit at a much deeper level.
To optimize performance, however, it takes more than an account based marketing execution strategy. The marketing and sales team must take ABM strategies to the next level with account based experience (ABX) management.
Here are six reasons why ABM and ABX matter.
Overcomes Marketing Team Challenges
Research by Folloze in partnership with The Demand Gen Report shows marketers feel they are facing three top challenges in today’s B2B environment:
- Buyer Experience: The way B2B buyers navigate the buying process has changed dramatically. Marketers must have the tools they need to deliver the experience buyers want.
- Buyer Engagement: The ability to deliver the right content at the right time in the customer journey with the right marketing channel strategy.
- Buyer Personalization: Creating personalized messaging, content, and campaigns at scale.
ABM solutions allow marketing teams to overcome these challenges with intelligent content orchestration to enhance B2B demand generation and deliver the account based experience buyers need.
Works for B2B Buyers at Each Stage of their Buying Journey
Since 44% of buyers say they identify the specific solution they want before reaching out to sales teams, if you’re not in the conversation once they have reached that stage, you won’t even have an opportunity to make a sale.
Account based experience lets you craft the buying experience the way buyers approach the process. As they begin the buyer’s journey, they often want to remain anonymous and unidentified. They’re not ready to deal with salespeople. By creating the content that fuels discovery, you can improve your B2B demand generation and capture leads.
When buyers are ready to engage, B2B account based marketing provides the relevant and helpful information they need that is customized to their needs. Having data-driven insights from your ABM platform, you can ensure that each contact is worthy of the buyer’s attention and optimized to drive them through the journey to the next stage.
Optimizes the Buyer Experience
Personalized marketing can go beyond just targeting and content. When your account based marketing execution optimizes the buyer experience, your B2B demand generation and your conversion rates increase.
The right ABM platform will allow you to:
- Deliver an interactive experience
- Optimize content for the entire buying team
- Include content orchestration to build greater value and trust
- Empower your frontline marketers to personalize at scale
- Provide self-serve options for buyers to support discovery
A buyer-centric approach, focused on the buyer experience, can accelerate your B2B account based marketing performance. Our research shows this leads to as much as four times greater engagement, 10X pipeline growth, and a 5X increase in customer lifetime value (CLV).
Delivers Deep Buyer Insights
The key to making ABM solutions work for you is the ability to leverage deep insights from real-time data. When you can assess buying team and account engagement down to the individual level, it provides a way to evaluate individual content and marketing channel strategy throughout the entire buyer's journey. This tells you what’s working and what’s not and when is the right time for your sales team to engage.
The best B2B marketing platform will track the metrics you need to optimize your content orchestration at both an account and individual level, including:
- Number of content views
- Duration of content views
- Forwarding or sharing of content
- Call to action (CTA) execution
- Track personalized links, cookies, IP and identity matching
With the right ABM solutions, you can use both first-party data and third-party data to analyze engagement and conversions. Artificial Intelligence (AI) can deliver a rich multidimensional account context, such as business context, buyer intent, and firmographics.
These buyer insights, coupled with AI, will recommend the right content most likely to fuel B2B demand generation, engagement, and conversions. The most relevant, high-performing content will be delivered with personalization at scale. Dynamic messaging, imagery, and content are delivered at the right time in the buyer's journey.
Creates Internal Alignment
Sales and marketing teams that are aligned in their goals are 67% more efficient at closing sales. They achieve 38% higher sales win rates and generate as much as 209% more revenue from their marketing efforts.
Effective account based marketing execution creates a holistic approach to marketing and sales efforts to align goals and create a seamless journey for buyers. Employing an account based experience (ABX) across your organization, you ensure that marketing teams, sales teams, sales development reps, and customer success teams all work together to deliver a coordinated experience.
This allows you to connect with buyers when and how they want to engage. Besides delivering engaging content with your B2B marketing platform, an account based approach also produces the content and self-serve tools for buyers as they do their due diligence. Since more than 70% of buyers now define their needs before engaging with a sales rep, making sure you have the right approach for discovery is essential.
Works Better the More You Use It
The more data that’s input, the better your ABM platform will perform.
Creating account based experiences forms deeper engagements with B2B buyers using strategic content orchestration and personalized messaging. While account based experiences connect with individual stakeholders within accounts, the data helps tell you which content and marketing is producing the most effective results.
This data not only fuels individual accounts but is also aggregated across accounts to uncover patterns. It can create deep insights to make every account experience more effective. As your ABM platform monitors performance, data becomes the foundation for the AI to determine the best content and marketing channel for effectiveness.
By segmenting accounts — and account data — you can uncover the behaviors that signal intent so your sales team can engage at the right time in the buyer journey with the context they need to drive the sale.
Want to learn more about how to take your AMB to the next level? Contact Folloze today for a demo and see how we can drive growth across your entire customer lifecycle.
