What is Account-Based Marketing? You could stick with ‘spray and pray’ marketing, but did you know that 92% of marketers worldwide believe account-based marketing is important to their marketing efforts? So how can you take your ABM program further and create engaged advocates? To do account-based marketing well, you have to know what to focus on at each stage. Unlike typical lead marketing that hopes to attract someone who might be interested, this ABM funnel stage focuses on finding the right person. Engage: The Engage stage is all about getting the right content out on the right channel. Takeaway #3: Use video in 5 ways to amp up your ABM program Tyler wouldn’t leave you wondering how to use the most powerful medium in your ABM program. Personalized video email campaigns Video can do some amazing things, but even video can be taken further. Want to see for yourself what a personalized video is like? Video engagement: Who, what, how long Engagement data is key to a strong ABM program.
For many marketing organizations, ABM is a powerful acronym these days. To helps marketers harness that power, we hosted a few ABM marketing expert panelists last week to chat about account-based marketing, and the secret weapon you can arm that can make your ABM program truly remarkable in 2017. This is a recap of that webinar session.
What is Account-Based Marketing?
Before we can get into the experts’ discussion on how to take your ABM program to the next level, let’s back up a bit. There are varying definitions of what account-based marketing is, so to provide valuable insights for your ABM strategy, it’s best to define it for the purposes of this blog: ABM’s focus is on generating awareness and demand within targeted customer accounts rather than individual leads. Instead of the ‘spray and pray’ mentality of putting your marketing out there and hoping you’ll hit someone who’s interested, account-based marketing is more like a ‘dart gun’ approach, where you determine which companies are most likely to become customers, and then you target them specifically with your marketing efforts.
Is ABM imperative to your marketing efforts?
You could stick with ‘spray and pray’ marketing, but did you know that 92% of marketers worldwide believe account-based marketing is important to their marketing efforts? That’s because lead generation, which focuses on marketing to individual leads, doesn’t typically account for how the decision-making process in enterprises works; the average B2B process now requires 5.4 signatures, according to Harvard Business Review! So if your marketing is just attracting one person, it may be the wrong person who doesn’t have the decision-making influence you need to close the deal.
Account-based marketing is also focused on advocacy; you can truly drive revenue when you focus on the most valuable accounts, engaging them on a deeper and more personal level so they not only become customers, they become advocates. This leads to more opportunity to up-sell, cross-sell, gain referrals, and build a long-term loyal customer base.
ABM is an exciting opportunity for marketing organizations. So how can you take your ABM program further and create engaged advocates? Here are a few takeaways from the recent webinar:
Takeaway #1: How ABM works using the ‘flipped funnel’
Sangram Vajre, one of the panelists of the webinar, is co-founder and CMO of Terminus. He is also the founder of the #FlipMyFunnel community. #FlipMyFunnel focuses on flipping the traditional marketing funnel for the purpose of account-based marketing:
The traditional marketing funnel’s stages typically include: Awareness, Interest, Consideration and Purchase. A few years ago, Sangram recognized that this may not be the most effective way to reach the leads who would be most likely to become customers. In fact, Sangram said, 99% of what we do traditionally as marketers doesn’t drive revenue for the company. That’s not a stat any marketer would be pleased about. So, feeling inspired and trying to work through and explain his idea, Sangram drew the funnel, but flipped, on a napkin, and renamed the funnel stages to Identify, Expand, Engage, and Advocate.
What do these new funnel stages mean?
To do account-based marketing well, you have to know what to focus on at each stage.
- Identify: This stage is all about identifying your best-fit customers. Sangram says that it has never been easier to determine who these customers are; there are lists you can buy and companies you can work with if you want extra help figuring out who you should be targeting and who would benefit most from your product or service.
- Expand: In the Expand stage, this is where you put your focus on the right people. Unlike typical lead marketing that hopes to attract someone who might be interested, this ABM funnel stage focuses on finding the right person. So many people can influence the decision-making process in a company, so if you’re focused on just one or two people, you may be talking to the wrong people rather than the decision-makers. This will slow down your processes and ultimately limit how much revenue you can bring into your company.
- Engage: The Engage stage is all about getting the right content out on the right channel. Sangram also says that this is the most fun part of the funnel. We get to be creative and focus on creating content that will wow our customers, like videos, case studies, landing pages and more. And, since you’ve now identified the accounts you want to target, and you have determined who the right people are, you can figure out how to engage them in the ways that will get them to take notice. Sangram advises that you engage with people…
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