This culminated in November’s B2B Marketing Awards, where ABM featured in five categories.
It’s also reflected in Momentum’s growth over the past 12 months – as we’ve welcomed new clients and seen others increase ABM budgets, impressed by the ROI it delivers.
So as ABM becomes a must-have for B2B marketing teams, what’s in store for 2015?
New flavours of ABM
We’re starting to see some clear patterns emerge on how clients adopt ABM. This is influenced by a number of factors such as size, number and value of accounts, marketing maturity and budget availability.
In 2015 we expect that these patterns of adoption will turn into new forms of ABM. This provides opportunities to overlay ABM techniques on account segmentation models, applying different twists for different sets of customers.
1:1 stakeholder influence
As we all know, ABM is about reaching the individuals that make those all-important decisions.
We think that a key focus of ABM will be about building a better understanding of these stakeholders and their social circle of influence – both digitally and in the real world.
This will mean blending insights from a wide variety of sources to identify the behaviours and preferences of specific individuals.
ABM starts to scale
At Momentum, we’ll be finding new ways to help our customers scale ABM activities and embed them in their organisation.
A big part of this will be to promote ABM as more than ‘just’ a marketing initiative. For true scale and big results, it needs to propel the continued shift away from product-led to customer-led sales and marketing alignment.
Partnering for internal PR
We’re already seeing great results from ABM being used as a shared approach between clients and their customers. For example, our tech clients are using our services to partner with their customers’ IT teams when selling ideas to internal business audiences.
We expect this multi-way ABM to continue, as organisations get beyond a transactional approach and towards a partnership model that doesn’t end with the sale of the product or solution.
Marketing trends and ABM
We’ve done a scout round others’ marketing predictions for 2015. A few things stand out…the dominance of social and mobile, the growing role of data-driven micro targeting and personalisation, and the explosion in content marketing.
ABM crosses over each of these trends. Everything we do is micro targeted, all the content we produce is personalised, and social and mobile are an integral part in how we engage with accounts.
The challenge for us in 2015 is to continually raise the bar on how we do it.
Yes, this means coming up with even more innovative ideas. And yes, it means even better creative concepts.
But it also means grounding ABM in sales and marketing teams, for repeatable processes that deliver long-term value. As we’ve seen in many of our clients’ industries, this is becoming crucial for competitive edge as differentiation across products and solutions continues to be eroded.
