The future of account-based marketing (ABM) image

The future of account-based marketing (ABM)

Pawan Deshpande, CEO, Curata, Ricky Abbott, marketing and strategy director, Pulse, Robert Hollier, director of strategy, Momentum ABM, and Tommy Powell, VP marketing, GrowthIntel, provide answers

What’s behind the explosion of ABM’s popularity as a marketing tool?

Account-based marketing was the product of a perfect storm of technological advancements, self-discipline and streamlining. The main drivers can be categorised thus: 

Efficiency: In a time when ROI is the best (if not only) indication of a job well done, the inefficiencies of an inbound-only marketing model have become apparent. 

Such is the complexity of sectors like tech and pharma that buyers find it hard to know just what they’re buying, which makes traditional messaging insufficient. Challenging products are compounded by large buyer groups, problems an account-based approach can address.   

Also, through a conscious and determined effort to align sales and marketing, ABM offers a way to overcome typically dysfunctional cross-departmental relationships.

Technology:  Until recently the practice mainly revolved around DM and sales tactics, but the proliferation of new technology and social channels has enabled both sales and marketing to focus on targeted account lists. Hyper-segmentation and personalisation is enabling teams to target specific prospects with the right messages.

Lead scoring and predictive intelligence has also made it possible for businesses to be more selective with target accounts, and therefore more confident about spending time, money and effort trying to convert them.   

Are we making the most of its capabilities?

The resounding opinion is that marketers are so near but yet so far. While many are practising ABM to an extent, very few are using all the channels available. Persona-building is often conducted through introspection – focusing on how to sell to the customer as opposed to addressing their painpoints. 

On top of this, ABM technology and tools for content marketers are in a primitive phase of development, despite being one of the most significant areas of growth for both sales and marketing teams. Sales and marketing teams are rarely aligned enough to ensure a cohesive approach towards each target account.

How widespread will ABM become as a marketing tool?

Although ABM is an undeniably hot topic at the moment with scores of marketers gradually finessing their approach, it can only go so far. This is because it’s an answer to problems set against a specific context. For example, account-based tactics are far less effective for low-cost mass-market products. On the other hand, if a company’s products or services are high-cost and niche, there’s little excuse for not practising ABM, and as a result, adoption rates are forecast to flourish.

There’s a compelling argument that at some point in the not-so-distant future the industry will drop the term ‘ABM’ completely; instead it will be the natural way to market (not unlike the obsolescence of the term ‘digital’ marketing.) 

Will technologies make ABM more scalable?

There’s no doubt that technological advancements are enhancing the way marketers can scale ABM strategy. Many vendors are banging the drum about ABM en mass and are making a big impact on the market. However, the focus is often on distribution and analytics which is an important but small part of the overall landscape.

For smaller organisations, scalability is still a source of difficulty. By its very nature, ABM is about targeting manageable sets of top-tier prospects; a surefire way to fail at it is to target too many prospects, where there’s a risk of diluting efforts by sacrificing personalisation. Research and personalisation are the two most critical elements of a successful ABM campaign, and both are difficult to scale in smaller organisations. 

There’s a strong argument that automation will gather more momentum when people (rather than machines) start to marry data with traditional ABM techniques to do something new. For example, marketers could use intent data from multiple sources to identify likely customers and begin ABM activity accordingly. 

Nonetheless, there are three key areas where ABM is becoming more scalable:

1. Identifying target accounts: This is being enabled by new technology from the likes of Datanyze and DataFox.

2. Creating content for those accounts: This is possibly the biggest impediment to scaling ABM at the moment, but it’s becoming possible to rapidly produce personalised content through curation software such as Curata and natural language generation software like Wordsmith.

3. Distributing content: This is a practice that’s becoming increasingly manageable through website personalisation technology such as Showpad or Demandbase, retargeting software like Terminus, and DM from Printing-For-Less.

But the human element will remain critical. Content marketers will find themselves in demand with outbound as well as inbound teams as businesses realise that in ABM a single, well-researched, beautifully written and highly personalised email to a sweet-spot target can be just as (if not more) important to their revenue as a newsletter to 10,000 subscribers. 

What are the most exciting emerging trends in ABM?

Sales and marketing alignment: ABM has always encouraged sales and marketing alignment, and as it gathers more momentum teams are working out new ways to collaborate on targeting accounts. On seeing the positive impact this activity is having on the bottom line, both sales and marketing leaders are becoming more open-minded to cross-departmental development. 

Technology and analytics: This is having a knock-on effect on the sales and marketing technology landscape. The alignment of the departments works similarly to peer-review, and involves having sales critically asses the performance of marketers through their own technology (like CRM and MA). A particularly hot trend is gathering meaningful insight on all marketing activity on all clients all the way through the funnel.   

*Part one of this feature addresses the confusion surrounding the topic and seeks to define what ABM really is.  
*Part two explores the practicalities of ABM and provides specialist guidance on strategies.

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