Account-based marketing (ABM). If you’re a B2B marketer, the chances are you’ve heard of it. But what is it exactly, and why is there so much fuss made of this B2B marketing strategy? Well, this blog will tell you everything you need to know (without the buzzwords).
What is an account-based marketing strategy?
Account-based marketing, or ABM, is the practice of treating individual accounts as markets in their own right. At the most basic level, this means:
- Identifying who your most important accounts are.
- Gathering as much insight on them as possible.
- Using that insight to align your proposition to their challenges.
- Crafting personalized marketing content and engagement around those challenges.
Do it well, and the evidence is undeniable: ABM can deliver huge revenue growth for your business. However, make no mistake, ABM is time and resource heavy, and requires serious thought, creativity, commitment and execution if it’s going to work. Of course, there are specific account-based marketing tools available, but you don’t need these to get started. ABM is about mindset, as much as it is anything else.
Before we go any further, it’s worth noting that ABM is not something you should use instead of demand generation or brand-building work. These areas are still critical to any successful B2B marketing strategy. In fact, to be as effective as possible, we recommend aligning your brand, demand generation and ABM strategies into one cohesive strategy – something we call Full Stack ABM (developed by our in-house ABM & Demand Strategy Expert, Robert Norum). If you’re already fairly advanced when it comes to ABM, we’d recommend you head straight there. If not, read on…
ABM delivers growth and increased retention
In a recent B2B Marketing ABM Census – a survey of hundreds of client-side B2B marketers – we asked our audience about the benefits they’ve seen since implementing ABM at their business.
In that census, we revealed that: 50% saw growth in existing accounts (from cross-selling and upselling); 51% won new accounts; 27% saw improved retention; and 33% saw an accelerated sales cycle. Clearly, there’s value to be had. This is despite the fact that 58% said the main reason they do ABM in the first place is purely to win new accounts.
It’s unsurprising, then, that approximately 46% of survey respondents said that they were increasing their investment in ABM in the coming 12 months. With that in mind, that means a whole B2B world out there that is getting more personalized and more targeted. That also means that, if you’re not following suit, you’re only becoming increasingly grey to your audience.
Fortunately (if you haven’t started implementing ABM), 16% of B2B marketers are in the ‘considering’ stage (i.e. haven’t even selected their accounts yet, but stakeholders are on board) and 28% are in the ‘preparing’ stage (i.e. sales and marketing have agreed on objectives of the ABM campaign, with each allocating resource to the effort). That means, if you haven’t started ABM, there’s time to catch up.
Significant investment required to do it properly
How much money do I need to put forward to run ABM? There is no one answer for this question, as it depends entirely on a number of factors, such as:
- How many accounts are you targeting?
- To what extent are you personalizing your communications? If you’re just adding first names to generic emails, that’s not enough!
- If you’re running personalized events, just how expensive are these?
- Do you need to purchase new technology to gather and organize the customer insight you need?
- Do you need to hire additional staff or work with agencies to focus on your target accounts?
However, be warned: doing ABM properly can take up a large proportion of your marketing budget, which can seem risky when you’re focusing that effort on a select few accounts. That’s why it’s so important to make sure you do, in fact, target the right accounts.
ABM is great, but not for everyone
ABM can offer some distinct and compelling advantages to sales and marketing teams in businesses where the products, pricing and buyers fit the ABM model.
But it isn’t a strategy that fits every business. If you are selling low-ticket products or services to a volume market, then ABM is not going to be for you.
However, you absolutely should consider ABM if:
- You are selling high-ticket products or services.
- You are selling to a high value, limited scale marketplace (fewer than 100 prospect accounts, for example).
- Your sales team has a high value-per-deal ratio.
- You have a target list of companies you want to win new business from or do more business with.
- Your buyer journey is sales team-led, rather than ecommerce-led.
Ultimately, this is simply because those larger customers are more likely to make that investment worth it in the first place.
ABM takes three core forms
At this point, it’s worth noting that there are three commonly used types of ABM. In layman’s terms, these are:
- One-to-one ABM: Where you treat one account separately from the rest of your demand generation work, with a separate marketing plan and strategy altogether.
- One-to-few ABM: Where you treat a handful of accounts separately from the rest of your demand generation work, with a separate plan and strategy, albeit with a degree of ‘standardization’ across your strategy.
- One-to-many ABM: The same principle as one-to-few ABM, but this time on a much greater scale, across potentially hundreds of accounts.
Note: whether or not one-to-many ABM is truly ABM is a point of contention amongst even the most senior of marketers. Some of the world’s leading voices in ABM argue it’s not even ABM!
What is an example of ABM?
Each year, our B2B Marketing Awards program celebrates the very best in B2B. With over 20 categories and hundreds of entries, each submission is judged by an independent panel of senior B2B marketing leaders, so you can be sure that each winning campaign, agency or marketer has fully earned their bragging rights.
With that in mind, at our 2023 event, Purple Agency and Kyndryl – a global provider of IT infrastructure services – won Gold for ‘Best use of ABM’, for their account-based marketing strategy called: “Time is of the essence: Bringing a data breach to life”. So, what did this campaign look like, and how did they use ABM to great effect?
Well, Kyndryl was tasked with having to convince an audience of senior leaders that its cyber-resilience services could be the critical factor in their business’ ability to recover from a data breach. Kyndryl and Purple Agency managed this by letting these leaders get to the conclusion themselves.
Using the principle of ‘show, don’t tell’, Purple Agency developed a customized, interactive simulation of a high-profile data breach. It did this by taking an account-based approach, focusing on 11 C-suite execs from one of Kyndryl’s key accounts. This simulation involved facilitator-led challenges, realistic video calls, media reports and social media storms. Attendees had to make crucial decisions against the clock to save their company from reputational and financial damage. The escape-room-style event, run by Kyndryl experts, drove home the value of having strong security and resilience procedures. It also resulted in a post-event report to add a practical edge to the educational session.
This simulation repositioned Kyndryl in the eyes of the client – elevating its status to that of a strategic advisor. In turn, this paved the way for Kyndryl to reinforce the relationship, build a pipeline and grow an important account.
The full case study is only available to members of Propolis – our global community for B2B marketers – but the headline is that this campaign led to hundreds of thousands of dollars in pipeline in the first month, with contract negotiations in place.
The future: Is account-based marketing dead?
One final thing to acknowledge here is that ABM is not new. In fact, it was first codified around 20 years ago. So, is account-based marketing dead? No. Quite the opposite, in fact. With new technologies constantly emerging, and buyer behavior continuing to evolve, ABM does not stand still. Whilst this blog intends to provide an overview to what ABM is and how it works, creating an effective ABM strategy in today’s day and age requires a lot of time, investment and thinking power.
If you’d like to learn more about how you can start with ABM, or how you can take your strategy to the next level, we recommend you learn more about Propolis – the global community for B2B marketers, helping you to start to put a world-class ABM strategy in place, today. If you want to dive right into just some of the tools Propolis has to offer to help you become a well-rounded ABMer, we suggest you check out our free ABM Strategy Pack.
