Top 7 Best Practices for Account-Based Marketing in 2022
Businesses are increasingly opting for account-based marketing (ABM) as they move towards providing a more customer-centric approach. Organizations are moving beyond the traditional marketing models to keep up with changing business conditions, this means adopting new strategies.
Account-based marketing is one such strategy that is gaining popularity and has become an effective demand generation channel. ABM lets marketers focus their time, effort, and resources on generating leads for high-quality accounts.
It is best suited for the B2B sector, where the buyer journey is long and complex and buyers need to be informed at every stage of the purchase process. Given its potential, it comes as no surprise that it has become a popular demand generation channel in recent years. This year will see some key trends emerging as account-based marketing evolves every year.
Account-based marketing is quickly becoming the norm for B2B marketers, so it’s no surprise that this technology has continued to evolve over the past few years. ABM has evolved into an orchestration of data and information throughout the customer lifecycle to provide end-to-end personalization.
ABM calls for the conjunction of the sales and marketing trends and allows sales and marketing teams to collaborate to scale up their business bottom lines and optimize their revenue goals. The criticality of ABM in the B2B space has only grown over the years and the year 2022 is going to be no different than its earlier counterparts.
In fact, in the year 2021, marketers fixed their efforts to expand their business with existing clients. According to a report by Salesforce, 81% of ANZ marketers have discovered the value of account-based marketing (ABM) to offer seamless experiences to their target audience groups.
Account-Based Marketing, as made evident in technologies, approaches, and goals, has been growing at a rapid pace. In order to drive this forward, both sales and marketing must align their goals and processes towards Account-Based Marketing.
While many sources have discussed the importance of Account-Based Marketing and its phenomenal growth in the near future, it might seem difficult to foresee how the whole trend is going to pan out.
The key account-based marketing trends for 2022 will include:
1. Artificial Intelligence
AI is a central player in account-based marketing. With your personal writer, you can input your ideal customer and let their personality guide the creation of your perfect message. Our content personalization platform gives you the power of AI to create optimized personalized messages. Give our content creation platform a try to see what it can do for you.
Artificial intelligence has the potential to transform account-based marketing, allowing companies to more precisely target key accounts and prospects, provide personalized marketing at scale, and uncover deeper insights into the buying process.
2. Integrations
In recent years, MarTech has become a huge area of focus for many marketing teams in their pursuit of an ABM strategy. Marketers understand how account data is critical to this approach, especially considering the need to create a highly personalized and relevant experience at each point of engagement in the buying cycle.
The traditional process of integrating various data sources, increasing the number of sales & marketing alignment, and creating workflows that support multiple types of interactions between your business and prospects can become increasingly difficult as you scale your audience.
In today's hyper-connected world, the B2B buyer's journey is no longer linear. Buyers are researching online, talking to friends and colleagues, and comparing lots of different options before making a purchase. Research indicates that most marketing leads don't turn into sales at all. What a waste!
To solve this problem, marketers are using a new approach called Account-Based Marketing (ABM). With ABM, companies sacrifice quantity for quality—keeping their focus on high-value "accounts" rather than disconnected leads. This requires interdepartmental cooperation, especially between sales and marketing staff members.
The two teams need to work together to identify accounts and create a strategy that will resonate with each account's unique needs. Once they've created the strategy and agreed on targets, they need to execute that strategy. Use just one tool to engage your target accounts across paid media, email, and events – all tightly aligned with your existing tech stack.
3. Partnerships
In today's B2B sales landscape, the most successful Account-Based Marketing (ABM) teams have one thing in common - they integrate their efforts with sales and use a collaborative, holistic approach to building relationships.
Highly personalized strategies are key to account-based marketing success. Popular ABM-ers such as Jon Miller, CEO at Engagio, and Henry Schuck, CEO at Zoom understand an account-centric approach and how partnerships are critical for its success.
Partnerships are critical to building successful and sustainable relationships with your customers. That’s why a strategic ABM service, in conjunction with value add alliances would be the best technology for the ABM-ers.
4. Selecting the Right Accounts
Selecting the right accounts is critical to your ABM strategy because you don't want to spend time and resources marketing to an account that isn't the right fit for your business. So how do you select those accounts?
It all starts with defining your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). An ICP is a description of your company's ideal customer based on a variety of attributes including demographics, roles, industries, and more. Once the ICP has been defined, the next step will be to identify the accounts that fit in this profile.
Account selection is the most critical part of an ABM strategy. Because you are focusing on fewer individual accounts with a more tailored approach, it's vital that you choose accounts that match your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).
If you don't choose the right accounts, then you will be poorly allocating your resources and spending more money than necessary to reach your desired sales outcomes, be they larger deals, faster conversions, or higher deal values. The results of choosing the wrong accounts can be disastrous to your organization while selecting correctly can propel you towards new frontiers.
5. Become a Customer of your Customer
When you are selling as an Account-Based Marketer, you need to be the customer of your customer. You will be successful if you can step into your customers' shoes to understand the pains they have so that you can offer solutions that will help them achieve their goals.
Making use of the knowledge about your customers to actually build products that serve them is a good strategy for ABM. But also good for your business. When you take the time and make the effort to really understand what customers need, it allows you to build product solutions that will get real results, based on their needs. And hopefully allow your company to make some money in the process.
6. Scale-Up the Intent-Based and Personalized Experiences
Effective ABM campaigns are hyper-personalized, highly targeted, and based on intent data.
Dynamic content based on buyer personas and past interactions is the best way to reach target accounts and individual buyers on a personal level. This leads to increased engagement, stronger relationships, and more closed deals.
Most B2B organizations are getting high ROI from ABM. This is because most of the companies are now performing hyper-personalized and intent-based targeting. In light of this fact, we should make our campaigns hyper-personalized and intent-based as well.
7. Leveraging the Power of Peer-to-Peer Learning & Networking
By leveraging the power of peer-to-peer learning, the ABM-ers lessen the burden on your marketing team and simultaneously educate and equip your sales team. This is a powerful recipe that can lead to deeper pipeline contribution, increased conversions, and decreased costs to acquire new customers.
Because B2B marketers know that today's customers do their own independent research, there is a heightened need to input relevant messaging on-demand. Combine this with the need to provide prospects with timely and relevant content sequences, and it becomes clear why not all content fits all campaigns.
But, if you're a Demand Generation Marketer focused on ABM, then you know the importance of providing detailed information which is relevant to your prospective clients' needs. You also know that it's not easy to get consistent content from product managers or SMEs in your organization.
In Conclusion
So, we’re moving out of the phase where ABM is just a buzzword, and into the stage where it’s actually going to make a difference to your business.