What is Account-Based Marketing: Five Use Cases

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a business strategy with growing popularity among marketers worldwide. ABM turns your marketing and sales focus to the right prospects, and might decrease your expenses. This is because you’ll need less effort and fewer team members while focusing on only the right accounts.

An important focus of ABM is to identify targets who are interested in a certain product or service and then customize marketing campaigns and sales programs to meet the needs of these prospects and turn them into customers.  

What is Account-Based Marketing?

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a business marketing strategy that directs resources to attract specific target groups within a market. ABM coordinates the sales and marketing teams to work together and create personalized campaigns designed to engage each account. The campaigns are built in sync and altered to the needs of each account, which leads to more lead success and higher revenue. 

Instead of running broad campaigns, marketers and sales associates use account-based marketing to closely identify their prospects and then they create customized campaigns and messaging with the goal to encourage upselling and new leads. 

Five Use Cases of Account-Based Marketing

Account-based marketing begins with identifying your target accounts and then calculating a program that’s personalized to those segments. The chosen accounts will be the ones that add the most value to your company. Below are five use cases of account-based marketing:

• Events, webinars, and meetings

In-person events and meetings have always been considered the most effective ways to find and persuade target accounts. With account-based marketing, these events can bring you even more customers and a bigger client base. How does that work? With ABM you can make personalized invitations, host special VIP dinners, give out personalized gifts, and send personalized follow-ups after the event. 

• Marketing email

In the day and age where everyone is overloaded with emails and considers most emails spam without reading them, it’s the perfect time to introduce personalized direct mail. Since account-based marketing is more targeted, gifts and messages through direct mail can catch more attention and result in more successful leads, which will lead to higher revenue.

• Targeted advertising

Paid social media advertisements are a common way to catch the attention of accounts or at least trigger a memory in their head. Social platforms like Facebook and Instagram allow you to display your ads and messages. Even more important, you can target specific groups of people and personas to see these ads. With IP targeting and retargeting, your campaigns will be brought up on target accounts only, rather than on the whole web.

You might be wondering why it is better that only selected accounts will see these campaigns. Well, there is a pretty simple explanation to that, first of all, the more people see your campaign the more it will cost you, secondly, a person that is not your target persona will never follow the campaign, and lastly, by targeting specific accounts you’ll have a better idea of the turnover rate. 

• More personalized content

Just like with the other use cases, account-based marketing will let you make content that’s relevant to your target accounts and current customers. For example, if your target persona is at a young age, interested in social media, and loves trends, then your goal is to make trendy content, that being cool Instagram posts, reels, and relatable TikTok videos. 

• Constant product improvement

Pretty much any service or product out there has some pain points, whether that’s instructions on how to use it or questions about safety. With account-based marketing, you’ll be able to resolve these pain points even before a customer or lead realizes that they have trouble figuring something out. 

Business Benefits of Account-Based Marketing

There are a number of benefits associated with account-based marketing, but for some businesses, ABM might be the only good solution, while for others ABM might be combined with other strategies, in any way it will positively impact all types of businesses. Let’s take a look at the following benefits of account-based marketing.

• Personalized marketing approach. Instead of a generic message and approach, with help of ABM marketers create personalized messages for target accounts. 
• Sales & marketing alignment. Collaboration is always a sign of improved conversations and more successful projects. Since ABM requires the sales and marketing teams to collaborate, their collaboration will also positively affect other business aspects. 
• Shorter sale cycles. Personalized campaigns usually quicken up the sales process because all prospects are nurtured simultaneously. 
• Better ROI. Account-based marketing is measurable and 85% of marketers who measure their ROI have reported that ABM delivered higher returns than any other marketing approach.
• Fewer wasted products. With a clear understanding of what personas you need to target, you’ll need fewer products and fewer people to gain the same or even more customers. 

How to Implement Account-Based Marketing 

In order to get the most out of an account-based marketing approach, you’ll need to know some key rules, the following steps will guarantee you implement an effective account-based marketing strategy. 

• Create a demonstrative coalition between the sales and marketing teams 

Without a demonstrative and thriving marketing and sales team alignment, every account-based marketing strategy will fail. This is because an ideal customer buying experience requires a seamless transition from detecting the lead to finalizing the sale. 

Basically, to improve sales, the marketing and sales teams need to commit to clear communication and a mutual plan, a type of middle ground where both sides cater to each other. For example, the marketing team will only score leads that the sales team can conveniently sell to and vice versa where the sales team will develop a sales strategy based on the people that the marketing team can interest. 

• Carry out investigations to identify account personas 

Once you have created a demonstrative coalition between the sales and marketing teams, you’ll need to identify account personas that you want to pursue. There are many strategies to identify an account persona, some of which are:

• Determine the business intentions of an ideal customer.
• Calculate savings and spending patterns.
• Detect what tools the ideal customer uses.
• Consider the current level of business, size, and growth trajectory.

With all of these strategies in mind and with many more out there, after identifying an account persona, it’s important that both the marketing and sales team agree on it and follow up with a mutual plan. 

• Create a plan 

As mentioned in the step earlier, after the sales and marketing teams both agree on an account persona, they’ll need to follow up with a mutual plan. This includes having the marketing and sales teams work together to map out the prospects, what they are interested in, and what content they will produce to attract them. 

• Attract target accounts

Even after plotting a perfect marketing strategy, if you are new to the business you will need to attract accounts in other ways too. First of all, you need to determine where your target accounts are finding solutions now, basically, what companies are offering something similar to you and how are you better. After that, you find a database with these people’s information and contact them with a better offer than they are paying for now.

Another popular way to get your company noticed, includes handing out wavers, sending emails, or printing billboards, this can be done at events, on newsletters, targeted ad placements, and more. 

• Get the sales teams more involved 

As you build a relationship or at least a conversation with target contacts, make sure both sales and marketing teams are actively engaging and pursuing a strategy to influence the buying decisions. After a few hits and misses, the team will have an established strategy that works, which they can then use repeatedly to attract and retain customers. 

Account-based Marketing: Final Thoughts

Use account-based marketing to focus on prospective customers, you’ll notice how leads grow and expenses decrease. The long-term objective of account-based marketing is to help teams find successful leads, grow revenue, and lead every step of the way. The more advanced a marketing and sales team becomes with ABM, the more account-based marketing implementation there will be across all companies.