Is ABM beyond the hype or the next big thing?
According to Wikipedia, Account-based marketing (ABM), also known as key account marketing, is a strategic approach to business marketing based on account awareness in which an organization considers and communicates with individual prospect or customer accounts as markets of one. Account-based marketing is typically employed in enterprise-level sales organizations.
So, in that context, it’s really just what it sounds like — marketing that’s based on a given account, existing or prospective. It’s typically done by enterprise-level sales organizations and is mostly relevant to B2B efforts.
Why is that? Well, ABM is particularly useful for organizations with multiple buyers or stakeholders. Part of its goal is to address the needs of the organization by connecting with all of the stakeholders within it. That’s one reason why it works so well in B2B — oftentimes you have to work with five or more stakeholders in a given sale.”
But it really boils down to essential steps, which we can flesh out and tie back to inbound marketing — because while they’re two different concepts, they can truly complement each other.
Inbound marketing and ABM are, on the surface, a bit different in theory:
- Inbound marketing primarily focuses on creating great content to bring prospects to you.
- ABM puts the emphasis on individual prospects or existing accounts.
To many of us, ABM means big enterprise companies targeting a few standout key accounts with a high-touch, expensive, siloed process. Today, ABM has the potential to be much bigger than that, thanks to the technology that helps us automate and scale. But more than that, it’s a simple documented process that can be easily piloted and replicated across the organization.
Once you understand the key fundamentals of AMB across the funnel, getting started, making progress, and measuring results become an attainable endeavour — and a gateway to broader, more successful ABM programs. Although there are a number of touchpoints across the funnel where ABM will play a big part, before you can execute on these things, you need an accurate plan to identify, market and measure your target account list!
