As an international marketing agency, we have been helping our clients with their demand generation and lead generation campaigns during a time when the ‘traditional’ marketing approach has been turned on its head.
The pandemic gave us the opportunity to connect our clients with their target audiences in unconventional ways due to the vast change in landscape and the inability to meet face-to-face.
One approach with origins that date back 20 years but has only really come into the spotlight in the last decade is Account Based Marketing (ABM), which companies have increasingly embraced in order to communicate directly with their prospects remotely.
What is ABM?
HubSpot defines ABM as ‘a focused growth strategy in which Marketing and Sales collaborate to create personalised buying experiences for a mutually-identified set of high-value accounts.’
As such, ABM takes a more holistic view of marketing, beyond just lead generation. For example, rather than sending the same message to all prospects, it looks at groups of accounts, or even each account individually and personalises the content on the specific attributes/needs of the account/group.
This unorthodox strategy has flourished in the last decade as technological advances have allowed marketers’ capabilities to connect with customers on a different level and with greater access, availability and data than ever before.
In this article, we’ll provide insights on two different ABM approaches which we have used extensively for our clients on LinkedIn, each with their pros and cons depending on your objectives, budgets and resource available.
However, to provide some context, it is worth explaining why adopting an ABM approach can help lead to more business success compared to the traditional lead-centric marketing approach.
Why use an ABM approach?
Since the phrase was coined in 2004 by the ITSMA ABM certification, ‘ABM has consistently provided a higher ROI than any other marketing initiative, with a 2016 study confirming that 84% of marketers saw higher ROIs with ABM than any other type of approach’, claims Demand Works Media.
But why is it so much more effective than a traditional lead-centric marketing approach, especially for B2B companies?
According to LinkedIn research referenced in a Demandbase whitepaper, it found around 7 people are in a typical B2B buying committee and a Clari study found that deals over $100K require 19 meetings with 14 different stakeholders.
That’s a lot of stakeholders!
This is where the traditional lead-centric marketing approach falls short compared to ABM, as it isn’t designed to handle accounts made up of multiple people who can influence the buying decision.
This Demandbase whitepaper outlines 4 main reasons why lead-centric marketing isn’t designed to handle accounts:
- It wastes time, budget, and effort filling the funnel with prospects that aren’t associated with any target account
- It can’t map the relationships between the decision-makers and influencers within the account
- It can’t track the level of engagement of the entire account at any given time – so it misses important buying signals
- It can’t orchestrate interactions to deliver consistent messages to the entire account buying team
Having outlined the key benefits of an ABM approach, we can now look at the two tried and tested methods we have at our disposal when it comes to executing this strategy.
Automated Vs. Manual
The great benefit of traditional marketing approaches is that they’re resource-light and quick to get off the ground, whereas ABM can prove challenging if budgets and resource are tight due to the personal/1-to-1 execution style.
One way around this is using an automated LinkedIn outreach approach, as it’s scalable and a lot less time-consuming. For example, there are certain tools you can use to map out, build and automate outreach message sequences via LinkedIn’s messaging feature.
Using automation software also means follow-up messages can be programmed ahead of time, ensuring no person is missed and that you get the most out of your campaign.
We have found great success in this approach when we want to reach an audience with over 200 accounts. However, platforms like LinkedIn do not typically integrate well with these 3rd party automation tools, so it does come with a risk of errors in targeting and messaging. This can be damaging to your brand.
The alternative to an automated approach is opting to execute your ABM strategy manually, which whilst might be more labour-intensive, however, it can be far more personalised and accurate, provided proper quality control checks are in place.
Of course, this does mean it can also be more time-consuming and costly, especially if the available budget is only really suited to much smaller target audiences. However, this can be made up for by making the messaging specific to each target, thereby increasing the chances of a response compared to the automated approach of which people are becoming savvier too.
One other thing to bear in mind with the manual approach is that all the reporting and tracking of follow-up messages must be done manually as well. Therefore, when executing an ABM strategy on LinkedIn in particular, LinkedIn Sales Navigator is such an invaluable tool, as it is well-suited to manage the campaign and monitor progress. Talk to us about planning your LinkedIn Outreach campaign.
In both cases, neither of these approaches should be carried out in isolation, ideally, any ABM campaign should be run alongside corresponding activities such as social media posts on the sales rep’s newsfeeds, follow-up calls, direct emails, and relevant content on the sales rep’s company’s page. In all cases, the key here is to find a primed route to your prospect so that contact is not out of the blue and that they have some awareness of your company and brand before contact is made. Ask us to help you with your content marketing.
In conclusion, the automated and manual approaches, whilst they differ, both have their pros and cons. When considering which method you should use to execute your ABM strategy, it’s important to align it with your key objectives and outcomes you want from the activity. I.e. if you want to get in front of as many people as possible, you may want to opt for an automated approach, but do bear in mind there are risks. Likewise, if you have a more specific, niche audience, perhaps it would be best to use a manual approach, but make sure you have the budget and resource available to execute it.
Whichever it is or it may even be a mixture of the two, as a B2B marketing agency with a presence in London and Berlin, we are excited to be involved in this increasingly adopted approach and would be happy to talk through whichever suits your needs best.
Contact Simon to discuss your account based marketing or next LinkedIn marketing campaign.
