Higher marketing budgets are increasingly being allocated to Account Based Marketing (ABM) as it continues to deliver real results for businesses in the ICT sector.
Account Based Marketing (ABM) is a key driver of alignment between sales and marketing within businesses. B2B organisations with tightly aligned sales and marketing operations achieve 24% faster three-year revenue growth and 27% faster three-year profit growth, according to SiriusDecisions.
Securing long-term business and high-value prospects
“ABM is a strategic approach to B2B marketing that targets specific accounts, personalising communications and content to customers,” says Matt Brown, CEO of Digital Kungfu, a storytelling production company that specializes in helping tech businesses build sales ready pipelines using the power of story and data driven marketing technology.
“It’s a one-on-one approach as opposed to a one-to-many approach in the traditional marketing landscape.”
ABM helps businesses achieve the following three key results with their marketing spend:
- Engage with prospects earlier in the sales process, focusing specifically on higher-value opportunities
- Align strategic marketing initiatives with sales and account management strategies
- Maximise ROI from marketing campaigns and derive full value from any content generated
“Businesses that are already embracing ABM have clear marketing goals that they expect ABM to reach,” says Brown. “Our clients typically want to achieve lead generation, pipeline acceleration, revenue generation and customer retention.”
Internationally, 85% and 97% of marketers respectively say that the ROI of ABM is higher than other marketing strategies, according to an ITSMA study and Alterra Group’s statistics.
Download Digital Kungfu’s eBook: 6 proven strategies that deliver sale qualified pipeline during a recession to discover how to implement these 6 strategies in your business and increase sales your sales today.
“Our clients have seen similar results with their ABM strategies in a sector that tends to rely heavily on referral business and often struggles to generate high-quality leads,” says Brown.
“Our experience is that ABM addresses these challenges because it is more focused and personalised than other marketing strategies, but more importantly, it aligns sales and marketing activities, which is crucial to securing long-term business with high-value prospects.”
Achieving higher ROI for marketing spend
“ABM is particularly useful when engaging with multiple buyers or stakeholders in a buying cycle, as ICT companies commonly face,” says Brown. “ABM allows you to connect in a personalised way with each stakeholder because marketing messages are tailored to their specific interests within the business.
“There’s a higher upfront effort and investment in such tailored content, but the ROI is also significantly higher. When sales and marketing work together as well, which ABM requires, the best opportunities are identified and focused on, which also improves win rates.”
4 Reasons why ABM is a market differentiator
Here are four reasons why Digital Kungfu believes ABM is the marketing strategy that will help ICT companies differentiate from their competitors, achieve higher ROI from marketing spend and attain high-quality lead generation:
- It’s personalised to your audience
ABM focuses only on the decision-makers within the same organisation, ensuring a campaign resonates with the people who have buying power. No marketing campaigns can successfully cater to wide audiences in such a way that each reader, viewer or user feels that their individual needs are being addressed. ABM doesn’t try to. Instead, it takes the view that the bigger your audience, the more types of people you’re trying to help and the more you dilute your message. ABM isn’t focused on a large audience to generate leads from. Instead, it taps into the right audience at the right time with a message that resonates and leads to higher win-rates.
- ROI is measurable
One of the biggest challenges that marketing departments face is attrition – how do you allocate which campaigns brought in the highest revenue? Which were more successful than others? When you’re marketing to a wide audience, it’s difficult to know exactly what message resonated with whom, or why they’ve chosen to buy from you. When you’re marketing directly to buyers however, it’s much easier to attribute your marketing campaigns to the revenue they led to.
- You focus on your high-value prospects
ABM aligns sales and marketing. Sales identifies the highest-value prospects and accounts that they would like to close, and marketing creates specific and personalised messaging for each individual stakeholder. While this does take effort, it’s effort that is directed at business that the organisation has a higher chance of closing. Effort and resources are not wasted on projects, campaigns and even customers with little to no clear business value.
- Your sales cycle is shortened
A large amount of time is typically given to lead generation – not just generating the leads, but qualifying them. Bringing sales into the loop earlier shortens this cycle. When you eliminate unqualified prospects early in the game, you direct company resources to the right customers. Sales and marketing can focus their energies on leads that they are most likely to convert to sales. Because ABM messaging is so personalised and focused, it also generates more qualified leads upfront.
Download Digital Kungfu’s eBook: 6 proven strategies that deliver sale qualified pipeline during a recession to discover how to implement these 6 strategies in your business and increase sales your sales today.
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