Account-based marketing (ABM) is a highly tactical approach to B2B digital marketing wherein key business accounts are identified, consolidated, and marketed directly.
In other words, organizations first pinpoint high-value accounts or prospects. Then, through various channels marketing strategies are implemented for appealing to the unique personas and needs of important stakeholders in these businesses.
Note that these key accounts (or prospects) are actually companies, not individual people, and are treated as a market of one.
Why Do You Need ABM?
As a marketer, you know the value of personalization. Simply put, personalize well and buyers will be more receptive to your outreach and less likely to ignore your content.
Well, think of account-based marketing as personalized marketing on steroids.
You see, marketing teams today know how crucial it is for their efforts to reflect directly in terms of revenue growth. The ABM approach compels you to build meaningful relationships with your highest opportunity, highest-value accounts. That’s one of the prime reasons why ABM is all the rage.
Now, imagine you sell an upscale SaaS product. Instead of taking a more general approach – going after startups, small businesses, and medium level enterprises – consider focusing on specific accounts that have the highest demand and the necessary budget.
As ABM requires marketing and sales teams to efficiently engage each person on the buying team in a personalized way, the overall marketing efforts are far more likely to resonate with these target audiences, thus leading to lucrative conversions.
According to a research by Altera group, 97% of respondents reported that ABM had a much higher ROI than other marketing campaigns. If you think about it, strategic personalisation was the principal reason behind this.
And so, it is worth mentioning again that a personalized strategy is imperative when directing marketing and sales efforts towards a few elite, high-value accounts.
To summarize, here’s why you need account-based marketing, especially for upscale B2B campaigns:
– To identify business accounts with the potential for highest ROI
– To reduce wastage of marketing resources
– To effectively personalise content
– To better align sales and marketing departments
– To accurately measure the results of your marketing efforts
ABM is truly a win-win-win for sales, marketing, and customers when it comes to the B2B domain.
How to Choose the Right ABM Tool?
There are several ABM tools available today to facilitate your account-based marketing campaigns. With so many choices to choose from, you might actually feel a little overwhelmed.
To simplify your decision-making process, we have carefully handpicked a short list of tools that are worth testing out. But first, let’s lay down the evaluation criteria and the top features to consider while choosing an ABM tool.
Evaluation Criteria
Any ABM software can organize data into beautiful charts and metrics. However, these insights are worthless if you can’t formulate a logical plan of action from them. The best account-based marketing tools will yield nifty metrics that you can easily understand and use efficiently. Furthermore, the finest ABM tools will also allow flexibility for you to create customized drill-down reports as you become familiar with your distinct requirements.
Here are the top features to keep an eye out for when choosing an ABM tool:
– Supports multiple steps in the ABM process: These include account selection, insights, engagement, orchestration, and ROI tracking.
– Supports integration with existing software: The tool must seamlessly integrate with your existing marketing/sales and CRM software (such as Salesforce).
– Lead data automation: The tool must help manage contact and lead information by automatically updating such data and mapping new contacts into appropriate accounts.
– Reliable customer support and services: Ideally, the tool must also offer real-time support.
Thus, with the ground rules in position, let’s dig into the list of the best ABM tools available in the market today:
- Engagio: This is a truly “full-stack” ABM software that delivers reliable automation and analytics regardless of the size of your target accounts. It can help with everything, right from crafting lead-based marketing strategies to reviewing project performances. What’s more, this ABM tool connects to your website and subsequently your existing Salesforce and Marketo accounts for keeping track of leads, marketing programs, and site visitors.
- Terminus: This is a powerful ABM tool that focuses on account identification and personalized targeting of key stakeholders. It is also well-suited for providing engagement insights for your sales team.
- Triblio: This ABM tool is exclusively meant for mid-sized and large organizations. Its core competencies include the ability to launch personalized content on websites and transfer new MQLs to sales in real-time with features like retargeting, attribution reporting, and account scoring. And with a G2 Crowd rating of 4.3, it is certainly worth a trial.
- Demandbase: This platform is designed to effectively synchronize communication across sales, marketing, and advertising. Top features include account identification, targeted advertising, content personalisation, and marketing automation. Plus, apart from offering the Marketing Cloud which also happens to be a full suite of solutions for streamlining every step of the marketing process for different teams, it also lets you integrate with a native CRM.
- Bound: This is a great lead generation and personalisation solution that allows you to create personalized paths for visitors to take when they visit your homepage, making them more likely to navigate it.
Conclusion
So there you have it. The alignment of marketing and sales teams is at the heart of effective account-based marketing, and these five ABM tools will help you achieve that superbly.
Which one did you pick and why? Please do let us know in the comments below!
