Account-Based Marketing (ABM) has rapidly gained traction over the past few years as a valuable method for identifying and communicating with prospective customers.
Today, many organizations have gone a step further to venture into Account-based Experience (ABX). While still in the nascent stages, ABX is the next-gen of ABM that can help drive the performance of your B2B goals.
The question that arises then is – What is ABX?
Account-based Experience (ABX) is a “methodology in which separate teams in an organization work closely with one another to ensure all brand interactions are focused on the end-user.”
In ABX, the marketing and sales teams collate to orchestrate and deliver personalized, relevant, and trusted content to customers throughout the B2B sales life cycle. In short, Account-based Experience (ABX) is a customer-centric way of looking at account-based-go-to-market that commences with the customer’s first awareness of the brand and goes on till the last interaction.
In today’s digital world, customers buy experiences, and the way your brand interacts with customers is what influences revenue, satisfaction, and retention. ABX is a holistic approach that brings sales and marketing together to ensure a buyer’s journey flows seamlessly across channels and touchpoints and delivers maximum impact.
How does ABX differ from ABM?
Traditionally, ABM focuses on identifying valuable, right-fit accounts and attempting to engage with them. As the name suggests, the role of the Sales department isn’t prominent, and marketing and sales alignment often end after account selection, leading to disjointed and inconsistent customer experiences. Moreover, reaching out to target accounts when they are least interested in engaging with your business is never the best strategy.
So, does it mean it is time to bid farewell to ABM?
Certainly not.
Combining ABM with content marketing is the way to go for B2B marketing. While ABM matches companies with your ideal customer profile, content marketing helps create the most compelling content and communications to earn customer confidence at each stage of their journey. This is what ABX is.
In other words, an ABX strategy focuses on the challenges and opportunities that are unique to the companies prioritized by ABM. It then engages with the companies’ decision-makers and influencers by leveraging content deep-rooted in customer insights and competitive data.
B2B buyers live in a world of attention scarcity and information overload. In such a scenario, an ABX strategy helps build trust, identify the perfect moments when customers are willing to engage with your brand, and then deliver interactions across sales, marketing, and customer success that yield the best results.
It is not the end of the road for ABM. Instead, ABX takes the best practices of ABM and simply adds the core concept of customer experience into it.
What are the key characteristics of an ABX strategy?
- All aspects of account engagement, including sales, marketing, and customer success teams, are unified by a shared strategy focused on maximizing value from the buyer’s journey.
- ABX ensures that all brand interactions are uniform and centered around the customer, avoiding random or disjointed customer engagement.
- ABX does not merely connect the buyer to the various touch points across their (Awareness, Engagement, Post-Sale, etc.) journey. It ensures that interactions across every touchpoint are meaningful, nurtures buyer relationships, and turn them into loyal B2B customers.
- In ABX, account characteristics, behavior, and other triggers dictate the company’s position across the buying cycle, whereas the stakeholders in the buying team determine the content and engagement strategy.
- ABX utilizes data brought together from adtech and martech solutions to extract tangible customer insights and understand who they need to target amongst the buying group. Besides, it helps determine the message, format, and type of content likely to bring in maximum engagement. While first and third-party sources help garner a prospect’s propensity to purchase, intent can be gathered from the audience, market, and brand context.
The Essentials of an ABM Strategy
- Understand your target account’s specific challenges and opportunities, the organizational structure, culture, and the role different stakeholders play in the buying decision.
- Create meaningful partnerships with sales, marketing, and customer success teams to design customer initiatives and ensure the next engagement channel picks right where the buyer last left off in the purchase journey.
- Focus on nurturing lifelong relationships that build customer loyalty instead of focusing solely on revenue generation.
- Invest in technologies (such as AI and machine learning) and solutions that unify customer data from siloed tools to help build effective engagement.
How can we help?
Indeed, ABX creates an immersive buyer journey that ensures customer satisfaction and brand loyalty, leads to higher ROI on account-based marketing and inbound marketing, and delivers consistent customer experience from first interaction to a closed sale and much beyond.
At Smarketers, we implement an ABX strategy that combines the engagement capabilities of ABM with the precise targeting power of ABM to get B2B clients closer to their growth goals.
Our certified and trained team of ABM experts with over seven years of B2B marketing and sales experience can help you transform your approach to sales and marketing and maximize return on investment from ABX. To know more, please feel free to schedule a personalized meeting with our ABX experts.
