If you only fish for guppies, you’re not going to land a whale

Account Based Marketing (ABM) is generating a lot of buzz, and for good reason.  It’s a direct relationship between sales and marketing.  Looking for an attribution model, marketers?  Here you go!

For B2B marketers, demand generation marketing has long been the workhorse of the marketing plan. This is only logical —it’s an effective and necessary method for supplying a steady stream of pre-qualified leads to sales teams. However, there are areas in which it falls short, particularly in the area of attribution.  Where did that lead come from again?  How many touch points led to the close of a deal?

Enter ABM. Account-based marketing is a super-targeted type of B2B marketing that flips the standard demand-gen equation on its head. Compared to demand generation marketing that casts a wide net to reach as many individuals as possible, ABM is focused on specific markets of one, or a few, key accounts (and depending on the size of your business, few can mean 30 or more).

As a marketer or business development person, you are likely thinking about the companies you’d love to turn into customers. The big one, the most impressive, the one that would “make the year.”  Or maybe you are already working with this organization, but you know that you could do more together. Enterprise accounts are great for business. It’s been proven that the more embedded an account is with your organization, the higher the lifetime value of the account*. Enterprise level accounts tend to be long-term customers, and more likely to view the relationship as a partnership.

How does ABM work for education marketing?

Guess what?  Most of you have been doing a version of this.  Every territory planned, or worked on, for an adoption state campaign?  Yes?  ABM!  At MDR, we’ve been proponents of an ABM-style approach to marketing for many years. Long-time clients may remember – or still use – an institution- or district-based segmentation strategy that breaks out customers from prospects and recommends different marketing approaches and spend for each. ABM takes the concept of targeting down to a super-granular level, and relies on a highly customized approach to messaging and content to win over the individuals (or more individuals) within the organization.

With such precision targeting, ABM can seem daunting at first. You may ask yourself:

• How can I personalize our communications to this level?
• Who are our targeted accounts or how do I identify them?
• As a marketing team, we have a lot to do (run a website, social channels, tradeshows, etc), how can we transition our resources?
• If we focus on a small number of accounts, will we leave money on the table?
• Are we limiting our pipeline?
• How do we prove ROI?
• How do we convince sales that it’s okay, if we’re not generating thousands of leads?
• Is there such thing as Account Based Selling?

So, if you didn’t, you now know what ABM is and how it can work in our field.  In order to demystify the strategy, I’ll next walk you through the steps to help you execute your own ABM plan.  Stay tuned for our upcoming blog where we’ll start to get into the nitty gritty.

Can’t wait and want to learn more now?  Contact us!