Ready to experience the benefits of account-based marketing? You’re not alone. ABM is on the rise in the B2B space, with 80% of all respondents in one survey planning to increase their ABM budget in the next 12 months. And in 2019, 55% of marketers rated their ABM program as “established,” compared to just 43% in 2018.
ABM is a marketing strategy that uses data and automation to target predefined, high-value accounts with personalized messaging, rather than casting a wide net as is done in traditional marketing. It works well for companies that sell a specific product to a specific audience, which is why it’s so popular in B2B marketing.
From moving decision makers through the funnel faster to aligning your own internal processes, there are tons of ABM benefits that all ladder up to the ultimate goal: increased revenue.
ABM Benefit #1: Internal Alignment
ABM is a team sport. Every participant – your coach, referee, players and spectators – must all be aligned on the rules of the game and how you will measure whether you’re winning. In the ABM world, the four stakeholders are the executive team, marketing, sales, and IT. Everyone must align on goals, KPIs and targeting before the game can begin.
By focusing on common goals and metrics, you’ll improve communication between departments. Account-based marketing benefits sales and marketing the most: 82% of B2B marketers say ABM greatly improves the alignment between marketing and sales at their company. Sales receives higher-quality leads so they can spend more time selling and less time chasing prospects; marketing receives recognition of their impact on the sales pipeline. Everyone is happy.
ABM Benefit #2: Improved Optimization
Many of the benefits of account-based marketing stem from the fact that it is a highly data-driven marketing strategy. This allows you to create personalized content based on industry, role, stage in the buyer journey and more. 61% of leaders report a focus on building these types of highly targeted, personalized and content-driven lead management and nurturing programs.
All that data also allows you to better optimize your campaigns based on how specific accounts and leads within those accounts perform. Learn which channels and messaging your prospects respond to and continuously refine your strategies. 46% of marketers are doing this type of real-time optimization – and accelerating their pipeline revenue.
ABM Benefit #3: Better Reporting
ABM is a focused strategy, meaning you’ll have fewer metrics and KPIs to track. Both goal-setting and analyzing whether you met those goals are easier when you’re targeting a smaller number of accounts. Plus, the detailed plans you drew up at the beginning of your campaigns make it easy to track your progress.
The amount of data you’re able to collect is also a major benefit of account-based marketing. When you can clearly connect your campaigns to pipeline revenue, you’ll keep your C-suite happy – and that makes you look good.
ABM Benefit #4: Increased Efficiency
It’s nearly impossible to leverage this type of marketing strategy without the right ABM technology. ABM automation allows you to set up a process just once and then scale it across many campaigns, allowing your marketers to do more with less and handle many more accounts per person. Media buying, ad targeting, modeling, upselling and more all become much more efficient with automation.
ABM also naturally increases efficiency by narrowly focusing on key accounts that drive the most revenue and highest ROI. If an account reaches a certain threshold where they are no longer worth your investment, you simply stop marketing to them. Your most valuable resources are time and money, and account-based marketing benefits both.
ABM Benefit #5: Higher Engagement and Retention
It’s a common adage in marketing that acquiring a new customer costs five times more than retaining an existing one. To reduce churn, you want to be sure that you’re not only acquiring high-value customers who are a good match for your business, but that you’re doing everything you can to keep those customers.
Investing in the type of personalized content that ABM excels at can help increase trust in your brand and form relationships that lead not only to sales, but to long-term success for both you and the customer. 95% of marketers say personalization results in higher engagement and stronger relationships, and 82% say the personalized content created for ABM campaigns improves customer retention. That’s an undeniable benefit of account-based marketing.
ABM Benefit #6: Shorter Sales Cycle
All marketers have encountered a scenario of “too many cooks in the kitchen.” In fact, the average buying group size is 5.4 – and most marketers won’t be surprised to learn that the likelihood of a purchase drops significantly as the number of decision makers increases.
The ability to eliminate low-value prospects and target specific decision makers means you can move those targets through the sales funnel and close deals faster. A shorter sales cycle saves resources and allows the team to put their full focus into the accounts with the best return. That means more time to generate new leads, chase down sales opportunities and contribute to the bottom line. Ultimately, this account-based marketing benefit is a huge competitive advantage.
ABM Benefit #7: Higher Average Contract Value
You might think that a shorter sales cycle means less attention paid to the customer and therefore lower returns. But thanks to the power of ABM, that’s just not true. When you laser-focus on the best accounts, you don’t acquire just any customers – you acquire the customers who are willing to sign away more money on the dotted line.
Reaping the benefits of account-based marketing therefore requires a complete transformation of the way you think about sales. It’s no longer about getting customers in the door and closing a deal, any deal. It’s about the quality of leads over quantity, and ultimately results in higher deal sizes: Target account deals are 2.3X bigger than deals resulting from other channels.
ABM Benefit #8: Higher ROI
All of these account-based marketing benefits ladder up to what really matters for any business: ROI and revenue. 87% of marketers say ABM delivers higher ROI than other types of marketing. Thanks to all that data we’ve been talking about, it’s also easier to measure ROI and connect it back to revenue than with other types of marketing. That makes a happy CEO. And when the CEO is happy, everybody’s happy.