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The level of competition in B2B marketing is high. It is essential for marketers to develop strategies that make their products and services stand out, and in turn generate quality business leads.
For many B2C firms, one of the most effective ways to capture prospects’ attention is through emotional or mood marketing. This refers to campaigns that appeal to the feelings or emotions of their audience. This marketing strategy is known for improving the chances of conversion.
One of the latest examples is the Gillette “We Believe: The Best Men Can Be” short film. The short film evoked emotion in target audiences and catapulted the brand into the forefront of everyone’s mind.
Many believe emotional marketing is useful primarily for B2C marketers and not B2B. This may be due to the fact that many B2B marketers envision their audience as the corporations itself. It is important to keep in mind; there are still humans working behind the curtain making the decisions on behalf of the corporation.
According to recent research, B2B clients and prospects respond better to positive emotions than those targeted by B2C businesses. This is perhaps because B2B marketing is more personal compared to communicating with a broad B2C audience. For example in B2B marketing, account managers work with their client counterparts and not a mass consumer base, requiring personalization.
B2B marketers can use personal motivators allowing their customers to feel personally invested in their product or service. The following benefits can be presented on both sides.
Emotional marketing strategies require your consideration into a few key approaches.
Authenticity and being true to brand can create a powerful bond. No one wants to support a brand with a message that is counter to businesses actions.
It is important for marketers to back up their brand messaging with action to prove to their audience they are authentic.
Understanding your customers’ needs and what they take action to, results in an emotional response. Being aware of your customers motivations allows businesses to craft a marketing strategy that provides solutions to the customers wants and needs.
A brand that can relate to its prospects’ feelings and emotions has a better chance of being noticed and meeting its revenue goals. Being empathic to people’s happiness, sadness, and anger, helps to develop strong customer loyalty.
Storytelling is a great strategy to engage your audience and develop an emotional connection. Stories are a visual approach to your messaging making your brand more exciting and memorable. It should spell out your company’s mission and what differentiates you from the competition.
To effectively tell a story, you begin by understanding your audiences pain points, making the narrative relevant. You can develop the story to present your products and services as a solution to their challenges. Testimonials from existing customers are an excellent example of a story that can help you effectively convey your brand message.
Positive emotions that you should focus on, include providing a sense of safety, trust, being cared for, and a legitimate interest in your customer’s needs. Such sentiments are more effective in generating leads and brand awareness. A great way to connect with your audience is through social media. Customers are eager to share content they have a positive experience with.
Neutralizing with your customers feelings is important whether they be negative or positive. It is essential to show your audience they can avoid risk or threat with the help of your businesses products or solutions.
B2B prospects can be easily influenced by skepticism. They have their careers and their companies bottom line to consider. If they make poor purchasing decisions, that could end up being highly detrimental to them in the long run.
Earning emotion means building trust with your prospects through an honest approach in your marketing strategy. Something as simple as making tangible commitments with them will accomplish that.
It helps to be transparent and open to questions and comments. Make sure to respond to criticisms positively and provide solutions to earn trust and build a conclusive experience.
Despite the resistance some B2B marketers may have using an emotional marketing strategy, evidence has suggested B2B business will benefit immensely from a humanized approach to branding. Developing a strategy to allow your audience to feel safe and confident will drive engagement to your brand. An emotional marketing strategy can provide opportunity to B2B marketers – opening doors to gaining leads, new customers, and increasing bottom line.
It’s no longer enough just to produce quality content. Consumers demand content to be hand delivered to them, and that content has to be personalized to fit their interests, needs, and challenges. Learn more about optimizing your content syndication programs.
It’s perfectly normal to stick to a marketing strategy if it has proven to be successful for your business. However, one of the most effective ways to keep your marketing strategy dynamic is to inject fresh ideas, talking points, tactical approaches, and creative messaging. Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is a relatively new concept in B2B marketing and may be a new program type for your business, with that being said you cannot “set it and forget it”.
Since ABM tactics focus on delivering personalized marketing to target key accounts, it is important to explore new ways to communicate and engage these accounts. In ABM, a one-size-fits-all approach just won’t cut it. You must treat each account individually, focusing on their specific needs, challenges, buying triggers, and preferred communication channels.
Here are some ideas on how you can take your ABM strategy to a whole new level:
Content personalization has become a major player in the digital marketing game. Customizing content based on your audiences’ interests and challenges aids in more accurately targeting your specific market segmentations and increases the chances of them converting. Ultimately, the goal of personalization is to provide your target prospects with a clear understanding of how your products can benefit their business.
Remember to fully utilize the content you are personalizing for your ABM strategy. Increase the size of your marketing net and make sure that your target accounts engage with your content across multiple touch-points:
Your ABM strategy doesn’t need to be cut and dry, especially when you want to stand out from the crowd. Storytelling is a perfect opportunity to get creative in showcasing your brand and developing a relationship with potential customers. This type of approach provides an experience for your audience; they can learn more about your brand, the solutions you provide, and the benefits they can expect to see if they do business with you.
Storytelling in your ABM focused content can take on many forms. This doesn’t have to be in your standard whitepaper format:
Prospects always appreciate having access to content that provides answers to pressing questions about their industry. A resource center acts as a comprehensive database of industry-related information. You can organize a resource center by topic, format, or any other criteria to make it easier for users to find the content they need. Your online resource center should also offer a way for your users to filter their search by keywords, date of publication, and popularity.
To bolster your account-based-marketing initiative, it is recommended to develop a resource center that speaks directly to your target accounts. The resources offered could be categorized in several different ways. Categorizing allows you to drive target accounts to the content most relevant to them:
For most people working in B2B, a website is their go-to channel to learn more about the products and services offered, and to make contact with the business. An optimized website should be high on your priority list. A personalized website experience should be high on your ABM priority list.
Standard personalization on landing pages and microsites will include many of the recommendations mentioned above. The addition of a resource center specific to your target account’s needs, landing pages speaking directly to them or their industry, etc.
Personalization gets really powerful when it is implemented dynamically on your main website. Working with 3rd party providers and partners, you have the ability to personalize your target account’s experience the moment they click through to your website. This level of targeting requires a large catalogue of content.
Traditional marketing tactics such as direct mail work best when spoken directly to the recipient’s challenges- and provide a solution. This tactic should be adopted to account email outreach messaging.
Instead of sending email blasts or including your target accounts into a marketing or sales email sequence, taking the time to convey a distinct personal message is more compelling. Be sure to include specific information in your email that pertains directly to the recipient:
Account based marketing is about reaching the customer with messaging and content you know will directly address their challenges and needs. Experiential marketing combines real-world and virtual touch-points to promote higher campaign engagement. Modeling your ABM campaigns around the tenants of experiential marketing can not only increase the likelihood of a conversion, it can strengthen your brand loyalty with target accounts.
To accomplish an experiential marketing ABM program, focus on the following tactics:
Account-Based-Marketing may not be a new concept in the B2B space, but there’s always an opportunity to freshen up your strategy with personalization to gain brand recognition and higher conversions. Dive into your data, resource assets, and current trends in the industries of your target accounts to better focus your efforts. And remember, while account-based-marketing can be a difficult tactic to develop, launch, and monitor, the benefits can easily outweigh the work.
With our integrated programs and global audience of more than 62 million technology buyers, you will be able to target your key accounts as well as specific individuals within those accounts.
Account-based marketing (ABM) has gained a firm foothold in the B2B marketing world. According to Information Technology Services Marketing Association, ABM is defined as “treating individual accounts as markets in their own right.” Basically, you as a marketer are taking personalization to an elevated level. Making the leap into ABM marketing is highly recommended to improve your marketing ROI, but without proper planning, finding success could become a struggle.
The only way to reduce the potential risks associated with virtually any strategy is to develop a comprehensive game plan. Effective planning will result in increased buy-in from upper management, effective training and development, acquisition of the right ABM tools, the accurate collection of data, and ultimately a boost to your strategy success.
Here are a handful of the different challenges and issues associated with account-based marketing and how planning can reduce the risk that they occur.
For the most part, marketing and sales teams tend to operate independently, though that has been changing over the last few years. Marketers focus on lead generation, so they care more about quantity, whereas salespeople focus on lead conversion, so they care more about quality.
Make sure that the objectives of each team are directed towards a common goal. If it requires alignment meetings every week to avoid confusion, then make it happen. Plan out your Service-Level Agreement (SLA) between the teams, so collaboration becomes official business.
Areas necessary for effective alignment include:
When developing your ABM list and strategies, the efficacy of your current CRM data may be the last thing on your mind, but outdated or incorrect data can have a very negative effect on your program success.
It is estimated that sales members lose up to 27% of their productive time due to bad lead data. When bad data is utilized in marketing efforts, it can result in more bounces, fewer email opens, and lower conversion rates. Marketing Sherpa found that between 25-30% of lead data becomes outdated (inaccurate) every year so staying on top of the accuracy of your database is paramount.
Keep in mind that there are some things account-based marketing can’t do. For example, it isn’t nearly as scalable as mass marketing because of the research and personalization requirements. If you think too big too soon and roll out ABM to hundreds of accounts at the same time, you’ll end up overwhelming your sales and marketing teams, and losing control over the process.
ABM works best when it’s rolled out slowly and implemented over time. Make your plan and start out with just a few accounts. Once you get used to the process and start seeing positive results, you can begin to extend ABM implementation to the rest of your accounts.
If you’re just beginning with ABM, expect to make a few mistakes here and there. But, you will become more proficient as time goes on. Since the strategy aims for precision, data is an integral factor in the process. Collecting and analyzing data must be an ongoing activity.
Equally important is the need for consistency in delivery or your nurture programs. Even though they’re only talking to a single contact, the team behind your ABM implementation should ensure consistency across multiple touch points to build a long-term relationship with the target account.
The results of your ABM strategy might take longer to come to fruition than other marketing strategies. However, you can identify small achievements by measuring your ABM campaign’s performance along the way.
If you’ve just started implementing ABM in your prospecting efforts, you can do a comparative analysis to discover which strategy performs better. This will help you identify strengths and areas for improvement. Measurement should take place at every stage of the ABM process, and measurement systems should be indicated in the marketing plan. Some of these key metrics include:
These ABM challenges and issues can all be prevented, or at the very least reduced, by a thorough knowledge of your account-based marketing principles. If you have a comprehensive plan that considers the potential challenges you might face, you’ll be able to develop contingencies and even find opportunities to improve various aspects of your ABM process.
Looking to take your ABM strategy to the next level?
With our integrated programs and global audience of more than 62 million technology buyers, you will be able to target your key accounts as well as specific individuals within those accounts.
Speak with a team member to discuss your Account-Based Marketing goals.
Personalization has become one of the hottest techniques in marketing today, and this doesn’t just apply to the B2C community, either. B2B marketers have adopted an even more focused approach for their target audiences with the rise of account-based marketing (ABM).
Many marketers have already seen the wonders of this marketing model and recognize that ABM techniques have helped them achieve higher ROIs versus other broader marketing approaches. The added flavor of customized marketing is also preferable to B2B technology buyers, as they want to feel like they’re being paid attention to vs. receiving the same email sent to a hundred other potential customers.
There’s also the inevitable alignment of your sales and marketing teams as you execute ABM campaigns, which many companies struggle with. Indeed, the benefits make account-based marketing worth implementing.
Businesses already execute ABM approaches in their marketing, but some don’t realize it yet. If you want to strengthen your B2B marketing strategies, then here are the main areas you should look into for an effective ABM strategy that drives highly-profitable conversions.
This is the backbone and arguably the most critical part of your ABM journey. Who are you marketing to? You want to look at several important factors that will help you narrow down and focus on the specific accounts you want to reach.
This step requires the coordination of both your sales and marketing teams. They should be able to align their definitions of what or who your target accounts are. Predictive lead scoring can help your organization find out which accounts have the highest possibility of closing.
To be able to identify your target account, you should look into firmographic and demographic information. These encompass data that will help you classify which companies relevant to your business. They often include:
It’s now time to dig a little deeper. Building your customer relationship management (CRM) database is the next step to making sure you understand your target accounts correctly. Using your final list of target accounts, you can start identifying the key people you want to connect with at a specific company. This may change from time to time, so make sure that you continually update your database.
The bottom line is, you should know how your target accounts are structured.
Answers to these key questions will indicate who your main contacts should be.
You’ve now narrowed down the list of accounts and key people you want to connect with. Your extensive research would have led you to the optimal channels where they can be reached, such as:
…and more. After which, it’s time to plan a course of action.
Attracting these accounts uses a mixture of inbound and outbound marketing methods. An omnichannel approach will increase the chances of your content and offers getting seen by the right people. Use different portals to distribute your content, create visually appealing graphics or guides that can pique their interest, send them a very convincing email, and so on.
Remember, your marketing team isn’t alone on this—sales teams are here to follow up, close deals, and analyze how each interaction performed. Work together to find out the best strategies that work for your company.
Fact: value tailored content. Targeted content supports the customized nature of ABM. Using content marketing principles, you should focus on creating scalable and relevant material. Perhaps you can choose to focus on eBooks or whitepapers that revolve around a pertinent issue in your target account’s industry.
However, you shouldn’t stop there. Go the extra mile with personalization. The more personalized a piece of content is, the higher the chances it will be noticed. Brenda Stoltz of Forbes suggests creating “dynamic, personalized microsites that deliver content that’s of interest to your audience.”
Any marketing campaign should be thoroughly tested, measured, and optimized so you can monitor and adjust your efforts. Focus on the metrics that matter to your business, and don’t just rely on one: document the results of individual campaigns, account level campaigns, and overall performance of your target accounts.
Keep in mind that measurements in the first year of your campaign will serve as your benchmarks, but not all of them will mature at the same time. For instance, you’ll be able to see conversions and engagement rates rising, but revenue might take longer to identify. For this reason, it’s important to check during various milestones of your campaign, such as the launch, first month, quarterly, annually, and until it ends.
If executed properly, your ABM tactics will help your company rise the ranks by gaining new clients and earning more revenue to continue expanding. With this marketing model, you’ll be able to show prospects how much value your service will be to them, increasing your conversions in the process.
Check out our FREE whitepaper to find out more about How to Develop an Account-Based Marketing Strategy.
Account-based marketing (ABM) is starting to gain a lot of traction in the B2B world. According to Information Technology Services Marketing Association, ABM is defined as “treating individual accounts as markets in their own right.” This basically means taking marketing personalization to a whole new level.
Based on a survey by Zoominfo, ABM is very effective when it comes to increasing revenue and predictability, as 96% of the marketers surveyed attributed their marketing success to ABM. However, it’s a relatively new strategy, so it’s vulnerable to more than a few pitfalls.
The only way to reduce the potential risks associated with virtually any strategy is to develop a comprehensive game plan. Effective planning will result in increased buy-in from upper management, effective training and development, acquisition of the right ABM tools, and accurate collection of data.
Below are the different challenges and issues associated with account-based marketing and how planning can reduce the risk of these occurrences:
The results of your ABM strategy might take longer to come to fruition than other marketing strategies. However, you can identify small achievements by measuring your ABM campaign’s performance along the way.
If you’ve just started implementing ABM in your prospecting efforts, you can do a comparative analysis to discover which strategy performs better. This will help you identify strengths and areas for improvement. Measurement should take place at every stage of the ABM process, and measurement systems should be indicated in the marketing plan.
For the most part, marketing and sales teams tend to operate independently. Marketers focus on lead generation, so they care more about quantity, whereas salespeople focus on lead conversion, so they care more about quality.
Make sure that the objectives of each team are directed towards a common goal. If it requires alignment meetings every week to avoid confusion, then make it happen. Plan out your Service-Level Agreement (SLA) between the teams, so collaboration becomes official business.
Based on a survey by SiriusDecisions, 24% faster revenue growth and 27% faster profit growth over a three-year period can be achieved by B2B organizations if they have a unified sales and marketing strategies.
Before starting ABM for your business, know that it involves heavy research on both the sales and marketing sides. Building an ideal target account is crucial, and this is where your next steps most come because ABM relies heavily on the accuracy of these target accounts.
Don’t limit yourself to the surface details. The more information you know (such as the ideal revenue, size, location, and key business challenges), the better you can formulate an effective ABM strategy that fits the core needs of your customer.
When you plan the development of your ideal target account, be sure to gather input from both your sales and marketing teams so you have a more holistic view of your ideal customer from a range of different perspectives.
Keep in mind that there are some things account-based marketing can’t do. For example, it isn’t nearly as scalable as mass marketing because of the research and personalization requirements. If you think too big too soon and roll out ABM to hundreds of accounts at the same time, you’ll end up overwhelming your sales/marketing teams, and losing control over the process.
ABM works best when it’s rolled out slowly and implemented over time. Make your plan and start out with just a few accounts. Once you get used to the process and start seeing positive results, you can begin to extend ABM implementation to the rest of your accounts.
If you’re just beginning with ABM, expect to make a few mistakes here and there. But, you will become more proficient as time goes on. Since the strategy aims for precision, data is an integral factor in the process. Collecting and analyzing data must be an ongoing activity.
Also, you need to show consistency in nurturing your target accounts. Even though they’re only talking to a single contact, the team behind your ABM should ensure consistency across multiple touch points to build a long-term relationship with the target account.
These ABM challenges and issues can all be prevented, or at the very least reduced, by a thorough knowledge of your account-based marketing principles. If you have a comprehensive plan that takes into account the potential challenges you might face, you’ll be able to develop contingencies and even find opportunities to improve various aspects of your ABM process.
To learn more about account-based marketing, check out our whitepaper on How to Develop an Account-Based Marketing Strategy!
Account-based marketing has been generating a lot of buzz over the last few years. And despite the fact that 90% of B2B marketers acknowledge the advantages of ABM, only 20% of companies are actively using this tactic. The wide gap can be attributed to skepticism due to misconceptions about ABM.
Even if ABM proponents and influencers are spreading the good news about it, it’s not that easy for companies to make the switch from mass or segmented marketing to account-based marketing. But let me tell you it’s worth the time, energy, and resources.
Let’s debunk the misconceptions surrounding ABM to help you make the right decision when you’re reassessing your marketing approach.
The concept of account-based marketing has been around since… forever. Think about it, marketing and sales professionals zero in on target organizations that they want to include in their clientele. This has been going on even before marketing went digital.
Many B2B marketers believe that the ABM approach was already being applied in the past, albeit without a systematic process. In fact, the term “account-based marketing” was coined by the Information Technology Services Marketing Association (ITSMA) more than ten years ago.
However, as digital and marketing automation trends continue to catch on, marketers and industry leaders have rebranded and developed the concept into what we now know to be account-based marketing.
Some ABM skeptics say that account-based marketing is purely outbound. However, inbound marketing also plays a significant role in successful ABM campaigns.
Highly personalized content such as eBooks, whitepapers, and even webinars can be extremely valuable in reaching your target account while cultivating a business relationship.
According to the 2016 State of Pipeline Marketing report, 35.4% of B2B marketers claim that their overall marketing strategy is composed of 25% ABM. This means that they’re complementing their traditional marketing strategies with ABM to target more valuable accounts.
While it’s true that ABM focuses on a handful of highly qualified prospects that can potentially generate higher revenue than others, ABM isn’t simply about targeting just a few big accounts.
ABM is scalable to a high volume of accounts while still retaining the promise of a more personalized and individualized approach. This is what makes account-based marketing incredibly effective for B2B marketers.
Account-based marketing can be customized to work with any business size or industry. According to ITSMA, there are three types of ABM that are currently being utilized in today’s marketing landscape namely strategic ABM, ABM lite, and programmatic.
Strategic ABM follows a 1:1 model, where one marketer handles a single account. ABM lite assigns one marketer to a few accounts.
On the other hand, the programmatic type, which is the newest type of ABM, automates the approach to accommodate hundreds of accounts so that marketers can cover more ground.
In account-based marketing, both the sales team and marketing department work closely together to determine their target accounts and achieve the same goals.
ABM is built on a solid account planning to create actionable and sustainable marketing and sales strategies. Alignment of both teams is crucial to the success of account-based marketing.
Companies need to delve a little deeper into how ABM can help grow and maintain their sales funnel. ABM can help businesses eliminate waste and decrease risk by implementing a complete tailored, customer-centric approach.
With ABM, you can better track your revenue and build stronger relationships with prospects. Customer experience is also heightened with an ABM strategy because communications and content becomes more relevant and valuable. So you can delight your existing clients, turning them into promoters and ambassadors of your brand.
Don’t let these misconceptions prevent you from reaping the benefits that account-based marketing can bring to the table. Find out how ABM can benefit your business by contacting PureB2B today!
Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is a strategic method where marketers communicate with a defined set of accounts as markets of one. It’s sometimes called “key account marketing” and is often used by enterprise-level sales teams.
ABM can also cover support for the after-sales customer lifecycle to help improve the overall experience of the customer. ABM allows teams to effectively deliver strategy, planning, goal setting, insights, and sales alignment that are needed to achieve the team’s objectives when it comes to customer growth, loyalty, and retention.
“In its purest form, account-based marketing has been around forever. Account-based marketing is simply instead of fishing with nets, we’re fishing with spears. You identify exactly the prospects you want to do business with and then you market very precisely and narrowly to them directly.” Matt Heinz, President, Heinz Marketing
But, is account-based marketing worth the hassle of implementation? In this article, we’ve listed a few benefits to consider to help you make a more informed decision.
For instance, if a prospect fills out a form on your website, it acts as a trigger for your sales team to start targeting other contacts from that company. This instantaneous trigger ensures that all key stakeholders are always kept up-to-date.
ABM identifies the accounts that can generate the most revenue, which helps fuel the sales funnel with similar accounts. By reviewing the sales feedback, purchase history, and even buyer behavior, teams can better identify valuable types of accounts and focus resources on trying to close them.
According to a survey from Alterra Group, 97 percent of marketers said that ABM resulted in a higher return on investment (ROI) compared to other marketing activities. Considering the fact that ABM targets accounts that are the most likely to generate revenue, increasing is suddenly quite doable with ABM.
ABM’s more targeted approach ensures that fewer resources are wasted. This is especially beneficial to teams with a limited budget like startups or small businesses.
Marketers are well aware of the many stages of the sales funnel. With a more targeted approach, your marketing and sales teams can drop unqualified leads right away to focus on the ones that are more likely to generate the most revenue. This cuts the length of the sales cycle, saving both time and resources.
There is often a disconnect between marketing and sales departments. But ABM seeks to align them so they can work in tandem to deliver results. To make this happen, sales team must provide marketing with useful feedback, and in return, the marketing team needs to provide relevant resources for qualifying prospects.
In an ITSMA study, almost 85 percent of marketing professionals said that ABM provided huge benefits in terms of retaining and expanding their current client relationships. The fact that ABM is so focused on customer accounts means that marketing and sales activities are far more customer-driven.
Despite the obvious benefits, you should also know about the key issues and challenges facing companies using an ABM approach:
For ABM to work, you need to assign a leader who will not just be in charge of connecting teams from sales and marketing, but also acts on the engagement opportunities with customers. Assigning accounts to sales people is not enough. There has to be an appointed leader who’s in charge of rallying the troops.
Sure, ABM can be a key driver to success, but it doesn’t mean you should roll out ABM to hundreds of accounts all at the same time. This will not only end up overwhelming your teams, but the lack of control can also result in major errors and potential losses. It’s best to start small and build momentum over time.
ABM is not a one time, big time deal. Like blogging, you need to commit to consistency. You can’t build relationships overnight; you need time and multiple touchpoints. Once you’ve established a momentum, you need to devote resources to sustaining it.
Like every other campaign, you need metrics to measure the success of your initiatives. For ABM to work, you need to monitor and compare your efforts to calculate its value to the organization. Essentially, you have to develop your own tracking system with your own metrics and goals to benchmark performance.
Account-Based Marketing is definitely worth implementing in almost any circumstance. The proper alignment of sales and marketing teams alone is a good enough reason to try. However, you have to remember that ABM is not an overnight sensation, and a single massive rollout may not bring the best results.
Use of this strategy requires planning and alignment, as well as consistency and time. The key is to start small and to monitor ABM success on your test accounts. Once you’ve determined its value, you can replicate it on a much larger scale.
ABM uses your existing and prospective buyer data to identify sales opportunities. Learn more with our FREE data-driven marketing whitepaper today!
