Account Based Marketing (ABM) has been something of a buzzword recently in the B2B space. With Mogrify currently Beta testing our own SMB-level ABM product, we thought we’d explore the topic through a little a series of blogs. What is it? How is it different? What pains can it help solve? What are the problems with it? How do you do it well?
What is ABM?
Account Based Marketing is a strategic approach to sales and marketing that employs both sales and marketing tactics. As such, a genuine understanding of sales and marketing and their alignment is crucial to its success.
ABM is different to other forms of marketing in that it embraces one of the driving forces behind good sales practice – treating each prospective account as a “market of one”.
What does it mean in practice?
In practice, this means a hyper-personalised series of marketing interactions with the target accounts. Let’s take a crude example – emails:
- Email type 1 – one-to-many
In this version of an email, we define our target markets, buyer personas and key messaging. We pull this in to a neat, segment-specific email that we can send out to hundreds or thousands of people who match the characteristics of our chosen segment. The content is relevant to them as we have planned carefully to make sure we know the segment, their pains and challenges.
- Email type 2 – dynamic one-to-many
In this version, we have built on the great work of version 1 to strive for an extra layer of sophistication using a world-class sales and marketing automation platform, such as Constant Contact, Marketo or Hubspot. Using the integrated CRM of the platform, we can code up dynamic content rules that utilise a wider range of contact specific information to swap in links, individual words, images, or even entire sections dynamically for each recipient. So, whilst ‘we may send the email out to 5000 people, there will be dozens of different dynamic versions of the email received. It is an extra layer of personalisation to seek higher engagement.
- Email type 3 – one-to-one – welcome to ABM!
Here we take a smaller subset of our target audience and produce an entirely bespoke email for each of them based upon the actual organisation they work for, job they do and more. So rather than saying, “…as a business owner in the Insurance industry I know you’ll be experiencing challenges around cyber security…” we move to “…as the owner of XYZ Insurance, I know you’ll have been devastated by the cyber-attack on your business last week…”
What’s so good about ABM, isn’t that just what a salesperson does?!
Well yes, it kind of is what a salesperson does! However, doing it for dozens of people across hundreds of target accounts every day across multiple channels (not just email), is not something a typical salesperson is equipped to do. It’s far too time-consuming and costly to pay a salesperson to complete these tasks systematically every day.
So our aim with ABM is to work with sales to use marketing technology and practices to take on some of those more time-consuming sales tasks (such as account specific research), systematise them and incorporate them into our ABM program of activity.
What’s the catch?
Cost, complexity, and a long-term view of success. Because there is so much that needs to happen to be able to individually service dozens of people, across hundreds of target accounts in any meaningful way using an ABM style strategy, it costs a lot and can involve a lot of operational complexity to get right. It may also require your business to look at a 6-24 month time frame in which to see results, as you build up rapport with your ABM nucleus of targets.
As such, your business probably needs a high average deal and/ or margin size to justify the investment – which is why ABM is considered a B2B enterprise-level tool.
ABM at the mid-tier?
At Mogrify we love bringing enterprise-grade marketing services to the SMB space. We’ve been developing our own ABM product using our world-class B2B marketing automation expertise and partnership with Constant Contact to underpin the operational processes in ABM to drive down cost and allow you to have a holistic view of what ABM interactions have occurred with an account and how they have responded.
If you are interested to have a discussion with us about what ABM could mean for your business and how it might work (whether that’s you trying to do it in house or with a partner like Mogrify) then drop us a message by clicking on the Contact us button at the top of the page and we’ll arrange a call.
