While the term account-based marketing (ABM) may sound new, the approach really isn’t. It’s an old-school strategy with a new spin for the digital marketing world and is an effective way to complement your inbound marketing efforts.
While inbound marketing is based on creating educational content to attract target audiences, ABM focuses marketing efforts on attracting specific potential clients. It should be considered one part of your strategy in developing relationships with your target accounts.
ABM has been so effective in B2B marketing that in just 12 months, the ABM adoption rate went from 50 percent to 90 percent among the marketers surveyed for the 2017 State of ABM Survey. With this insight, we can assume the ABM approach will likely continue to reshape marketing initiatives through technology and process.
To get started with your own account-based marketing strategy, let’s explore some leading platforms that will help you achieve your goals.
The Atlanta-based ABM platform has been helping B2B companies target accounts since 2014. Its goal is to help companies tailor marketing experiences to decision-makers and build a sales pipeline suitable for that company. Terminus helps companies choose the exact firms and job titles they want to engage with their ads, regardless of whether or not those individuals have visited the companies' websites.
Hundreds of companies are utilizing Terminus, which has garnered the attention (and investment) of marketing industry leaders. HubSpot, for example, recently implemented a Terminus integration that enables B2B marketers to launch account-based advertising campaigns activated when users visit a specific page or view a specific email.
Customers who use Terminus regularly see click-through-rates that are three to five times the industry average. This is largely due to the platform’s ability to customize and personalize your advertising messages to the right people at the right time based on where they are in the buy cycle.
Drift
Drift is working to make marketing personal again. The company uses a conversational marketing approach, employing an intelligent chat bot rather than a lead capture form to engage with prospects in real time.
Using enriched data, such as knowing what page on your site a prospect is looking at, chatbots can customize the conversation by being positioned to answer questions. The chatbot may even be able to distinguish what prospect the company works for to further contextualize the conversation. This does the legwork for you so that when a prospect is ready to talk to sales, they’ve already been qualified.
With Drift, customers can not only offer a more personalized experience but increase revenue, as well. In fact, Drift customers have seen qualified inbound leads increase two to four times just by shifting to engaging leads through messaging.
Your employees send dozens of emails every day, so why not make those communications work harder for you? That’s the idea behind Sigstr, the email signature marketing platform that turns these routine email communications into a measurable marketing opportunity with a call to action. Here's mine:
Using the Sigstr HubSpot integration, you can target contacts by linking your ABM lists in HubSpot to Sigstr campaigns. Connect the signature email banner to HubSpot landing pages to measure the number of views, form submissions, contacts and customers that resulted from your Sigstr email banner.
ABM has continued to gain traction year over year, and adoption of this strategy will likely only increase among marketers. Its effectiveness in aligning a company’s sales and marketing strategies and creating a targeted approach toward attracting quality prospects has been proven to work for many companies across various industries.
As we’ve demonstrated, there are many creative ways to go about this, from email signatures to one-on-one conversations with prospects, and surely many other avenues will emerge as this strategy is further explored.
Bringing together the most useful aspects of inbound and outbound methodologies to meet customers where they are, account-based marketing is a yet another way to attract customers, nurture a relationship with them and provide them with your products and services that can resolve their pain points and help them achieve success.
