We’ve all heard the phrase ‘work smarter, not harder’, and that’s exactly what account-based marketing is all about. Essentially, it’s shifting your sales and marketing efforts to focus on targeted, high-value accounts as opposed to the mass market. Account-based marketing has seen a huge increase in the B2B world with 70% of marketers having or planning an account-based marketing strategy, so let’s look at why.
Teamwork makes the dream work
In the words of Mike Krzyzewski, “two are better than one if two act as one” – and that’s exactly why account-based marketing works so well. It aligns sales and marketing activities and creates clarity, establishing a clear path to achieving key goals. This collaboration helps to create a more seamless customer experience by ensuring that communications and content remain consistent throughout.
Naturally, two teams working towards the same goal will be more efficient than one, and the results speak for themselves: organisations with clearly aligned sales and marketing departments achieve increased brand awareness, bigger business deals and higher annual revenues.
It’s time to get personal
There’s no one-size-fits-all solution to life. We all have different needs and preferences, which is why every industry is filled with different organisations offering their solutions to consumer issues. By accepting your business is not suitable for everyone’s needs, you can start focusing your resources on those that you can benefit.
Moving from a one-to-many to one-to-one approach will allow you to create more personalised content that is relevant to your audience. If someone approaches you with a personalised solution that has been tailored to resolve your specific problems, you’ll have no choice but to listen. That’s why account-based marketing is so effective. Personalised content is a great way to get your foot-in-the-door, showing your relevance to the client and helping to build trust by enabling deeper, emotional relationships to form.
Perhaps the biggest counter-argument for account-based marketing is the sheer amount of time and money that goes into nurturing specific clients – but that’s exactly why it works. Rory Sutherland (Vice Chairman at Ogilvy UK) explains this using ‘costly signalling theory’, for which he says success comes from the meaning associated with costliness. Essentially, the more resources you use, the more you show you care – and if you care, your clients will too.
For account-based marketing to be effective, it’s fundamental for you to understand your customer data – and this data must be relevant and up-to-date. Poor quality data is where we see the biggest downfall in account-based marketing. If your data is inaccurate, then you’re likely to be targeting the wrong accounts, so just keep this in mind.
Improve your ROI
By focusing your efforts on a smaller group of more relevant accounts, you’ll be spending less but (most likely) achieving more. Agreeing, 84% of organisations who use an account-based marketing strategy say it delivers a higher ROI than other campaigns. Moreover, because each account has their own marketing strategy, you are able to easily track ROI and assess which accounts are most beneficial to your organisation and identify any that are not performing well.
To conclude, by adopting an account-based marketing strategy your company can become more efficient, increase ROI and build a more loyal customer base – so what are you waiting for?
