ABM is an approach to align sales and marketing built around the idea that it’s better to approach specific accounts, building relationships with them in a more personal way, than simply blast everyone with some variation of the same message.
This notion has been around for a long time, but in recent times, technology has allowed us to be much more efficient with ABM. Today it’s not just for big enterprises — it also has value for smaller businesses, and the tools we have access to has made it much more accessible. There’s a reason 67% of brands use ABM.
In this article, we’ll explore what ABM is, the benefits it has for small businesses, and look at some tips for how to do it effectively in your organisation.
What is ABM?
ABM is a more individualised approach to marketing. Instead of blindly targeting all your leads with the same approach, you specifically tailor your marketing to specific accounts.
It involves working more closely with your sales teams, drawing on their more intimate, one-on-one knowledge of individual accounts to personalise your marketing much more effectively.
The Benefits of ABM for Small Businesses
- It’s much more specific and precise. ABM isn’t just based on pure guesswork, it’s driven by data and a clearer understanding of your customers. This means it’s easier to make connections, build relationships, and ultimately increase your revenue.
- The ROI is easy to measure. When you’re targeting specific accounts you can track progress more closely, understanding what may be holding you back, and make tweaks to your approach. It’s easy to see the clear impact of your marketing and communicate this to others in your organisation to justify decisions.
- It’s low risk. With ABM, you’re making decisions based on hard, specific data, as opposed to guesswork. This drastically lowers the chances of your marketing missing the mark, and makes it much less likely that you’ll waste time and effort on the wrong approach. This is especially relevant for smaller teams who can’t afford to waste many resources.
- Your accounts appreciate it. ABM allows you to take a much more personal and tailored approach to your marketing, which your prospects typically appreciate much more since it feels more authentic, relevant, and valuable to them compared to cookie-cutter, impersonal approaches. For smaller businesses, which tend to serve fewer customers and often build strong relationships with them, this is important.
- It’s easier to align sales and marketing. ABM requires sales and marketing to forge a closer relationship and ensures better understanding between the teams and more consistency of message.
How to do ABM right
Do your groundwork
Before you launch an ABM campaign, there’s a lot of preliminary work to do. Make sure to start by developing a full understanding of the accounts you’re targeting. A good way to start is by meeting with other teams like Sales and Customer Support.
Find out as much as you can about who you’re targeting in each case, gather case studies, and decide on the best messaging and overall approach to take. It may help to create detailed profiles for each account you’re targeting with as much detail as possible.
Optimise your online presence
Once you have decided on the accounts to target, make sure your website and other online platforms like social media accounts are optimised for them. Speak their language, address their specific pain points, and make sure your messaging is consistent and aligned.
Identify high-value target accounts
With ABM, it’s impossible to target everyone. The nature of this strategy means you can only focus on a handful of accounts, so it’s essential to make sure you choose the right ones with the highest value.
This allows you to focus your resources in the right places — targeting accounts that are likely to respond well to your approach to give the best possible return on your investment.
Analyse your results and optimise engagement
ABM today is driven by data. Every modern business has access to a wealth of data on their accounts, and this allows us to be much more empirical with our marketing, making decisions based on clear evidence as opposed to guesswork.
To make the most of this, it’s important to define success for all stages of your ABM campaign early on. Then, carefully and continuously track all the relevant metrics to ensure you’re on track and course-correct as you go.
Connect the right people with the right prospects
One of the great things about ABM is that you can be very precise with how you connect with each account. One way to take advantage of this is to connect accounts with people like them in your organisation. Let IT experts speak to IT experts, and make sure they see content written by those people. Approach C-Suite accounts with marketing written from the perspective of other C-Suite executives. Speak their language, get on their wavelength, and it’ll be much easier to forge effective and productive relationships.
Account-based marketing can be an incredibly powerful approach for small businesses if used correctly. It allows you to maximise your resources and optimise your chances of success by taking a much more targeted and data-driven approach to connecting with your prospects.
To learn more about how Kongo can help you implement ABM in the most effective way possible, get in touch.
