Account Based Marketing
What is Account Based Marketing?- Account based Marketing is used quite a lot in the business world. However, it is best known for being a business strategy that concentrates resources on a set of target accounts within a market. In simpler words, Account based Marketing is a strategic approach to business marketing based on account awareness in which an organization considers and communicates with individual prospect or customer accounts as markets of one.
There are 14 benefits to Account Based Marketing including Improved Customer Acquisition Process, An Opportunity To Get Personal, Faster Sales Process, Clearer Path To ROI, Cost Efficiency, Efficient Use Of Marketing Resources, Shorter Sales Cycles, Sales-Marketing Effort, Synchronization, Trust-Based Relationships, Greater Opportunity To Be The Expert, A Way to Stand Out From The Crowd, Better Reporting, Data-Driven Decisions To Align Sales and Marketing, The Right Target and The Right Leads. Going into depth about some of these benefits can help others understand why they are beneficial and how they affect certain people in account based marketing. One of the benefits is the Faster Sales Process, Multiple stakeholders are involved in making a final purchase decision. This can often slow down your typical sales and marketing process, but account based marketing allows you to leverage it. Another advantage for Account Based Marketing is Better Reporting, Goal setting and analyzing reports are a breeze in comparison to looking at a larger set of data pulling from all different types of accounts. Lastly, another important benefit is Trust-Based Relationships, this benefit is crucial because when clients are drawn to answers and they end up finding those answers, it builds long term relationships. Once trust is built, that sets the groundwork for a relationship and that leads to more sales. Employees can create value to their organization by implementing Account Based Marketing to improve processes and generate sales.
There are many examples of account based marketing that are commonly used and can be found in the real world. The first example is events and webinars. Both of these are events either in person or online that can be tailored towards specific target accounts with unique content, gifts, etc. Another example of account based marketing is direct mail and email campaigns. These are used to send tailored marketing electronically to the customer that is personalized for them to get the best results. Target accounts can also be reached through social media via paid advertising which allows you to focus ads on specific accounts instead of the whole website. The final example is website personalization that allows you to change the experience on your website for target accounts vs everyone else. Those are some examples of how account based marketing is used.
Another aspect of account based marketing is how to effectively set it up in your business. The first part of it is to know what your high value accounts are, or who could contribute a lot to the company. Next you would need to research these accounts and make a customized marketing campaign based off of that. The whole purpose of account based marketing is the fact that it targets a specific group or person so this step is essential. Then the final thing to do is to execute the marketing campaign and analyze how well it did. That is a quick summary of how to successfully set up account based marketing in a business.
To summarize, account based marketing can be described as contributing time and resources to marketing towards a certain set of target accounts that may yield a high value. Based on the company this might or might not be an effective tactic to use, but if used and implemented correctly it could have good results.
Written By: Reed Barnard and Andre Melo
Works Cited
https://www.optimizely.com/optimization-glossary/account-based-marketing/