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3 Marketing Strategies That Deliver – Part One – ABM

Most B2B marketing departments, regardless of industry, share some common goals, such as increasing leads and engagement, enhancing CX, producing targeted messages that get results, etc. However, the strategies they use to achieve these results can be quite diverse. In this practical and informative three-part blog series, we will focus on the top three strategies successful marketing departments are using now in order to stay ahead of the competition:

  • Part One: Account Based Marketing (hyper-personalized CX)
  • Part Two: Data-Driven Marketing (connected, actionable data)
  • Part Three: Content Marketing (leveraging data to deliver valuable content)

Strategy: Account Based Marketing

Account Based Marketing (ABM) is arguably the most-hyped marketing strategy, but it’s not without reason. Advances in martech have made sending hyper-personalized marketing pieces to a curated collection of ideal customers a scalable endeavor. In a time when 65 percent of B2B customers expect the companies they do business with to know them personally, or they’ll take their business elsewhere, ABM is empowering marketers to deliver on that demand. What’s even more amazing is if you have the right tools in place, you can automate the process of pulling and sending personalized content and campaigns, which provides customers with the loyalty-inducing bonus of instant gratification.

ABM Essentials

A few things you will need to do in order to successfully add ABM to your marketing ops strategies are:

1. Prep Your Data

Your data is critical to getting ABM right. It must be clean, complete, enriched and easy to mine. You cannot personalize messages and campaigns with bad or dirty data. You also cannot identify your ideal customer without bias, unless your data has been optimized for analyzation.

Tools of the Trade

  1. Data integration tool – Connects all data sources, creates centralized access to data and a single source of truth.
  2. Data management tool – Continuously cleans, enriches and preps data for use.
  3. Marketing dashboard aka data dashboard – Allows you to mine data, glean insights in real-time, share reports on-demand and make data-driven decisions.

2. Choose Targets

ABM is not about marketing to everyone. It’s a strategy that requires you to narrow your focus by choosing only the customers and prospects that are most likely to buy.

Tools of the Trade

  1. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system – Tracks all customer interactions.
  2. Marketing dashboard — Makes identifying trends, patterns and opportunities a simple process. Some dashboards come with the ability to analyze data and can identify your ideal customer profile (ICP) for you.
  3. Marketing Automation Platform (MAP) – Essential for automating the process of sending out personalized marketing campaigns across a variety of channels.

3. Create Personalized Campaigns

Once you have created targeted campaign lists for your ideal customers, you are ready to create personalized campaigns that speak to their unique and specific interests.

Tools of the Trade

  1. Content management software – Pulls content from all connected data sources (MAP, CRM, etc.) and organizes it for use in personalized campaigns. When integrated with MAP, it can automate personalization at scale, which significantly reduces the complexity of ABM.
  2. Sales enablement software – Enables sales to select, personalize and send pre-approved marketing campaigns via the CRM.

ABM Inspiration

Those who have done the work of implementing ABM into their agency marketing ops repertoire are seeing some amazing results, including:

87% of B2B marketers report that ABM delivers a higher ROI than other marketing initiatives

208% more revenue is generated by companies who use ABM than those who don’t

79% of companies that exceed revenue goals have an ABM (personalization) strategy

Stay Tuned

Be sure to read Parts Two and Three of our blog series: 3 Marketing Strategies That Deliver. You can also learn more about strategic marketing by downloading our NEW eBook: A Guide to Optimizing Marketing Operations.