The ABM data explosion — how will the marketing team cope?
It’s “revolutionary”. The “hottest new thing in marketing” and “a game changer”. These are the types of introductions we’re used to seeing when people write about Account-Based Marketing (ABM). The reality is that we’ve been using targeted marketing techniques for years, it’s just that the excitement around ABM reached fever pitch in 2016.
One of the reasons people are talking about ABM more now is that new Martech is making it an even more effective tactic. The strengths of ABM are that it uses sophisticated technologies to help you focus on the best opportunities, deliver customer-centric experiences and connect marketing to revenue. The number of services that can plug into your marketing platforms is growing by the day, as is the potential mountain of data you can gather on your prospects and current customers.
This means your marketing team needs to sift through behavioural analytics, intent data, sales funnel activities and more, so you need to give them effective content, communication and collaboration tools, as I’ll go on to explain.
ABM and the 80/20 rule
ABM has come a long way: emerging from the 80/20 rule and need to focus on a smaller number of more profitable customers. It grew out of a world that used very siloed tactics, where we reached our customers through direct mail, events, telemarketing and direct conversations with specific decision-makers: the CIO or CFO, for example.
I’m sure you remember those days, and how much work we all had to put in to get results. The problem was, the strategy was flawed: it didn’t use a joined-up approach. Often, people didn’t have a clear view of who the opinion maker was. Perhaps they relied on anecdotal information, from sales reps talking to people they knew in the prospect’s business, but they may have been lower-tier personnel, or in the wrong department. Consequently, it was difficult to build an accurate picture of the DMU.
ABM technology brought some powerful tools into play; ones that were highly targeted, aimed at teams of buying decision makers at a particular prospect organisation. They were metrics- and analytics-based, and could make use of individual decision-makers’ IP addresses, in order to reach them directly.
In the last year or so, the number of solutions being offered by Martech providers has exploded. We’re seeing Predictive Analytics, Account-based Social, Intent Marketing. You can do ABM through Marketing Automation, or BI and Analytics: knitting all your information together and running sophisticated, integrated marketed programmes at an account level.
Providing you understand what the DMU looks like, account marketing enables you to target all the decision makers through the most appropriate channel. That could be anything from telemarketing or email marketing through to very specific ads with personalised native and social messaging. All of these tactics use highly relevant content that’s more personalised and effective than batch and blast could ever dream of being.
The Holy Grail of Marketing
Some marketers talk about ABM as though it’s the Holy Grail, and maybe it is. Perhaps in the future, ABM will just be called “marketing”, because we’ll take so many of its features for granted.
Regardless, ABM is a journey you need to embark upon. Most companies attack it too quickly. Be different — be strategic. Don’t assume Martech will solve all your problems, but use it in a better way to make your marketing more effective.
It’s also essential to operate an effective SECURE platform for storing and sharing content, creating and agreeing unified documents, and collaborating across marketing, sales and other teams that offers workflow to support the working process
These types of account management campaigns often use a lot of disparate people, including senior marketing, BDRs, inside sales, marketing operations, and field operations, each of whom have important parts to play.
But you need to get on the same page, stop the infighting and work together, which is often the biggest battle in business. As I mentioned in my last article, agreeing on, working on and sharing documentation is one huge thing that can get all these people, who work separately, to work together — right up to the CEO. This will provide the foundation for successful ABM campaigns.
More information is available here on how one advertising agency uses Box to manage and collaborate on content using a unified platform like the one I mentioned.
