May 6, 2016

The Power of Digital Account Based Marketing, by Prasad Adavankar

David Ogilvy, a famous advertising executive, once stated, “Don’t count the people you reach. Reach the people that count.” He makes it sounds so simple. But isn’t this one of the biggest challenges of a marketer: reaching the right people at the right time with the right message? And then, when you actually do reach the right people, your sales team forgets to follow up or continue to nurture the lead.

Now more than ever, a business needs to act like an experience business, which was the theme of this year’s Adobe Summit. Experience business is about “reinventing how products and services are created, delivered and marketed.” More specifically, companies must sense opportunities to transform how they deliver a consistent and contextual experience to customers. What are practical strategies for acting more like an experience business?

Reaching the right people

Many new strategies are shifting business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing to the next level. Unfortunately, the business-to-business (B2B) world tends to be more challenged on delivering meaningful experiences to institutional customers.

One promising strategy to reach the right people is account-based marketing (ABM). Essentially, ABM is about shifting the marketing focus from targeting the entire customer base to targeting a select few high-value, high

-growth-potential client accounts. You’ll need to understand their specific needs at a deeper level and then market the most relevant information, solutions, and value propositions to win, retain, and grow the business. One amazing discovery, since the launch of this 90s strategy, is that ABM is powered by digital.

With significant advancements in digital platforms, access to data, and new service models, ABM is now gaining a lot of attention in the marketing community. Studies by firms such as Marketo, Demandbase, and ITSMA found some important trends:

Over 97% of marketers say that ABM delivers higher impact and ROI than any other marketing tactics, and 80% realized benefits in expanding client relationships.
Over 72% plan to increase their ABM efforts and technology investments over the next 12 months.
ABM is essential, yet only 20% of marketers have been using it for more than a year, while 47% need more help.

The Path to Digital ABM

If ABM is a promising strategy for B2B companies to reach the right people, what should an organization consider to begin its journey?

1. Identify a cross-functional team and establish goals. ABM requires a collaborative approach that will engage sales, marketing, and other teams. Once the right team is in place, establish a collective goal. Empower each team member to identify high-impact marketing strategies to reach an account as well as to chart ways to contribute individually to growing a trusted account relationship for the long term. Marketing will typically lead the ABM program, getting the right team to the table, helping set metrics to track business impact, securing any needed investments, and tracking revenue attainment. Remember to include stakeholders from legal and regulatory functions in this process in order to address any compliance considerations.

2. Identify your target accounts that offer either the highest growth potential, profitability, access to specific markets or geographies, product co-innovation opportunities, or all of the above.

3. Get insights and develop ABM plans. ABM is built upon the fact that most customer buying decisions are not made by a single person. Typically a group of functional leaders contribute to different roles in the buying process. Many of them expect anytime and anywhere access to relevant information, decision support tools, and engaging digital experiences. Choose to make an effort to deeply understand your customers and key individuals. Craft and deliver highly relevant, consistent, and contextual experiences for the business customers throughout their buying journeys and beyond. Use techniques and sources such as the following in order to develop customer insights:

Work with sales for insights on core needs, sales processes, and dynamics of key accounts.
Create a buyer group persona analysis and journey map.
Research industry analyst reports for independent and objective insights into market dynamics.
Use digital channels for insights into specific business units and product lines.
View professional networking sites for insights into key individuals in order to inform engagement strategies.

4. Define a strategy and approach for content creation, cultivation, and curation to support the ABM at scale. With the above insight sources, develop your ABM plans jointly with the sales organization. Consider starting with just your top five accounts. Then adapt and roll out to other key accounts over time.

5. Pick the right tactics and technologies to execute at scale. ABM execution at scale requires careful orchestration across different work streams and tool sets. You may have a work stream for joint account planning, key deals, opportunity mapping, experience delivery and stakeholder engagement through digital-social-mobile channels. Consider using digital technologies to manage the ABM program by including tactics such as the following:

Research insights into specific accounts or individuals.
Run analytics and machine-learning techniques to detect buying signals.
Create an account-specific microsite or customized home page using IP detection, targeted contents, and calls to action.
Use third-party and user-generated content on social and professional networking sites.
Target display-ad placements on respected industry publishers’ sites.
Encourage social outreach and engagement through professional networking sites such as LinkedIn and social shadowing.
Create custom campaigns specific to large deals, and target key stakeholders.
Promote direct-mail campaigns.
Network at key industry events or host account-specific events.

Undoubtedly, ABM is the next big thing in B2B digital marketing, and it’s worth starting the journey to creating higher-impact marketing programs that reach the buyers that matter. Have you used ABM? What success have you achieved? Let me know.

Opinions expressed in this blog are of the author and may not represent Cognizant’s point of view.

Prasad Adavadkar

Prasad is a Digital Strategist and Director at Cognizant Life Sciences Digital/Cadient. His primary focus for past ten years is on helping…