What is Account-Based Marketing?

There are several types of strategies to reach an ideal prospect, but one of the most effective is Account Base Marketing, which focuses on knocking on the right doors, talking to the right people and thinking quality over quantity. The following Blog will tell you in digestible terms what this strategy is all about.

Index

• What is Account-Based Marketing?
• Inbound vs. ABM
• Reasons to use Account Based Marketing
• Conclusions

What is Account-Based Marketing?

Imagine someone offering you just the product or service you need, through a convenient medium of your choice and at a cost range you already had in mind, sounds like the ideal scenario for both buyer and seller, doesn't it?

Account-Based Marketing or ABM is a strategy that contemplates this idea, which consists of a company generating a direct and personalised route focused on its ideal client, avoiding dispersing its efforts and resources in attacking the masses and instead concentrating on the desired account.

In other words, you are creating a tailor-made suit for the company you want to reach, instead of opening a clothing shop where several companies come in looking for something tailored to their needs, you are customising a strategy in detail, ensuring a high probability of selling, as you are creating a solution that fits perfectly to a specific need or problem.

When you offer a plan to correct a problem so directly, ABM becomes a foolproof strategy because unlike other marketing strategies, you let a prospect know up front what their business needs and avoid them having to go through several stages of interest and nurturing to get to you, rather you arrive at their door to provide answers and routes to improve their business performance.

Inbound vs. ABM

ABM being so direct and specific, it could be said that it takes the opposite route to Inbound Marketing, which seeks for a company to create a loyalty process by first seeking interest and then nurturing it, until expectations are met and a prospect falls in love with it. On the other hand, ABM approaches a previously identified high profile prospect, who is a vital decision maker within a company and gives them just what they are looking for with certainty, offers them a personalised solution and once they are hooked, proceeds to nurture the bond with the company once they have their attention.

Basically in Inbound, we let a prospect go on a journey and internalise that they have a problem, discover the best route to solve it and try to attract them to our company and in ABM we tell the prospect that we have the right solution to their problem, we tell them to choose us to solve it and in doing so, we convince them to move forward with us to strengthen their business.

Now when there is already a link between a company and a loyal prospect, both Inbound and ABM should be complementary processes, as both processes are necessary and effective when used in a balanced way, however, we must always keep in mind that Inbound targets masses while ABM targets an individual or company.

Reasons to use Account-Based Marketing

• It is a direct, specific and personalised strategy.
• It focuses on a prospect or company individually, which allows you to concentrate on a single target, rather than attacking masses that could cause a diversification of attention.

• The strategy is designed for decision makers in a company or directly for the prospect you are targeting.
  

• You have more control of the information and results, since you are the one who investigates the problem or situation to be pointed out, you draw up and propose a plan on how to solve the problem that you are going to offer to solve to a company or prospect.
  
• It is almost a certainty that you will reach an agreement, since you have previously investigated and segmented the company you want to reach, you will be more sure to offer something that you know they will require, making your offer very attractive, since it will solve the gap they need to fill.

Account Based Marketing is ideal and effective when you have a defined and segmented company or prospect, it must be clear that the resources and efforts are being used towards an individual objective of attracting those interested parties and not a group or mass, in order to achieve a personalised loyalty within a B2B environment. With this in mind, ABM is one of the best strategies to achieve direct goals, investing time in the most effective way and resources in the most appropriate way in exactly what you want to achieve, presenting yourself directly to a company or prospect as the bearer of the answers to their concerns and problems.

<<Read More: Learn about Account-Based Marketing Process>>