What is Account Based Marketing

What is Account Based Marketing?

Account Based Marketing (ABM) is a strategic approach to marketing and sales in which individual accounts are focused on. It's about understanding your target customers' needs, wants, and motivations in order to customize content and optimize conversions. Itā€™s about providing a tailored experience for each account with personalized campaigns that align with their needsā€”all in order to boost sales and increase brand awareness.

Account Based Marketing turns the B2B sales and marketing funnel on its head.Ā 

Instead of starting with marketing channels to generate leads, anĀ Account Based Marketing (ABM) strategyĀ begins with identifying and targeting the best-fit accounts with the most significant revenue potential for your business. Only then will marketing work with sales to create highly relevant personalised content and communication to engage with the prospect.

Traditional marketing produces a single point of contact lead. Account Based Marketing produces multiple points of contact in the best-fit companies most likely to benefit from your services.Ā 

You may be familiar with the Miller Heinemann strategic selling, the Blue Sheet and the four different buyers. The economic buyer, the user buyer, the technical buyer and the coach. However, KnowledgeTree reported that the average B2B buying committee comprises seven to 20 individuals. Each buyer and influencer is involved in the decision-making process, and each has to satisfy their needs.Ā 

It's not a new approach, but so few organisations use it. The ones that do are the ones that you lose business to.

Our Account Based Marketing FAQs should answer any questions you may have and please speak to our team who will be happy to answer your queries.

The three pillars of account based marketing

Benefits of Account Based MarketingĀ 

  • Aligning the sales and marketing activities - marketing tied to tangible results and more significant ROI
  • More Efficient Use of Marketing Budget
  • Shorter Sales Cycle
  • Removes the customer's internal blocks when selling, helping speed up the sales cycle.
  • Salespeople spend time selling, not prospecting - who cares if you've made 100 cold calls today if you haven't sold anything?
  • More intelligent use of PPC with targeted ads
  • Better Customer Experience

Account Based Marketing is about the customer. They are not waiting for your sales call. They want to read meaningful and relevant information and have valuable conversations on their terms. 

Account Based Marketing is omnichannel. Which channels you choose depends on the target customer and the target individual. Think of it as running a marketing campaign just to get to speak to one person, what would you do? We then use process and tools to enable this highly personalised approach to scale. 

So you may support direct outreach, such as email, with awareness ad campaigns on social media targeting that individual. Or tailor content for that persona. Or even identify which events the target customer attends and exhibit, or simply arrange a meet up there over a coffee. 

There are lots of moving parts, and we can do all the heavy lifting. 

Account Based Marketing isn’t the right solution for every product or service. We tend to recommend it when the mrr on a deal is above £4k. 

An Account Based Marketing campaign ranges from £3k to £25K a month and typically run for six months. 


Example of Account Based MarketingĀ 

Doogheno was engaged by a cloud provider's new business sales team to create a marketing campaign forĀ  virtual cloud data centre stack.

Doogheno created and actioned highly targeted Account Based Marketing to ensure the campaign was fully aligned with the cloud providerā€™s sales objectives.

Outcome

Ā£53,000 MRR pipeline

7 x ROI on closed business

Speak to our team today about Account Based Marketing or read more case studies here.

What We Did

Define Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

Defined a list of target customers based on ICP.

ICP target research

Target persona researchĀ 

Copywriting

2,000 word piece of hero content, supported by four LinkedIn articles.

Personalised messaging for email sequence and LinkedIn outreach based on detailed personas

Email Marketing

Email sequences from HubSpot

LinkedIn Marketing

LinkedIn posting and articles

LinkedIn connections (manual)

LinkedIn conversations

Lead scoring

Defined interaction scores

ABM Offer