Account Based Marketing

The Value of Account Based Marketing

Account Based Marketing (ABM) has become an essential marketing strategy for companies in every industry thanks to its effectiveness. In fact, roughly 85% of B2B marketers believe that ABM campaigns surpass all other marketing initiatives when it comes to delivering ROI.

In this brief overview, we’ll explore what Account Based Marketing is, how to make it work, what technologies to use, and what makes Overdrive’s steady-state ABM program so effective.

What is Account Based Marketing?

Account Based Marketing is a strategy that targets a key set of accounts or companies by directing highly personalized campaigns to critical decision-makers and buying teams within each account. Rather than building campaigns designed to blanket all possible leads, ABM identifies the most promising prospects and treats those accounts as a “market of one” to build relationships that lead to greater sales and marketing opportunities.

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What are the benefits of Account Based Marketing?

The benefits of ABM campaigns include:

  • Greater results – because marketing activities and communication are laser-focused on critical decision-makers, ABM campaigns tend to have a higher conversion rate.
  • Faster sales cycles – by simultaneously addressing, nurturing, and converting all the decision-makers within an organization, ABM enables a faster buying process.
  • Demonstrated ROI – as Account Based Marketing campaigns are targeted , precise, and measurable, calculating accurate ROI is far easier than general campaigns.
  • Alignment of marketing and sales – ABM campaigns require sales and marketing teams to collaborate more effectively, which increases efficiency and improves communication and personalization directed at prospects and customers.

Core Competencies

Our capabilities provide you with the 1001 marketing tasks your enterprise needs to launch high-powered marketing programs that last and yield measurable insights you can take to the bank. Our teams blend the critical talents of modern marketing into a single agile and global solution.

Account-Based Marketing

Proven and pragmatic ABM programs that reach and influence the people who actually buy what your company sells and bridge the gap between sales and marketing.

Social Media Marketing

Smart and friendly social that weaves content and brands into the fabric of the web, creating customer connections and real ROI.

Four Steps to Success with Account Based Marketing

Successful Account Based Marketing campaigns involve four distinct phases:

  1. Define: identify the audience you want to reach. Create a segmented ABM universe of companies and contacts that can actually buy what you sell. Then, define a plan for nurture track development.
  2. Reach: stay in front of the right people all the time. Deploy always-on ABM media programs that keep your offers and brand in front of your highly targeted universe of ABM contacts.
  3. Nurture: escalate ABM leads to sales. Engage your universe of prospects with relevant offers, highly persuasive email and content, relevant website experiences, and timely sales efforts to escalate leads.
  4. Measure: track your ABM success. Report on contacts, engagement, pipeline influence, and revenue for your universe to calculate ROI. Understand what is driving your leads and determine how to optimize your business pipeline.

"For ABM to work, it must be an always-on program." Harry J. Gold, CEO, Overdrive Interactive

Three Types of Account Based Marketing

When launching an Account Based Marketing campaign, one of the most challenging steps is determining how to identify which accounts to target. Complicating this task is the fact that sales and marketing often have conflicting opinions about which accounts may prove most valuable.

Successful techniques for identifying the most promising accounts include:

  • Starting with IP addresses. You can develop lists of contacts by determining the IP addresses of companies visiting your website, and using data procured from third-party providers to create contact lists.
  • Exploiting homegrown email and intent lists. Most companies do a solid job of developing valuable internal email lists. By using data from Facebook and Twitter or Google Custom Match, you can develop a targeted ABM list.
  • Using predictive analytics. By zeroing in on intent data at targeted companies, you can create predictions about which accounts are more or less likely to engage with your services or buy your products.
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The Best Technology Platforms for Account Based Marketing

Account Based Marketing requires cutting-edge marketing automation, CRM, and advertising platforms to manage the intense personalization involved in nurturing a specific set of buyers in each account. While there are many products available for ABM campaigns, there are several clear leaders.

  • Marketing automation platforms. Marketo ABM and Oracle’s Eloqua are leaders in this category. They both provide unified platforms for targeting and managing accounts, running campaigns across a variety of channels, and personalizing communications with key contacts.
  • CRM platforms. Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce are at the top of this category. Microsoft Dynamics builds highly personalized experiences for customers and makes it easy to correctly attribute pipeline and revenue to individual ABM campaigns, while Salesforce centralizes all prospect and customer data, simplifying the process of building personalized experiences based on data.
  • Ad platforms. Madison Logic is a B2B marketing platform that supports lead generation. Another platform, called Demandbase can help develop a list of target accounts and provides a bevy of metrics and insights to improve future targeting. LinkedIn Campaign Manager delivers sponsored content onto the LinkedIn feed of target audiences and enables greater granularity and targeting.

ABM Partners and Technologies

Our experts help our clients choose, integrate, and maintain the right ABM media and technology solutions based on their needs, legacy marcom stack, and budget.

3 Perspective Shifts Required to Make Account Based Marketing work

Implementing Account Based Marketing is a company-wide effort that requires several significant changes in the way that marketing, sales, and other teams think about their work.

  1. Everything must align. Marketing, Sales, Finance, IT, and the C-suite must all be on board with the adoption of ABM solutions and with the decision about which accounts to target. Aligning sales and marketing is particularly critical, as their joint efforts are required to seamlessly nurture and escalate ABM prospects.
  2. Focus on accounts rather than individuals. According to IDC, the average deal involves more than eight decision-makers. Converting these accounts requires highly targeted and personalized marketing that addresses the needs and interests of all decision-makers rather than individual leads.
  3. ABM is a way of life, rather than a campaign. ABM is a long-term, ongoing investment – a way of doing business rather than a specific business tactic. It requires constant attention to customer satisfaction and a daily focus on retaining sales and upselling existing customers.

Account Based Marketing with Overdrive Interactive

As a leading digital marketing agency, Overdrive Interactive has perfected a surgically optimized approach to Account Based Marketing that keeps clients’ content, offers, products, and calls-to-action in front of the right audiences, in the right places, at the right times.

Overdrive ABM campaigns include:

  • Full-final optimization to ensure that leads are quickly escalated.
  • Scalable programs that deliver the horsepower and accuracy required to launch and maintain measurable ABM initiatives.
  • Integration of Sales and Marcom technology to arm Sales and Marketing departments with timely intelligence and alerts they require – including the active buyers who need to be called today – to compete and close more deals.
  • Target audience development, including interviews, research, segmentation, and acquisition of third-party data to create a comprehensive list of companies and contacts for surgically targeted media and nurture programs.
  • Media planning and buying, including IP and company name targeting, marketing automation cookie targeting, named ABM contact retargeting, custom audience individual and titled targeting, and direct mail campaigns.
  • Nurture and marketing automation that delivers highly targeted and relevant email marketing, content and website experiences to quickly escalate leads.
  • Measurement and optimization tasks that deliver transparency, accountability, and actionable insights for super-timely alerts, intelligence, and ongoing improvement to ABM programs.

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