By David Tomas, on 7 December 2016
If you are up to date with all the B2B marketing news, you will most likely have already heard of Account Based Marketing or ABM. It is one of the most revolutionary B2B tools to have come around in a while, and we believe it will have great impact on the market. Which is why I would like to tell you today everything you need to know about what Account Based Marketing is.
What is Account Based Marketing?
1) It is based on collective decision making.
Account Based Marketing is based on a very simple principle: that purchasing decisions, in B2B markets, are not made by isolated individuals, but, instead, are the result of an entire team’s effort. Which is why, if you focus your promotion efforts on one single person, you can very well be missing out on extremely valuable opportunities.
The audience targeted by an ABM campaign is not made up of individuals, but rather teams, or “accounts”: for example, the employees who work in a specific multinational’s office. As most companies have their own IP addresses, they are quite easy to identify. Once we know which IP addresses we are interested in, we can publish campaigns that are visible only to users with this IP address. All in all, it is about targeting campaigns at a very specific audience, in the most efficient way possible.
You may have noticed some similarities between marketing automation and ABM, but don’t mix them up! The difference is that the former is based on the use of cookies, which requires having previously interacted with the user you are targeting.
2) It is technologically innovative.
In the digital marketing world, it can sometimes seem that there is some kind of new technological innovation every day. Some of them improve already existing tools, while others bring around a complete and utter change which alters the very way we think about and look at marketing. Account Based Marketing falls, clearly, into the second category.
ABM uses the real time ads and IP based identification to create a high precision, real time marketing technique. It results in small campaigns with very low budgets, but that reach precisely the right people at precisely the right moment. You may only get 40 impressions on the ad, but you know that all of them are important and relevant to your goals.
3) It is a growing market.
Although the Account Based Marketing concept is not exactly new, recent technological advances made is possible to use it on a large scale, and it is expected that it will continue to grow impressively over the following years.
Currently, only a handful of companies control the ABM market. As with any new technology, however, it is an exploding industry with new providers popping up everywhere. Over the next few years, there is no doubt that adoption rates will increase, and we will see more and more ABM based solutions.
4) It works!
Account Based Marketing results can reach extraordinary levels, and it is not hard to see why: thanks to this tool, you can buy one single, or several, impressions in real time, direct them precisely to the account you are selling, and dynamically active your ad, according to the viewer’s actions. It is simply the most effective way to make sure ad comes in contact with the right person at the right time.
Its three main purposes are:
- Acquisition: ABM has great potential to attract new clients. All you have to do is create a list of the companies you want to reach out to, and create content specific to each one of them.
- Nurturing: if you need to care for and nurture your existing clients, you can use ABM to show them content on your website designed for precisely that purpose, rather than rely only on your email marketing campaigns.
- Expansion: once you already have contacts inside a company, ABM can be a great tool to expand your business to other departments and divisions.
5) But, like everything, it has pros and cons.
ABM is one of the most powerful B2B marketing techniques we have ever seen, thanks to its unique combination of characteristics: its real-time nature, IP basis and the fact that it is not only automatable, but also simple and easy to set up.
Just like any tool, however, it also has its limitations: particularly the fact that it requires investing in an implementation platform, and that sometimes it may not be entirely precise, depending on your target client’s IP mapping.
All in all, if you work in the B2B industry, increasing your marketing’s effectivity with Account Based Marketing is most definitely an opportunity you will not want to miss out on!
David Tomás
