Why account-based marketing is so important?

Cannot overestimate the importance of ABM (Account-based marketing) in B2B sales. One of the core differences between B2B and traditional marketing is that during the procurement process in an organization, decisions are rarely being made by one person in isolation. There is either a particular structure where several people are making decisions or the decision makers are advised by more than one different professionals, who are competent enough about the acquired products or services. And all is further complicated by time – although the procurement process could in certain cases take months or even years, in certain cases time is of paramount importance – research shows that the sooner we engage the lead, the greater the probability of deal. Therefore, acquiring lead’s contacts and engaging them is the primary goal for new business generation.

As a result of all this, the task of the B2B marketer becomes exponentially more difficult – we need to communicate to multiple people with different agendas and professional background, who are along different parts of the decision journey and most probably have different experiences with or brand. In addition, very often, if it’s a new account, we do not know all of the involved and we do not have their contact information. And even if we have, sometimes due to legal restrictions, we are not allowed to use it for direct marketing purposes.

Luckily, there are ABM digital and social media tools, which allow us to target these decision makers and influencers directly with different types of communications, appropriate for the different stages of the decision journey. B2B is getting so huge a business that all major internet platforms – Google, Facebook and LinkedIn – are stepping up their efforts to provide some aspects of ABM marketing capabilities.

Of course, leading in this area is LinkedIn but the biggest problem with LinkedIn is of course its reach. While very popular in North America and parts of Europe, LinkedIn is not enough to give you the reach to every possible target. The appropriate global reach can be achieved with the help of Facebook and Google, but do they offer ABM marketing capabilities? Here is what ABM marketing capabilities all three major social media platforms offer.

Account-based marketing (ABM), also known as key account marketing, is a strategic approach to business marketing based on account awareness in which an organization considers and communicates with individual prospect or customer accounts as markets of one. Account-based marketing is typically employed in enterprise level sales organizations.

Account-based marketing with LinkedIn

Of course, LinkedIn was the first platform to provide strong ABM targeting capabilities. LinkedIn is the only platform of the three that allows for company targeting. All you need to do is prepare a list of your target companies and upload to LinkedIn to Campaign Manager and create an audience based on the company’s list. Then you can create all types of LinkedIn campaigns, targeting the employees of the companies in your list. You can communicate with your account through messages for highly targeted or use other LinkedIn advertising options if the target is along different part of the customer journey.

Apart from company targeting, LinkedIn has another very useful functionality. Is not effective to target all of a particular company’s employees and LinkedIn allows us to segment our audience according to professional demographics. This could be useful, because for hyper targeting we could create separate communications for business executives or professionals in different areas of interest – technology, engineering, etc.

And of course, LinkedIn allows for use of lead forms, where all of the target’s contact details would be automatically filled-in and if necessary, sales could immediately engage them.

Here is a video to start with: