In B2B, account-based marketing (ABM) is a hot topic. If you aren’t familiar with the term, ABM refers to structuring and implementing marketing programs for specific prospects/customers as opposed to markets, industries, or regions. Also known as key account marketing, ABM personalizes and tunes communication programs for each target account.
In DemandGen’s 2018 State of Account-Based Marketing report, 93% of survey respondents said account-based marketing is “extremely or very important” to overall organizational success.
Decades after account-based selling began being implemented in enterprise sales, and long after the release of The One To One Future by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, major marketers are realizing the significant benefits of this more concentrated, personalized, coordinated, measurable, and yes, responsive marketing approach.
According to the DemandGen report, 75% of account-based marketing practitioners have had their ABM strategy in place for under a year. Only 13% have been doing ABM for more than two years. So it’s fair to say when it comes to account-based marketing, the vast majority of business-to-business marketers are quite close to the starting blocks.
You’ll Need Tools to Implement ABM
The report indicated that 60% of respondents will “invest more or significantly more” in ABM in the next 12 months. Good thinking. Smart investments in technology will enable higher engagement and conversion rates, as well as larger deal sizes and a higher ROI, from ABM.
One example of smart ABM technology is Drift, which happens to be, like Longwood Software (the makers of RevBase), based in the Boston area. Drift ABM enables personalized, real-time conversations with key accounts by synching those accounts to Drift. Reps then receive real-time notifications when prospects from those accounts visit their website. These prospects get a personalized welcome message from their account rep, to start (or continue) a conversation.
The Role of MAM in ABM
Another example of the intelligent use of ABM technology is marketing asset management (MAM). With marketing asset management, users of account-based marketing are able to set up a value-added portal for each key account. It’s no secret that content is king in marketing these days. Imagine having a unique and highly relevant content portal for each of these accounts, aligned around sales objectives and managed by marketing.
The right marketing asset management system brings together content, collaboration, and communication (think of it as the 3 Cs) – along with eye-opening metrics. By tracking usage of content, marketing continually improves the relevance of its offerings, and sales reps gain the opportunity to add useful information to the portal personally vetted by them. So when a rep believes a customer will be interested in one or more other products, they’re simply added to the MAM portal.
But the personalized touch doesn’t end there. Sales reps are able to easily personalize content for each key account – without going through marketing and within existing brand guidelines. Want to modify a promotion for a single customer? A sales rep can do it in seconds, right within the marketing asset management application.
“Batch and blast” email marketing is being replaced by opt-in marketing. With marketing asset management, your customers can opt in to receive information on certain products or solutions as they become available. MAM supports a full variety of workflows to promote marketing and sales alignment.
Accelerate Your ABM Strategy With RevBase
The RevBase marketing asset management platform makes the implementation of online customer and prospect portals that support ABM easy and inexpensive. In as little as one week, you could be up and running with your first customer portal – one that brings together all relevant content across media for that customer. Your portals can go far beyond the capabilities of conventional content management systems and other point products. This can help make it easier than ever for sales reps to close more high-value sales in less time and with less effort.
To schedule a discussion on using marketing asset management to support account-based marketing in your organization, click here.