The Evolution of Marketing: Account Based Marketing (ABM)

Right off the top I’m going to say Account Based Marketing has me more excited than just about any trend in marketing right now. Here’s why:

 

• Millennial research points to the power and necessity of more personal relationships.
• Social behaviors and consumers demand for more customized marketing approaches.
• The overbearing and overwhelming clutter of content prospects have to sort through to find the answers they want/need to arrive at a decision.
• Big data and social data and our ability to capture it, curate it and analyze it to know EXACTLY what our clients want, don’t like, are likely to buy, etc. 
• The emergence of more pointed marketing tools such as automation systems with robust lead scoring capabilities (i.e. Marketo).  

 In my opinion, we are at a unique intersection of business evolution. As I have shown above, not only do we have the ability to know what our customers want through our amazing technology and social platforms, we also have the ability to connect with them on a personal level and give it to them. In no time in our history can I think of a time we have had more perfect conditions when it comes to want and need fulfillment.

 Which leads me to this question: Why, if we have this ability to speak to prospects in such a personal and meaningful way are we continuing to market to the masses based on general personas?

 

To me, ABM is the evolution of marketing, particularly for B2B (B2C, don’t worry, yours is on its way) And I’m not talking about the type of ABM that has historically been reserved for only the biggest of the biggest clients (even then in a limited capacity), but to scale and apply the same ideals and strategies to smaller, but good-sized prospects.  

What?  Launch individual campaigns for all our clients? Well, obviously that isn’t going work from an ROI perspective. However, it can be applied to those companies in the pipeline that are hot (high lead score) and identified worthy of such an investment (meets certain requirements). Those companies may not be the gorillas, but don’t tell me when it comes to meeting numbers (particularly when you’re behind) each and everyone of those you can hook aren’t worth the effort? And really, how much more effort is it?  It’s mostly just a matter of reorganizing and re-prioritizes resources. For example, how many emails really need to go out to an already inundated client base with a low likelihood of responding? Not to mention, the more existing clients you have, regardless of size (well, within reason), the more you stand to grow and benefit from up sell, referrals, etc. 

Over the years I have seen so many campaigns and content pieces created and churned out in a seemingly endless stream.   Sure, a lot of it has value and needs to be there for lead generation and nurturing, but so much of it is wasted on inert prospects.  Instead of casting all these wide nets, lets give our attention to more of those people who actually care about our products and stand to benefit from them the most.