In part 1 of our Account-based marketing (ABM) series we looked at how this approach can lead to substantial return for your business. We covered the more ‘obvious’ performance metrics across sales and marketing, such as conversion rates, sales cycle length, average order value, retention rates and lifetime value. We also looked at how the insights and intelligence that an ABM approach surfaces can feed into your business to deliver a better customer experience, promote product-led growth, drive advertising revenue and support product development, continually optimising your product-market fit to stay relevant, valuable and a must-have.

Missed it? Catch up on part 1 HERE.

Now that you’re hopefully convinced that ABM can offer a multitude of benefits, let’s look at how you should approach your ABM execution in a way that works for both your business and your market.

One-size doesn’t fit all: select the right ABM approach for your needs

Many events and subscriptions marketers are already conducting a form of ABM. Sending targeted emails to specific market segments applies the basic ABM principles, or a “One-to-Many” approach. Recipients get messaging that addresses their specific challenges and needs.  You’re likely doing “One-to-Few” ABM if, for example, you’re targeting certain clients for cross-product promotional campaigns, across your events and publications. At the most advanced, you’re doing “One-to-One” ABM if you’re running a campaign to target strategically important individuals e.g. for a VIP programme or to help get sales a conversation with a key decision maker. 

Let’s deep dive into each of these a little further.

1. One-to-One ABM

With One-to-One ABM you should treat a single account with its own strategic focus. Every marketing and sales touchpoint is carefully crafted to harness the information you know about that account – which should be a lot e.g. their business model, operational infrastructure and growth aspirations.

Pros:

• This model facilitates personalisation, stronger relationships and higher conversions.
• You have a higher chance of ‘land and expand’ because of deep account knowledge – increasing the use of your product across departments, geographies, or cross-selling other products.
• You build client champions throughout the business because your offering truly delivers on their needs.

Cons:

• Personalisation to this degree can stretch resources, requiring upfront investment into research and the custom creation of emails, content, assets, microsites and more. This is why the approach needs buy-in from across the business, including senior management, so that there is an understanding that the ‘BAU’ will be affected.
• You need to balance the benefits of being laser-focused on a few high-value accounts with the potential of missing reactive opportunities simply because a company falls outside of your focus area.
• This approach doesn’t scale easily to a larger number of accounts because of the time involved to deliver a fully personalised and customised experience.

Advice for marketers:

• Make sure you ask yourself whether the benefits that One-to-One ABM could drive for your business fits with your overall strategy or your market. How sticky are customers in your industry? Can they accommodate more than one supplier in the same space?
• Only attempt this approach with a limited number of accounts at one time and where you think you could likely see results in a timeframe that works for stakeholders.
• Where you achieve success, engage with the account to gather feedback and use this to refine future attempts. Conduct comprehensive research, leveraging sales teams and key account managers who often possess in-depth knowledge.

One-to-One ABM will take investment and need time to convert but it can yield impressive returns.

2. One-to-Few ABM

For many, this will be the sweet spot between personalisation and scale, allowing accounts to be clustered based on shared characteristics or behaviours e.g. sector, turnover or employee size. You may want to group accounts to reflect the interest they have shown in your services or solutions e.g. watched a webinar but not engaged in a sales conversation.

Pros:

• It’s easier to scale this approach to several clusters. If you have multiple products, services, or markets, this allows you to replicate the campaigns that are driving success. Your marketing automation platform can likely support in doing this efficiently.
• Encourages a deeper connection with segments by being able to talk to shared pain points and offer applicable solutions.
• Being able to run a few of these segments concurrently allows for engagement comparison between similar accounts and quicker identification of successful tactics.

Cons:

• The time and resources required to understand each cluster effectively shouldn’t be underestimated.
• There is a risk of extrapolating or misinterpreting. Having lots in common doesn’t exclude two companies from having fundamental differences which impact their propensity to purchase.

Advice for marketers:

• Create a cohesive narrative for each segment, such as shared challenges, to ensure that your campaign resonates.
• Use marketing automation platforms, CRMs, analytics and AI to fine-tune segmentations.
• One-to-Few ABM is flexible so monitor campaigns closely, gather feedback, and be ready to pivot your strategies based on results.
• Collaborate with sales teams so that they can deliver additional personalisation between companies at the point of a sales conversation.

This approach to ABM is well suited to events and media businesses where there are key accounts that would make a significant difference to your commercials and are worth considerable investment. However, this needs to be balanced with the high volume marketing demands and benefits of capturing early brand loyalty in a market where there is often a lot of competition.

3. One-to-Many ABM

This approach is still account-centric, but it uses technology to reach multiple similarly categorised accounts, often leveraging automation.

Pros:

• Of all the approaches, this offers the greatest scale – marketers can target a higher volume of contacts, across a broader set of accounts.
• Simplified asset creation makes it easier to execute campaigns at scale, thus reducing the time to market, cost and team resources needed.
• Most marketing teams are already set up in terms of technology, processes and headcount to undertake this approach of ABM.

Cons:

• True personalisation is not possible with ‘many’ targets and therefore you will likely see lower engagement and conversion rates than with the two previous approaches.
• The risk of targeting accounts with misaligned messages increases and this can be brand-damaging.
• A robust CRM is needed to manage contacts when you’re targeting multiple accounts, hence mismanagement, poor data or weak infrastructure can mislead you and result in a bad customer experience.

Advice for marketers:

• Robust data analytics will help you to identify patterns, challenges and opportunities across accounts.
• As you are working with greater data quantities, use your teams at key milestones to conduct quality checks.

This approach is the lowest ‘barrier to entry’ to starting on your ABM journey, and likely the approach that many events and media businesses are already doing. If you’re not sure where to go next, start by getting your technology to work harder for you. With this, you will garner more support from stakeholders, and practical bandwidth to experiment with the other approaches.

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These three ABM approaches are not mutually exclusive – you can deploy some or all of these at the same time depending on your market, products and of course, your resources.

You’ve likely spotted the commonality between all of these approaches, data and its usability. Quality marketing data and a robust database infrastructure are the foundations of successful ABM. If you don’t have clean and enriched data you won’t be able to accurately differentiate contacts and companies into segments. If you don’t have the data layers and automations set up that supports the flow of this data into your campaigns, your ABM efforts will require greater time and human intervention to be successful. Finally, if you don’t have the analytics specifically set up to review the performance of your ABM campaigns, you won’t have the information to optimise. One, two or all three of these factors are typical reasons why events and subscriptions marketers struggle to convince stakeholders of the benefits of investing in an ABM approach.

If you’re keen to develop your ABM capabilities but are unsure whether your data and tech stack are up to the challenge, MPG can help you to review your data and analytics, make recommendations and even train your team so you have the skills to deliver your ABM strategy.

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