Not Your Basic Marketing Plan
The SheEO Guide to Account-Based Marketing
Many business owners have heard of the “Marketing Funnel”, whereby an organization starts with building brand awareness through its marketing efforts and ends with conversions. Another approach, especially for B2B firms, is Account Based Marketing (ABM). But what is ABM, and how can you use it to better drive sales and growth?
What is Account Based Marketing?
Account-based marketing (ABM) is a business marketing strategy that involves personalizing content and experiences for selected and targeted accounts. Although most often thought of within the context of B2B marketing, its principles can be applied to B2C marketing as well.
ABM turns the traditional “marketing funnel” on its head, by first focusing on accounts (or audience segments) that have higher average deal sizes and are most likely to want to work with you, and then leveraging personalized outreach to engage and nurture contacts throughout the buyer’s journey.
Is ABM right for you?
The ABM model may not be a fit for every business. It’s usually best suited to B2B companies whose clients often have multiple decision makers and longer sales cycles (three months or more). It’s a way to laser focus your marketing outreach on a carefully selected “short list” of prime, high value prospects.
Achieve Your Best Results
Before embarking on ABM, be sure to:
- Identify and understand your customer. What are their pain points? How will they define success?
- Identify and map out your customer sales journey
- Understand why customers are looking for solutions like yours
- Understand their decision-making process. What motivates them?
- How long does the journey usually take?
- What are key milestones?
- Identify where and how do they procure they information they need to make a decision
- Solidify a lead nurturing process
- What kind of communications will occur, when, and why?
- Map out what next action you want the lead to take at each point
- Make sure your organization is metrics-driven
- Define and validate your sales process
By aligning your teams; outreach, notifications, and metrics; and testing and refining your ABM campaigns; you can build a strong strategy to drive growth.
More about Deborah
Deborah Garry, founder and CEO of BBG&G Integrated Marketing, leads a full-service award-winning marketing communications team that develops successful and effective integrated branding and marketing programs. BBG&G provides branding, web, digital, social, creative design, influencer, video, emarketing, and content marketing for a broad range of B2B and B2C industries across national and international markets. 27 years after founding BBG&G, Deborah, a Certified Account Planner and Marketing Automation Specialist, remains passionate about reimagining solutions that position agency clients as industry leaders and help them achieve business growth, expansion and success. BBG&G’s proven process helps their clients overcome challenges, attract and retain customers, and accelerate growth through the power of storytelling. Deborah and her team successfully strive to provide an unparalleled customer experience. They often become their clients' "go-to" resource for marketing innovation and best practices, assessing and integrating emerging technologies into their marketing programs. As well as serving on various boards and committees, Deborah is a past recipient of the Hudson Valley Women in Business award and The Enterprising Women of the Year award. In 2024 she was recognized as an honoree by the 100 Women to Know in America.